Thanksgiving

How about those UTES!!!  Wow!  That game almost made us want to get some of these for Thanksgiving:

We missed seeing everyone this Thanksgiving, we wish we could have gone home to Utah to see all the family.  

We decided to go all out for our little family feast and it was fantastic!  We'll give you a rundown of what we made:

Here' Natty layering marshmallows on the sweet potatoes.

Natalie seems to think our dinner is hilarious!

Natty waved her magic wand and dinner was ready!

Here is our turkey, potatoes and butternut squash soup.  Yes, that is bacon on the turkey.  It was fantastic, thanks for asking!  We let the turkey soak in a brine made with maple syrup and spices overnight, rubbed sage butter under the skin, then basted it with a glaze made with maple syrup every half hour while we cooked it. The bacon went on for the last hour.  The gravy from this was the best we've ever had.  WOW!!!

We need to do one of these for Christmas.  It was the best turkey we've ever had.

Here are our sweet potatoes.  Delicious!
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Sage stuffing with apples.  We put some bacon from the turkey in this as well.

The spread.  We made a pumpkin spice cake with orange cream cheese frosting for desert.

The dishes.

DELICIOUS!!!

Natalie made this "Jointy Bus" out of legos.  She also made the great backdrop.  She still loves making things out of legos.

Pictures of our house.

Here are some pictures of our house:

Natalie with one of her lego creations and all of us playing Clue.  Natty won!

Here are some shots of our kitchen now that it is finally done!

Check back soon!

World's cutest Lego bobbing for apples.

We're Alive!

Welcome back to our blog!  For those of you who have been checking back every day for the last three weeks looking for new posts: What were you thinking?  If you know us well enough to be checking our blog you should know  us well enough to know that we aren't "update our blog daily" kind of people.  We will be shooting to be "weekly blog update people" but we'll be lucky to be "update our blog once a month when grandparents bug us for pictures of Natalie" people.

We had fun a couple of weeks ago when Jill's twin Amy and her little family came out to visit. Natalie was happy to see her cousins and Jill loved having her sister in town, she was sad when they had to leave, but that frown was soon turned upside down when her mother-in law arrived the next day!  Dave's mom, dad and brother Mike drove all the way out to Denver to visit.  It was nice to have everyone come out.  Almost enough fun for us to remember to take some pictures, but apparently not quite fun enough.  

For Dave the highlight of the visits was the trip we made to Ted's (as in Ted Turner) Montana Grill with his parents where he had a fantastic concoction known as the kitchen sink burger.   We have a strict No Pictures of Food we Eat at Restaurants policy here on this blog, but this was almost worthy of an exception.  This burger came topped with grilled onions, mushrooms, ham, bacon, and, I kid you not, a fried egg.  This burger is the best thing Ted has done since he dumped Jane Fonda.

Anyway, here is some stuff we did take pictures of from this weekend.  Natalie had a birthday with some of her friends.  It was fun, she had a Lego party which is apparently all it takes to bring out the worst in boys her age.  Next year we will be encouraging her to have a girl only affair.

Natalie lost a tooth!

We set up a ramp to race Lego cars the kids built at her party.  That's Dave with his little buddy Ezra from the ward.

Building cars with Legos to race.

This is the fraction of a second where the boys at the party were all behaving well simultaneously.

Natalie is a LEGO! (c) TM

These pictures are from the Trunk or Treat we had at the ward yesterday.

Back view.  This is the second year in a row we have made her costume out of a cardboard box.  We are shooting to be the ward's Sub for Santa family this Christmas.

Trying to bite a hanging apple is hard when you are a Lego with a missing tooth.

Natalie with her friend India.  India is Ezra's sister and is a Fire Fairy for Halloween.

Ironically, the face Jill made when I took this unwanted picture is the same she will make when she sees that I posted it.  It's like looking in a mirror, huh Jill!

Videos!!! YAY!!!!

Here are 3 videos from our summer adventures.  The first is at Mesa Verde.  The second is when I had us stop to skip rocks on the way home from Durango when we should have been driving so we could get home before midnight.  In my defense we did spend an hour at Safeway geting dinner when there was a perfectly good Taco Bell right across the street.  Finally, there is a video from the day we spent in the mountains last Saturday.

Mini Summer Vay-Cays!!!

Here are some pictures from some little trips we took this summer.  These first few are at Mesa Verde.  (Click on the pictures to view ENORMOUS versions of these)

We Stopped for Lunch in a little town called Ouray.

These are at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

At a waterfall by Ouray

These are from a drive we took last weekend up into the mountains.

At the Air Force Acadamy to see Utah beat the Falcons.  GO UTES!!!