A visit from Grandpa and Gee-Gee

Bud and Jane came to spend Thanksgiving week with us and we were happy to see them!  The kids were asking about their arrival all day.  I don't know how many times I heard, "How long until they get here?!?"*

Thanksgiving Day was, of course, the big highlight, but we also had a few other adventures on the other days.

The whole group, minus Miles and me, went to the missionary center JAARS for a tour one day, and they all learned a lot!

Another endeavor over the last couple days was building some sort of tree house/platform thing in the backyard (I'm still not completely clear on what it is or is going to be).  Thankfully Bud is very handy with power tools, so somehow something is taking shape...

Meanwhile, Jane baked us a very tasty apple-cranberry crisp, and helped us put up our Christmas tree!

 To be more specific, she helped re-disburse all of the ornaments after the kids hung 95% of them on the same 3 branches at the bottom of the tree.  She did a good job -- now our tree looks all sparkly and even!

We are thankful that they made the long drive down to spend some time with us!   Hopefully all of our chaos and silliness didn't wear them out too much.  :)



* While we were running an errand, I told Colsen about how I used to be so excited when Mor-Mor and Grandpa would come to visit us when I was his age.  I described to him how my siblings and I used to sit out on the curb and watch all the cars turning down our street, trying to see if it was them or not. Sometimes we would have to sit and wait for hours because, as I told him, we didn't have cell phones and couldn't know when exactly they would arrive.

"You didn't have cell phones??" Colsen asked.
"Nope," I said.
"Oh.... you lived Back THEN!" he said.

I'm pretty sure Back Then is all one big era to him.  It's the pre-modern period during which there were no cars, no electricity, and the dinosaurs roamed the earth.  And now, apparently, it's when I was a child.