Thanksgiving Weekend

For the first time in 6 years we were able to go to Idaho for Thanksgiving. It was sort of a busy weekend but we had so much fun.


We missed Lacey and Kelli (& their families) for the meal, but we added Aunt Gail's family & Ron and Launna. This is 1/2 of our table.

Notice my boys plates. Noah is eating turkey & Ben opted for rolls. Zack was brave enough to try one bite of the spinach salad then chose to play it safe for the rest of the meal and only ate rolls too.

If you ever find yourself at a McGarry family meal, try to sit by Ashlee. She is very entertaining because she is food challenged. First she couldn't quite handle the cheesy celery:

Then, she destroyed a fancy fork by breaking it in half trying to cut the turkey. The turkey wasn't tough, but apparently Ashlee is. This little tragedy resulted in her cranberry sauce flying
up and hitting her on the neck. She ended up in tears because she was laughing so hard. Fortunately Aunt Gail wasn't in tears over the destruction of her fork.

This is paybacks for Logan. He & Brandon used to attack Matt all the time.

See what a sports family we are. Logan and Wacy are the most inclined to actually want to watch a football game, but even they fell asleep.

Lacey has never gone shopping the day after Thanksgiving. We looked at all the ads and didn't really need anything, but wanted the experience. Since we didn't have anything better to do at 6:00 am we decided to go check things out. (Sleep was a better thing to do at 5:00 when most of the sales started). We ended up at Target at 7:00 and ran right into Angie so she joined our little party. It was actually really fun because we weren't stressed out about finding certain things. The store was totally crazy and there was a shopping cart shortage. Angie tried to grab one but wasn't fast enough to beat the kid who ran off with it. Eventually we found a worker who emptied his cart full of games for us. Lacey unloaded some other possibly deserted cart (you walk away, tough luck) and between the four of us we filled them up. Even though it was crowded it was still better than trying to shop with all the kids.

This fall I have been feeling the urge to unleash my inner cowgirl. Dad was bringing the cows off the mountain in October, but we couldn't quite get the scheduling right for us to go. As luck would have it, Uncle Theron had plans to bring his cows down over Thanksgiving weekend. It was a great day in that it wasn't really windy or snowy but it was still only 21 degrees. It is just way too cold for me! Instead we drove up to bring the real cowboys & girls lunch and follow them the rest of the way.

Can you see the joy on Zack's face? He loves to ride horses. He was having the time of his life riding with Brandon.

Brandon had a hot date that afternoon so he couldn't finish the ride. I actually considered riding his horse, except Brandon was the second rider to take on Tinker because he was being such a naughty horse. Knowing this, I kept quiet and let Lacey have the fun. She is brave because from the moment she got on him, he was being crazy. I would have been freaking out. Eventually even Lacey had to trade Dad horses, so I made a good choice. My skills are very limited and even Dad admits I have bad luck with horses. Maybe next year, I can kick one of the kids off Dixie and ride.
Zack got to ride on Duke with Grandpa for awhile too. I asked him how he liked riding with Grandpa and he said it was fun but the cows kept getting in their way.

There are two options to getting the cows home from the mountain. One is to gather them and load them in the semi and haul them home. This is the other way:



All these poor people had to wait:

The final event of our stay was the blessing of little Shaylee. Isn't she so sweet?