Thanksgiving 2009

I warned you that I was way behind so I hope you aren't terribly surprised to see that I am posting about stuff from two months ago.

As you already know from our family pictures, all of my family was in town. Admittedly the majority already live here, but it was a real treat to have Olivia and her new husband Gino come down with their family(pictured here with Erika and Ken and Emma who live here in Mesa). And Bob who came from Billings and Angela and Glenn who brought their family from Rancho Cucamonga. Back to Olivia and Gino. They got married in August and that subject deserves its own post. I'm telling you. Waaaaaaay behind.

I am a horrible picture taker, meaning I don't get the camera out and do it so I am lucky other people took some pictures that I can use for this. I wasn't in too many and that's because I was taking a lot of naps that week. My sisters kept complaining that I was boring, mope-y, etc. Olivia told me that I needed to eat more so I wouldn't be so tired all the time. Of course the truth of it was that I had just discovered I was pregnant and I couldn't get by without naps. Boring, but true. And I didn't tell anyone that I was pregnant because I knew if I did then I could just say, "oh, but I'm pregnant," as an excuse for everything and I didn't want to do that. I thought maybe I would have to try to seem normal if no one knew I shouldn't be acting normal. It didn't really go that way, but it was worth a shot.

Part of our Thanksgiving traditions is to make graham cracker gingerbread houses. I think Ian got a little help from Spencer. You better believe that half the fun is eating all the candy off of them once they are all built.My mom's birthday is early in December and this was her 60th so we wanted to surprise her and have a fun party in her honor while everyone was here. The festivities took place at the church and we schemed and concocted a plan to get her there unawares and while she was in the bathroom with my grandma, the rest of us waited just outside the door to yell "SURPRISE!" when she came out. It was all going according to plan until Ian slipped into the bathroom behind Erika. Erika was supposed to be there, Ian was not. Thankfully we still managed to surprise her. She did say, "What's Ian doing here?" But it didn't ruin anything. She was still totally surprised.

We hired this nice lady to teach us some dances. She did a great job and we all had a lot of fun. Especially the birthday girl!I wish this weren't true, but Spencer and I are not good dancers. We tried our best and still had fun, but we weren't wowing anyone with our sweet moves.


Here's Bob dancing with Marian. I didn't spend much time paying attention to how anyone else was doing, but I did have the chance to dance with Bob and he actually is a really great dancer and a strong partner. I'm sure he was glad to get rid of me. I was bringing him down.

OK. One down, I don't know how many old ones to go. I think I'm actually going to really like posting old stuff. That way I'll get to keep putting up pictures of me while I was skinny and I can forget about how much fatter I am getting in real life.