Thanksgiving in Missouri!

We had an exciting November, especially Thanksgiving, keeping us quite busy. Kyra went to nursery for her first time. She did great except for when Nathan threw a toy at her. We had talked to Nathan several times about Kyra coming to nursery and how he could help her enjoy it. Oh well! The kids all have excellent church teachers and we really appreciate that.

Nathan has become a whiz on the computer. He can turn it on, type the password, wait patiently for it to start up, go online, and go to his favorite websites, all on his own. He also has learned to push the chair to the sink, turn on the water and wash his hands all by himself!

Amber is caught up in kindergarten and is learning to read. Her most recent progress report showed her meeting the standards in all subjects. Today she read, "And it came to pass" in the scriptures all by herself.

We have shopped at Piggly Wiggly, a local grocery store, a couple of times. Going through the store, Nathan says "Piggly Wiggly!" every time he sees a picture of the pig. There are a few different items in stores here in the south such as self-rising flour. We don't remember seeing that in Utah. We also see deep-frying oil in big boxes, the classic southern rocking chairs to go on the big long porch, and a lot of football fan items to cheer for your team. Everyone here in Athens cheers for UGA.

We drove to Missouri for Thanksgiving. We left 5:14am Monday morning. It's about a 13 hour drive so we only stopped for a few minutes about 4 times and made it there late. Driving through Arkansas particularly stood out to Heather: run down trailers, run down homes, no lawns, clutter--junk and trinkets-- in the yards, a lot of poverty, a lot of churches, gun stores, flea markets, antique stores. She'd heard about Arkansas but it was a little more than she expected.

We stayed with Jared's older brother Peter, his wife Caryn, and their 5 kids ages 10, 8, 5, 2, 2. They recently moved in with Caryn's parents on the farm where Caryn grew up, in the middle of nowhere down 2 miles of dirt road. It's a big house where Caryn grew up with her 7 older brothers and 1 sister (the oldest). On their farm they have goats (they drink goat milk every day, it tastes about the same as cow milk and it didn't make us sick), chickens (their chickens lay eggs in different places every day so we had to hunt around for the eggs), a horse, and two ponies. They had a cart for us all to take pony rides. Heather even drove the pony cart (with her niece sitting next to her to help). She milked a goat (just a little) and Nathan fed the chickens. They also have a garden and what looks like over a year supply of canned food. Caryn said that if she needed to she could feed her family completely from what they have on the farm without ever going to the store. We had a good crash course in self-sufficiency while we were there!

One of Jared's other older brothers came down from Iowa with his wife and kids ages 7, 6, 3, 1. The girl cousins had their little club where they played dress up and taunted the boys. The boys had a little club too where they played and jumped on their blowup bed and banged on the girls' bedroom door. It was fun for Amber to be included with the girls although it was a bit much for her. They are 10, 8, and 7 and Amber doesn't really have any experience hanging out with older kids so it was overwhelming for her. The first day there, the girls went out tree climbing and Amber's foot got stuck in a tree so the girls had to take her foot out of her shoe to get her down. We discovered a few hours later that Amber had a sprained ankle. She just didn't know how to express the problem. So she spent the next 48 hours crawling or being carried. I think she sort of enjoyed it. All of our kids were hanging out with kids bigger than them. Nathan couldn't handle sleeping with the boys who were much bigger and roughhousing on the air mattress so he slept on the couch where it was safer. Nathan had a lot of fun playing "waterfall." He had his BYU blanket (a gift from Heather's younger sister Ashley when he was a baby) and he slid down the stairs with the blanket, over and over. Some of the other kids joined in as well. We also went fishing at the pond on their property of almost 50 acres. We rode the pony cart, saw the animals, and played tether ball.

We had DELICIOUS food every meal! We had crepes, pizza, German pancakes, johnnycake with fresh fruit in it, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, Hawaiian haystacks, and lasagna. In the evenings after we sent the kids to bed, we played games with the other adults which was a lot of fun!

Jared's brothers are into guns a lot, so that was another activity, shooting at targets and clay pigeons. Heather actually went out and shot guns too. She shot a .22 handgun, a .22 rifle, a 20-gauge shot gun, and a Russian 9mm handgun from the 40s. She shot the target 8 out of 8 times with the rifle but wasn't very good with any of the others. She admitted to enjoying the experience but is not about to purchase a gun anytime soon.

It was so fun spending time with Jared's family, getting to know them all better, and for my kids to grow up knowing their cousins. We wished we could have stayed longer but the rest of us were ready to head home after five full days of nonstop fun! We drove back home all day Sunday, arriving late. The day after we got back from our trip we put up our Christmas tree and decorations!

Jared finishes his exams for the semester this week and then is off to California for a conference for a few days. Heather is excited her parents are returning home from their mission and have a long layover in Atlanta so they will drive up here and spend the night at our place. Looking forward to the rest of the Holidays!