Texas Thanksgiving

To preface, I know this is a long post, so I will keep the dialogue to a minimum and let the pictures do most of the talking.

For Thanksgiving 2011 I headed to Dallas, Texas. Unfortunately by myself because Robert had to stay home to prepare for his final exams. He spent Thanksgiving at his grandparent's house with his family.

So what's in Dallas you may ask? Well, my brother Jeff and his wife Laura have been living there for the past few years, so we thought it would be a great time to officially "break the house in" Tolsma style.

This was my first trip to Texas and I happened to meet up with some other fun people that I like to call family.

Exploring downtown Dallas.

Dealey Plaza or the Grassy Knoll where JFK was assassinated.

Family stroll through downtown Dallas.

We made a pit stop to visit the Dallas Temple.

Laura had fun activities planned and ready for us to create. We are making our Thanksgiving Day pilgrim and Indian hats.

I present to you our gratitude tree. This ended up being a really fun activity that the kids and everyone enjoyed doing. It's so easy to create and it really helps you appreciate all the things you are grateful for. I think I will have to make it a tradition now.

Thanksgiving Day

Turkey time

Ready for a feast

As tradition, I made my grandma Whitehead's homemade rolls with Kayla and Keaton's help.

Everything turned out to be delicious.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Take two:

Take three:

Kayla that's just gross. :)

What's a visit to Texas without a visit to the stockyards to see some longhorns?

The boys, with no help from the girls who watched humorously from the top, explored their way through a maze.

We didn't do it!

Grandma took Kayla and I on a carriage ride down the Fort Worth Stockyard Station streets.

My next car

It was a perfect time to visit Dallas because everything was decorated so nice for Christmas. I think it definitely enhanced all the surroundings.

Howdy partner!

Mama T bought Kaden and Keaton these get ups that they loved and played in the rest of the trip. They were hilarious.

We continued our Texas themed Thanksgiving by attending the local Fort Worth Rodeo.

Lots of concern for the cowboys on this row. The bulls had the upper hand that night - for the first round not a single cowboy made it 8 seconds.

Before the trip ended, we celebrated Kaden and Lori's birthdays!

I think it was a successful trip.

Trip Highlights Include:

*Talking, laughing and staying up late

*Watching Tangled and Now & Then twice

*Tolsma Fat Camp

*Visiting the Fort Worth Mint (one of the two places where your money is printed)

*Football, Frisbee and backyard games

*Playing tag at the park

*Feeding the ducks

*Kaden's trick on us - telling us he dropped his large coin in the creek (I almost jumped in after for it). He really had us going, we all felt so bad.

*Going to the worst movie ever - The Muppets

*Watching an awesome movie at the theatre to make up for the last - Breaking Dawn from the Twilight series

*Movie theatre popcorn

*Standard traditions like deviled eggs, jello-salad, pineapple turkey, and grandma's rolls.

*Fort Worth Stockyards

*The Grassy Knoll

*Shopping with Laura and my mom on main street in Grapevine

*Rodeo and eating out

*Teaching Keaton to play piano

*Treasure hunting with Kaden

*Birthday celebrations

*Visiting the Dallas Temple

*Crafts

*Eating lots of candy anytime we were out on the road. Thanks for bringing your left-over Halloween candy guys!

*and many many more...

Welcome to Winter!

I returned to Utah in the middle of November for a work trip. Before heading to Provo for some partner meetings that we had scheduled, I spent some time with my mom up in Ogden.

It snowed that weekend, but we were troopers and made the drive to Logan, so we could go up to Logan for a temple session.

It felt like we officially brought in the holidays.

We had a fun drive up and enjoyed the freshly fallen snow as we walked the temple grounds. I love fresh fallen snow on the trees before they loose their leaves.

They are fun to photograph and breathtaking.

It was a great weekend spent not only with my mom, but my grandma, family, old college roommate Janae, and this great guy:

Grandpa Whitehead

After an enjoyable weekend, I headed to work and stayed very busy.

Okay, so I didn't take a lot of photos, but I did work very hard that week. However, I did find time to prank a co-worker's office with another co-worker of mine. It was a hit and everyone loved it! Who knew I was such a prankster? :)

It felt like I spent that entire week eating...and eating...eating.

The dessert pizza is the best!

The end.

A Spooktacular Halloween!

This Halloween was a fun one. I'm not in the mood to write a long boring post that I know most people will read over, so for this one, I will try to let the pictures do most of the talking.

We picked our pumpkins out from a local pumpkin patch in town. We always try to find unique ones.

Rob's pumpkin is below:

Chosen because of it's distinct coloring.

We had a carving party with friends and here are the results. That's a ghost in the above picture, in case you were wondering.

My pumpkin is below:

Chosen because of it's awesome stem.

This year we decided to be creative with our costumes.

Robert decided to go as himself...the Stetson 7-Time Intramural Champion.

He has quite the reputation around school. When you win an intramural sport you get a plaque put up in the weight room, so most people around school know who Robert is since he dominates the wall. Since we were going to a Stetson party, he thought it would be hilarious to dress up and show off his mad athletic skills.

He really loved playing it up, hence this is what the back of his plate said:

Listed are some of his friends and obvious people.

The full outfit:

For my costume, the idea to dress up as a Magic 8 Ball just hit me out of the blue one day while at work. This is what I came up with:

Lucky number 8.

We had a fun time partying it up with friends.

Happy fall to everyone from Florida!