Thanksgiving!

Family tradition - time to head up to the Okanagan for Thanksgiving!  Again, it was a quick trip full of lots of visiting and lots of food.  We took Daniel out of school at noon and headed out as soon as we were ready.  Unfortunately, it still took a long time to get there - long weekend traffic and construction around Hope didn't help.  But we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's around 9pm.  The boys were fast asleep but Sarah woke up as we arrived and visited for a bit.

Saturday morning was spent playing and working - the boys played and Grandpa and Uncle Duncan worked on installing a fan above the stove.  Fun!  Great-Grandma and Grandpa C came over for Thanksgiving dinner #1.  James and I popped over to their house to see all the work they've done on their kitchen - it looks great!  The kids had so much fun with the cool toys they brought - a helicopter and rescue truck for the boys and a cute singing cow for Sarah.  Dinner was delicious and it was so nice sitting down at the table with the entire family.

Sunday was, of course, the apple squish.  The boys were so excited!  They had so much fun picking apples, squishing apples, eating apples and making apple juice.  There was also roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, throwing apples for dogs to fetch, playing on tractors and running around the orchard.  Sarah had a great time wandering around the legs of everyone there, eating her first hot dog and munching on apples that kept falling in grass and dirt!  She looked so cute in her apple vest from Auntie Lauren and her fancy boots that bugged her a lot, since she couldn't move to well in them!

Dinner followed at the hall in Summerland - so much good food and yummy desserts!  There weren't many kids there this year - just our two and cousin Nicholas, plus some much older second/third cousins.  But the little ones (and Grandma and Grandpa!) had a lot of fun in the multipurpose room, playing soccer and riding on big exercise mats!  The kids weren't overly thrilled with Thanksgiving dinner but they had a good time anyway.  (We actually found a food that Sarah doesn't like - turkey.  It's probably only the third food I've found that she doesn't like!)  What a special tradition!  Grandma gave us our copy of Canadian Living magazine with an article about the apple squish back in 1986.  It was so fun (and funny!) to look back at everyone 25 years ago - what a souvenir to have!

Monday morning was spent eating french toast and packing up for the trip home.  The trip home was not one of our better ones - it took us almost 8 hours to get home!  We started out OK but got stuck at Hope - construction, accidents and bad traffic meant that it took us 3 hours from there!  We were a little late for dinner with Leah's family.  Luckily, they were nice enough to wait for us and we had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner #3.  By the time we got home, though, we were exhausted!  We threw everything on the floor and collapsed right into bed.  :)