Turkey Day

Thanksgiving came and went in a flash. It's been awesome to have the second half of my pregnancy over the holidays because time is flying by! More on that later. Here we have four little turkeys after our gratitude FHE.

We wandered down to Cedar for Thanksgiving this year. I was in charge of making the rolls and Jeff was on pie duty. He whipped up an apple and a cherry pie the evening we arrived.

Branded with the family logo.

On Thanksgiving morning Mary and Kaelynn snazzed up the table while I took notes on how to festively decorate.

With only minor grumblings from my boys, I managed to get them all out back for a Thanksgiving picture before dinner.

Eli had so much fun playing with Tyler and Caleb for a few days! They were all best buds. It was so fun to hear snippets of whatever Angry Bird/Ninja Fighting/Transformer game they were playing as they whizzed through the house together.

I am hoping to forever be invited to other people's houses on Thanksgiving because I am horrendously intimidated of cooking a turkey. David and Mary are pros!

I guess the carving is where it gets sketchy in the Excell home? Ha. This is my absolute favorite picture of the week...

Especially because this picture happened right after, and Jeff hadn't even seen the face his dad had just made at me. The Excells are angry cookers. Ooooooooooorrr they just don't enjoy me constantly in their face with a camera.

The two little boys bonded once they realized they couldn't quite keep up with the older boys. Their mutual love of trains kept them contently holed up in the basement together all morning.

Soon enough we were finding our seats for the delicious meal.

Side story -- Within 10 minutes of arriving to Jeff's parents' house, Eli and Carson ran outside to play on their playground. I heard screaming quickly after they started playing and meandered up to see what Carson was so upset about. It wasn't until I had picked him up that I saw his whole eye and eyebrow area covered in blood!

I ran back down to the house and had to have Jeff and his mom nurse Carson back to health because the blood was too much for me. After cleaning him up a little bit, we were relieved to see it was just a little scratch on his eyebrow that required nothing more than a band-aid. But man! That thing bled!

Then it was time to hear the story of what caused his injury. Turns out Eli had climbed up on the playground and threw a big dump truck down directly at Carson. We've determined it was probably an accident, but we'll let Santa make the final judgement.

I couldn't stop to take a picture of my plated food until I had eaten a sufficient sample of everything. So here's my picked at plate.

After dinner the boys found the Legos while the adults strategized about Black Friday.

Kaelynn organized a coloring competition. Eli has become quite vocal and opinionated about colors lately. It took him forever to learn his colors but now that he knows them, I'm wishing he was still color oblivious. He is fight-to-the-death loyal to blue. Everything he brings home from preschool is colored blue, so it was no surprise to see he only needed one crayon to complete his project.

Carson is a little more open-minded in his artistry.

The day after Thanksgiving we did the traditional Turkey Shoot. The littlest boys stayed in the van and watched The Polar Express while the adults got cut-throat on the range.

With the winner being....Sir Jeffery Excell!

Then we spent Saturday down in St. George soaking up the beautiful weather with what appeared to be the entire rest of the city on a little hike around the gorgeous red rocks.

The boys are good hikers when they have 1.) rocks and 2.) water ahead on the trail to motivate them to keep walking to throw their rocks into. Well. We had one of those things, but without the water to throw the rocks into as an incentive, we had two distracted little boys most of the time.

I gave up on calling our outing a "hike" and accepted it as an exploring excursion.

It was such a fun place to explore! There were tons of places to climb and wind through and the scenery was breathtaking!

This ended up being one of my favorite things we have done in Southern Utah.

Once we found our way back to the trail, I noticed Eli wasn't quite keeping up with us so I looked back to check on him just in time to see him dropping to the ground.

I rushed over to him, thinking he had fallen, but as I approached I realized he had intentionally dropped to the ground in an effort to make a sand angel. I'm not sure what prompted this idea, but he executed it with such certainty that I just stood back and laughed without asking any further questions.

That evening we stuck around long enough to see the temple lights. It almost rivaled Temple Square's!

We had a blast as usual!