Family Pictures

While we were all together in St. George we took some family pictures. We all dressed in blue, grey or black as a contrast to our red rock surroundings. Beth scouted out an amazing location that was the perfection combination of fall leaves, red rock and blue skies.

Andrew took the photos with his drone, it was the easiest way to get all 19 of us in one picture, they turned out so good! We played around with a few different angles. It was so easy to get Monty to look at the camera, he is our youngest and thus our wild card for family pictures, he was fascinated by the drone so he had no problem holding still and looking at the camera.

After a few shots in the first location, we walked down the trail a little bit to another location that had some nice fall leaves. Andrew took some amazing pictures of our surroundings.

This was the photo Mom and Dad ended up using for their Christmas card this year.

We took this opportunity to take some individual family pictures as well.

Ben got some photos taken for his senior pictures, he looked so handsome in every single one, I can't believe he is a senior!

Then we were gifted with the most magnificent sunset. It was absolutely gorgeous, it filled the entire sky with so many beautiful colors and enveloped us and all our surroundings in a golden light. It lasted an unusually long time for a sunset, we were able to take so many pictures of everyone before it faded. I have the strongest feeling this was a gift from Reece and that he was a part of our sunset photos. We were missing him so much that week as it was the 2 year anniversary of when he left us.

All the grandkids!

The Rest of Thanksgiving Weekend

On Friday and Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, we just hung out at the house and had a relaxing time. The grandkids had such a fun time hanging out with each other.

Karin and Ricky headed up hikes in the mornings for anyone who wanted to join. 

Mom set up her watercolors and worked on Christmas tags. Monty couldn't resist those magical looking paints.

All throughout the weekend there were groups playing cards games, working on a puzzle, playing pool, playing ping pong or playing games on the TV.

The Burtons had brought a magical puzzle that we all enjoyed piecing together.

First we put the puzzle together like a normal puzzle.

Then we got to open this top secret envelope.

Inside the envelope were instructions on how to move the different sections of the puzzle around to create a hole in the middle as well as new puzzle pieces. We didn't have a picture of what the new section of the puzzle looked like so we had to piece it together blindly. When the new section was completed, it made the picture on the puzzle make more sense. It was such a cool puzzle.

For lunch one day, Karin and Ricky created a charcuterie board with lots of fancy cheeses they had brought.

We had discovered that there were chipmunks that would visit our backyard in search of crumbs to nibble on. So we began to put out seeds and berries for them every morning. We had so much fun watching them come and go throughout the day. The most we saw at one time was 4 chipmunks! 

The Burtons put together a BBQ for their assigned dinner. Ricky grilled hamburgers and hotdogs on the grill in the backyard, it was all so tasty!

One night, Mike, Nora and I helped Monty assemble an oreo train. Monty is still obsessed with trains and oreos are currently one of his favorite treats, so when we passed by this kit in the store, we couldn't resist getting it for him. It took all four of us to get it assembled it was a little tricky, but it turned out so adorable and monty was thrilled with it.

Monty helped with the decorations.

The kids played a lot of different kinds of games on the TV. It was fun to hear them laughing and listening in on their gaming dialog.

On our last night we played a game that is a spin on charades. Everyone wrote words down and we combined them all in a bowl. Then we split up into teams, we decided to try kids vs. adults.

There are three rounds

1st round: You describe the word

2nd round: you act out the word

3rd round: you say one word to describe the word

You use the same batch of words for each round, so by the third round everyone is pretty familiar with the words.

Then we played a few rounds of Pictionary. We all laughed so hard during this two games, it was so much fun.