Thanksgiving, Christmas Tree Excursion, and Christmas Time

We headed out to Duchesne for a few days over Thanksgiving!  It was wonderful to get away and leave our worries behind!  We had a great time with Jared's family.  All of his siblings were there, so it was a full house!  The kids had a blast playing with their cousins.

Dad and Grandpa carving the turkey.

The feast!!!  It was extra yummy this year.

 The big kids ready to eat!

Camille, Taylor, Hailee, Garet

 The other three...Mason, Ava, and Hazel.

Baby Luke was asleep during the feast:)

Grandma Davies and Grandpa Taylor were able to join us for dinner too.

 As most of you know, the weather was freezing that week.  It dipped well below zero almost every morning and never got above the teens.  But, the kids still wanted to go out and play.  Jared was such a good sport.  He took them on four-wheeler tube rides even though their wasn't much snow.  The kids loved it!

 The girls did plenty of crafting.  We made these countdown blocks and scrapbooked our calendar pages.   Serena is putting together a cute calendar and we are all contributing a page.  They will be so fun!

Camille and Ava were the only ones that wanted to ride Lightning!

 Saturday we headed up Rock Creek to cut down a Christmas Tree.  We had a good time and even got a family picture.  Will is missing (he's at work) and baby Luke is asleep in the car.

 We found the perfect tree!

 More sledding fun!

 Hazel and Jason

 Decorating the tree!  Mason was so cute this year.  I think he's redecorated the lower branches at least ten times since we put it up!  Silly boy.

 My three little snowmen!

 While we were watching the first presidency Christmas Devotional the kids made these Tinker Toy popcorn holders!  So clever!

 Mason being a silly boy.

 One night when Daddy was working late the kids made these forts out of the couch cushions!  Very creative I might say.  Notice the girl one and boy one!  They wanted to show Dad before they cleaned up for bed, so we had to take a picture.

 Another night we decorated gingerbread houses!   I think Mason ate more than he decorated! 

 Yummy!

We love Christmas time!  Hopefully Santa will bring us a new vehicle for Christmas this year!  No, we still haven't found one:(  We are hoping and praying though!

Thankful....

I love this time of year!  A time of Thanksgiving and remembering the birth of our Savior.  But, this year I am even more grateful....especially for my beautiful family and the gift of life.

We were in a car accident on Saturday night (Nov. 20).  We had just finished grocery shopping and were on our way home.  I was driving.  It was snowing pretty hard.  We were turning left at an intersection and the light turned yellow and I waited to see if anyone else was coming and didn't see anyone.  So, I started to turn, and their was a giant white truck.  It hit the back end of our car (refer to pictures), and spun us around 180 degrees.  We had all the kids in the car.  Camille was unconscious for a minute or so (she hit her head on Garet's booster seat back) and Garet had a small cut and scrape on the side of his face.  Jared and I had the wind knocked out of us and were VERY shaken up.  Mason was just perfectly fine.  He and Garet only cried for a second and then they acted like nothing happened.  Our neighbors happened to be at the intersection when this happened and took the boys while we focused on getting Camille awake and in the ambulance.  Me, Camille, and Garet rode to the hospital in the ambulance and were admitted.  They did an ultrasound and everything looked great.  I am a little stiff, but have no other complaints.  Camille had a CT scan and everything came back normal.  Her head is still very sore, but she is recovering.  Garet is fine.  He acts like nothing happened.  Jared is the most stiff because he saw the truck coming and really tensed up before it hit.  We are soooooo lucky that it happend the way it did!  So many small miracles occured that night.  I know that we were being watched over and protected.  We are so thankful that no one was seriously injured.  Life is so precious!  It can change in a moment.  It really made us reflect on what matters most.

So....to look on the bright side of things.....we were already in the market to buy a bigger vehicle to prepare for the new baby in a couple months, so now this will speed the process up and we get to buy a new car.  Also, Jared took this week off, and it was soooo nice to have him home.  He even made cinnamon rolls this morning!!  We were able to go to the tow yard and check out our car and gather our things.  I think it was good for the kids to have some closure.  All day yesterday Mason kept saying, "Car died".  It was so cute/sad.  Garet realized yesterday that he lost his gummy bears and horsey in the accident and he broke down.  He found his horse, still in good condition, and a few slimy gummy bears:)

 The truck hit us on Garet's side (passenger).  If we would have been a split second later it would have crunched Garet's door.

 This is Garet's face (2 days later), it's mostly healed.  It looked a lot worse the night it happened.  He has a small cut on his eyelid.  He was such a brave little guy.

This is a funny video of the kids and Mason.  He is telling us that the car died.

Florida Fun

Jared and I went to Florida last week!!!  I have a cousin (who was my roommate in college) who lives there with her family.  Her hubby is going to school to be a Nurse Anesthetist.  They live in Bonita Springs, which is near Naples and Fort Myers on the South western gulf coast of Florida.  They were kind enough to let us stay with them for a few days.  We arrived Wednesday morning and went to the beach.  It was gorgeous.  They have some friends who have a house right on the beach, so it was very private.  So nice!

 Our camera memory card died, so we lost some of our pictures of the first day.  Jared had a blast trying to learn how to body board.  The waves were pretty big because a storm was coming in.  Usually this beach is very calm.

We also went to Sanibel island and saw a lighthouse and another beach that had tons of shells on it.  A lot of the beaches on the gulf coast are very shelly.  It was fun exploring!

We drove up to Siesta Key which is about an hour away.  It had beautiful beaches and the waves were huge because a cold front had come in.  Cold, meaning 65-70 degrees, which is warm for us!

 I've never seen anything quite so beautiful!  White sand stretched on for miles!

 Another beach on Siesta Key, called turtle beach.  This beach had dark gray sand, but it was still so pretty.

 The last day we went to Marco island with my cousin and her family.  The giant waves from the storm had washed up all kinds of treasures onto the beach.  We found star fish, octopus, horseshoe crabs, and every kind of shell you can think of.

 Two of my cousins girls.

 My cousin and her family.

 BFF''s forever~ I have so many great memories with this girl!

 One day we explored the everglades.  We went to an alligator farm and took an airboat ride.  It was so exciting.

We saw plenty of these guys while we were there.  We even drove down a dirt road, (that my cousin told us about), and saw at least 20 alligators in the wild.  It was creepy! 

 Air boat ride!  It was amazing.

 This guys was crazy!  I would never get this close to an alligator.  Yikes!

 Feeding time. 

 One of our favorite things is eating seafood, which we don't get to enjoy very often living in Utah.  We had the best, shrimp, mahi, and sea bass I'd ever tasted!  I think we ate seafood everyday!  It was fresh from the ocean!  Yum Yum!

 The foilage was spectacular!  Flowers, vines, greenery, moss, everything was growing!  While we were on our everglade expedition we found several fruit stands and had some fresh avacados, oranges, tangerines, and grapefruit!  Yummy!  We even managed to bring home a gunny sack of oranges and grapefruit!

 Outside my cousins town house.

                                                                Standing by a banana tree.

 Baby gators!

Thanks to Grandma Cable, Aunt Kendra and Uncle Luke, and my sweet neighbor for watching the kids!  It was so fun to come home and see them again!  It's so nice to get away from the usual day to day things!