Thanksgiving in Blanding 2012

It was faster than a turkey trot for three days at the Wilcox home this past Thanksgiving.  We were so happy to have Rob, Anthony, and Autumn's families come to visit, hike, play games, and keep us entertained and busy in the kitchen. 
     As I often say, you'll learn something everyday, if you're not careful and we learned quite a few things about smoking turkeys this year -- what to do and not do.  Hopefully, we will remember, or will have Andrew to mastermind the event next time!

   









The kids made some fun decorations for Thanksgiving, which sparkled up the table and the house.  Of course the main activity for the kids was going on a couple of trailer rides with Grandpa, and also going fishing.  Grandpa also took Hunter and Ethan out for target practice out at Westwater with the BB gun.

    For Grandma the fun was playing games late into the night (and being beat!) by the grandkids.  We played Spazz Uno, Snorta, Quiddler, Aggrevation, chess, and Blokus.  I was really impressed at how well our little grandkids can spell! 

Autumn and the girls made delicious croissant rolls from scratch, with messages rolled up in them. Each person told what they were thankful for. Ethan gathered the responses earlier, and  I typed them up. It worked pretty well.  As each slip was read, we guessed who had said it. It was a reminder of the many  blessings our family has received-- and only Hinckley ate the slip of paper! 

We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, with a new potato dish brought by Lila, who joined us.  Kathryn brought her yummy rolls for sandwiches that evening, and Lila also made Rob's apple pies.  He had bottled a couple of batches of Granny Smith apples earlier this fall.

Those are so handy to use.  I did about 45 quarts this year as we had a bumper apple crop.

Grandpa and the kids pulled the wishbone, and the grandkids finally won!

Part of the fun was playing with cousins, and joining in when Rob played the piano.  Lawsyn and Ryan were wonderful little babies, and were so cute and fun to play with, though I didn't get to do much of that as there was always a mess in the kitchen and more food to fix.  Next big family visit, I'm assigning out meals.  It's getting too hard for me to keep up a 15 hr. pace for three days.



Theron and Anthony were able to get most of the outside lights up, which I really appreciated. We'll get the rest up this week. Autumn got the Christmas village pretty much in place, and Ashley and the girls helped dust and decorate the Christmas tree...so it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas and it is only the 25th of November! I love all the lights and brights it brings. I forgot to take the kids up to see our big Blanding Christmas extravaganza at the Moons. If you come down for the temple sealing on the 15th of Dec. remind me that we need to go ooh and aah at the lights. Ashley is going to help organize the program, but plan on participating with either songs, dances, or poetry for the season.

Rob also figured out a way to keep those crazy boys under control by applying handcuffs!  They had a lot of fun teasing their uncles as well as playing on the computer and building bamboo forts in the orchard.

We were able to Skype Quent and Bev's family Thankgiving night.  It was Quincy's 11th birthday on the 22nd, so we all sang to her. Leah (the Jeppson's dog)  turned 8 that same day, so we remembered her too.   Quent's family was in pretty good spirits considering the stress that they've been under this past week.  Bev was sustained as Primary President last Sunday the 18th, and then two days later Brig ended up in the emergency room with breathing problems, but he is on the mend now.  Quincy and Sage were attacked by head lice this week also, so they are being treated for that and had on new fashionable hats!  They missed a couple of days of school in the process, but we're hopeful they'll be good as new next week.  Marci came up for Thanksgiving and we were able to send most of their Christmas gifts back, as well as the gifts Andrew and Amy had for their family.

The weather was beautiful and we took a fun hike out to the natural arch out by the Westwater ruins. I had forgotten it was even there, until our home teacher mentioned this week, that Cleal Bradford's family had finished making a pretty good trail out to the little arch.

I can't believe we've never hiked this part of Westwater before.  It was fun and exciting, yet doable!

 

We took plenty of water, oranges, and licorice to keep us going.  The boys cut down bamboo poles to use for their hiking sticks.  As you can see the day was absolutely beautiful.

The trail had quite a lot of up and down climbing. Grandpa was the rogue hiker but finally found us and the trail.  We didn't have to go clear down into the bottom of  the canyon as they had installed a couple of railroad tie bridges to get across Billy Goat Gruff's stream. Water was still running  It was a little scary for Peyton, so she crawled across!

 

 

I had just seen a picture of this arch in one of the old Pinion yearbooks this past week, and they had the whole SJHS drill team standing on this bridge for their group photo.  Several of our group went out on the bridge with Leah, but I didn't suggest a group photo there!   It was an awesome sight, however!

After we got back to the car we walked down to the turn around at the end of the road, so we could see the Anasazi ruins, but we didn't hike down that trail.  We'll do that another time.

All in all it was a great weekend...and oh, yeah, I heard there were some football games going on too--but never saw any!  Autumn, Ashley, and I were busy doing our Black Friday Internet shopping!!