A Whistler Thanksgiving

Another Thanksgiving spent at Whistler.  This year was a little different though.  We ate Thanksgiving dinner on Tuesday night and drove up to Whistler on Wednesday (no traffic!) and skied all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  Ethan flew in first and the three amigos became four.  It was great!  Marcus arrived a couple days later and then we were complete.  The noise level was back to an all-time high, the sounds of pounding feet up and down the stairs and running throughout the house resumed to their usual constant, and the kitchen was always a mess because someone was always eating.  In other words, chaos reigned supreme and I was in my happy place--the eye of the storm.  Thanksgiving dinner was delicious because I ordered brisket from a local BBQ place.  I think I loved it more than anyone else simply because I didn't have to make it.  The pies were good too, and I did make those.

Ethan arrived and suddenly everyone was happy to hang out together

We even put the tree up before we left.  I was at the top of my game this year!

Packing a family of 7 for a five-day ski trip takes mad skills and luckily Randy has those skills.  Too bad I'm not an influencer because North Face should be sponsoring us.  Randy loves their duffels and we have them in every color and a few different sizes as well.

The snow was terrible but we still had fun.  Whistler Village is always fun after the end of a long ski day.  I always get lost and turned around in the Village but Randy leads the way and can somehow always find the Pizza Place and Rocky Mountain Chocolates.  

Henry wins for most improved

check out the base of the mountain with absolutely no snow to be seen

Marcus finally got a new ski coat.  He's been wearing the same one since 8th grade :)

Strolling through the village was so great without snow

The Village always has new stuff to check out

Parker has grown and ended up with a new set of skis as an early Christmas present

French fries and poutine for lunch!

We had our friends over for pie and games

Avalanche Pizza is sooo good!

Views from my run.  It's beautiful and looks just like home :)

hotel life and boys being boys

Ethan in a wheelchair because of course he tore his ACL on the last run of the last day of our trip.  Poor guy.  It was pretty stressful trying to figure out what to do because surgery in WA would've been convenient over the break but all the therapy and follow-up appointments meant the surgery needed to happen in Utah.  Ethan is on the mend now and the worst is behind him. He picked a good season to miss skiing because there isn't much snow anywhere but at Whistler.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My Life in March

It's been a fun month and it started out with a fun Relief Society activity.  We had a very talented lady in our ward help us create our own art and not only did we all have a good time, but the art turned out beautifully!  I love gathering with women and it was fun to see everyone's smiling faces.  Technically we were still supposed to wear masks indoors but I forgot to put mine on when I got there to set up and eventually everyone took their masks off when they saw me without mine.  Oops!  We were just days away from the end of wearing masks and I just couldn't make everyone put their masks on.  I think not wearing masks made everyone so much happier that this activity went down as one not to be forgotten.

Landon going to middle school for the first time without a mask on

Side note: Our statewide mask mandate ended March 12th and we are oh, so happy!  There was a lot of discussion among my boys and their classmates about whether or not they would continue to wear masks.  After two years of mask mandates we all felt a little exposed not wearing them in public for the first time.  About half the students at the school still wore masks the first day back at school, but its getting to be less and less now.  Landon has seen several kids at his school wearing double and triple masks so for kids to go from feeling like they will literally die if they don't wear masks to going maskless in public places is a huge adjustment.  I still see random people out walking by themselves, with a mask on proving that the fear tactics used to enforce mandates were very effective. It makes me more sad than angry.

Ok, back to life...

I've embraced my title as "Lacrosse Mom" and help run the clock at Landon and Parker's lax games.  I have to start and stop the timer with each whistle from the refs and keep track of the additional timers for players in the penalty box.  It stresses me out but I haven't messed up too badly.  No, I will never run the clock for high school games.  The pressure and stress would do me in!

Parker ate a cake pop at school one day and came home begging for us to make some.  I caved and ordered stick on Amazon and we got to work as soon as they arrived.  Cake pops are easy to make but very labor intensive.  As soon as we run out of sticks, they will be a distant memory.

Henry, Jack, and Karissa are the three amigos.  They do a lot of playing together and pretty much ignore all the other kids in their preschool class.  Next year, Jack and Karissa will be starting kindergarten while Henry does one more year of preschool.  It's going to be rough!

A friend moved about an hour away to Edmunds and she invited us all to her home for lunch.  The ocean views were stunning!

These ladies are some of the best!

Sunday afternoons, right after we get home from church, are my favorite time of the whole week.  Everyone is together in the kitchen, hanging out, talking, and eating.  Somehow they all managed to find great hats too.  I'm soaking in all this togetherness as we await Marcus's mission call.  We scrambled to get his mission papers turned in, made doctor appointments, and scheduled his interviews with the Stake President and Bishop in a record amount of time because we thought we were late getting them turned in based on his availability date.  We turned them in with huge sighs of relief, then found out we turned them in two weeks too early.  Oops!  We rushed for nothing!  So it feels like we've been waiting for his call for 5 weeks and now with upcoming General Conference, the wait time has increased.  So we wait.  Not an easy thing to do, especially since Marcus just pulled his hamstring and can't play lacrosse for the next two weeks.  Are you noticing a theme with Marcus's life?  Injury after injury?  Yes, that would be correct.

Thanksgiving 2020

Thanksgiving was a blast this year!  The theme was spatchcock and hairy nipples. Yes you heard that right. Read on....

My boys were disappointed we couldn’t go to Whistler since the border is still closed, but I was happy to stay home and feast. Luckily the Johnson’s came so we had new faces to keep us from getting bored with each other. It made all the difference. 

Marcus and Ethan were house sitting/dog sitting for our friends at their lake house which meant everyone had a bed to sleep in and when it was time for bed, the teenagers left for the lake house staying up until all hours of the morning without adult supervision. They also got paid to get pillows shipped out for my friend’s business so they even made some money while watching TV. 

Wednesday night I got the crazy idea to have Chicago pizza flown in for dinner so I wouldn’t have to cook. It arrived frozen solid, packed with dry ice. The pizza was good but after eating Toby’s delicious dip as an appetizer, none of us were very hungry. We had pizza leftovers for days. 

While I was baking up pies and April was washing dishes, the karaoke machine came out and the fun reached new heights. Randy and Marcus were quite the duo and Megan is quite the singer, even with hiccups!

Thanksgiving day started with a turkey trot by the lake. It was a flat 5k and all the boys acted like we were making them run a marathon and complained about being sore the next couple days. The big babies! We ended the race down at our friends' dock so we could mentally prepare ourselves for the polar bear plunge the following day.

I stayed home to cook and enjoy solitude while everyone went to a park to play football. I texted some friends and told them if they just happened to be at the park at the same time we could bump into each other and have a spontaneous game of football. Luckily one of them took the hint and everyone had a great time, even though we were breaking COVID rules. 

this is what a spatchcock turkey looks like
I smoked my first turkey using the spatchcock method (a word I’ve never heard before) but it sure is fun to say over and over again and so we did. And it was delicious and simple. I also made three pies with homemade, flaky pie crusts, homemade rolls, salad/dressing, and creamed corn with bacon. The meal was delicious!  Toby made a giant bowl of mashed potatoes and the feast was perfect. 

This is what a ton of mashed potatoes looks like

The adult table complete with my china dishes gifted to me by Mom

The kids table.  Pretty sure they finished eating in under 3 minutes before getting back to video games

Feasting!

Chocolate cream pie, banana cream pie, and triple berry pie (with a polka dot crust)

Polar bear plunge!

 We did a polar bear plunge in Lake Sammamish on Friday morning and I’m pretty sure it took a few years off my life. Randy almost ran me over in his rush to get out of the water so that was hilarious and the teenagers weren’t even affected so I guess cold water really does affect the elderly. While we were all standing on the dock getting ready to jump in, some boy made a comment about their hairy nipples and Randy started singing “hairy nipples” in a his opera voice which echoed nicely off the water for all of Sammamish to hear.  We were so inappropriate.  And thus was born our spatchcock hairy nipple Thanksgiving.

We went biking at Duthie Hill mountain bike park and were only delayed a little by the locked gate. The park was open but the back entrance from our church parking lot was “closed due to COVID.”  What a joke right?  We quickly threw the bikes over the fence and were soon biking with the hundreds of other bikers who were enjoying the sunny weather as well. 

We took family pictures for the Christmas card.  Unfortunately this was the best shot of them all.

Did I mention we ate a lot of food?  Randy bought 4 dozen donuts that day!  Two trips to Krispy Kreme for 2 dozen donuts each trip.  We ate them all!

Traeger nachos for the win!  I believe this was when I said, "I can actually see myself getting fatter!"

The little boys also spent hours playing Anky Overdrive, their video game race track thing.  I love when they play with their toys instead of video game.  This is the best of both worlds because they use an iPad/iPhone to control the cars and shoot at each other.  Its great fun!

On the Johnson’s last night, April and I went down to the lake house to watch Lights Out. It’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe the teenagers watched it by themselves!  And then decided to watch it again with us!  So now I can’t stand on a shower drain (thanks to Stephen King’s It) and I can’t walk into a room with the lights off. Yay for me. 

Happy Thanksgiving one and all!