Thanksgiving stuff '12

Oh so much to catch up on - why do I feel so compelled to be "caught up"?  Here's a good try - we went up to Idaho for Thanksgiving again this year - I'm not a good rotator.  I like to do the same things each year - Idaho for Thanksgiving, my parents on Christmas eve, home for Christmas.  The rest of the holidays I'm up for change, but I like a little consistency with these ones.  We went up to Montana to get our tree and I realized when we got there that I had left my boots at the John's - eek!  Luckily there wasn't too much snow this year and what there was was pretty hard and easy to walk on - we found a good one!

 The tree Clara and Grady picked out for their room - they were so excited about this little lodgepole!

 We got a HUGE beautiful tree this year - and then I butchered it!  It started when I decided that I didn't want to drive around town the day after we got home with a tree tied to the roof of our car.  We actually had three trees on top of our car and instead of waiting for B to come home and lift them off, I just untied them and pushed.  And then the next night I decided I would cut it down to size and bring it in the house by myself too.  I found this awful little hand saw and after a really long time and a whole bunch of different tactics I got the bottom cut down - but it was still too big, so I took a bunch off the top too and then dragged it in the house.  Upon doing so I realized that the top of the tree was broken completely in half about two feet from the top!  (probably from being rolled off the top of a car I'm guessing:()  I had broken a bunch of other branches too and I had to prune and shape and the bottom part I had cut way too high up and our most beautiful tree turned into....well, it wasn't cute I'll say that.  And then we had this massive light dilemma and I had to re-string the lights on the bottom 1/2 of the tree 5 TIMES!  I threw away 8 sets of lights - 5 of them I had made two different trips to the store to get. I stayed up till midnight trying to make it all beautiful and finished to surprise Brandon who was working late and he had to come home at 12:30 to a grumpy wife and a wrecked tree!  HOLY COW that tree stressed me out.  The bottom two strands never did work, and poor B who found the most beautiful tree we've ever had had to look at that disaster all december:(  Next year - I'm leaving it all to the tree master:).

 This years thankful tree - I really like this activity.  Graham's foot was our little Indian man at the bottom.

About this time Clara got back her first set of school pictures.  How dang cute is she!  So fun what a big good girl she is becoming.  It's hard to believe how much she has grown up this past year.  Oh i love her.  Happy Thanksgiving!