2022 - Thanksgiving

 

Trying to decide which suit for Aragorn

😂

The gathering begins

My goal is to finish all Christmas shopping by Advent.

Can one play too much chess?

My parents visiting my sister and her family in Lodi, CA

😁

My other 2 sisters celebrating Thanksgiving.

We roasted a 42 pound tom turkey

and

smoked a 27 pound hen

Just fit (in our commercial size oven)

Rosie made 4 different kinds of muffins for Thanksgiving breakfast

Goldberry made an egg bake

tuckered out

Wedding china

(we actually have 3 different sets of china)

Cute little name tags by Rosie, of course

Took a couple full grown men to get the turkey out

Remembering our dear friend Tom who passed away this summer who often joined us for holiday meals. This little donkey was given to Kili after he had passed away. It came from Nicaragua. 

Also missing Aragorn's father and his carving of the turkey. I'm always specially reminded of him on Thanksgiving.

Our group of 20

feasting

(it's only sparkling grape juice)

We had to cut up the deer from hunting season but naturally the vacuum sealer broke so I headed out on Black Friday (!!!) to get a new one. They had TWO registers open and the line was about 20 feet from the back of the store when we got in line. It only took 10 minutes as they opened up about 10 registers. *phew*

2022 - November 22 - UW Geology and Planetarium

 

Celebrating niece/favorite cousin birthday at an escape room.

Afterwards they went out to eat at Mod Pizza

I was able to join and enjoy some mom-time.

One of Samwise's deer

Lovin' the almost-daily shots!

Lunch out after the field trip which is below (out of order!)

Frodo's escape room beam

We went on a fabulous field trip to the UW Geology Museum followed by the Memorial High School Planetarium....

glowing rocks!

amazing fossils

After fossils are dug up, they will encase it in plaster to keep it from breaking during travel times. 

The googly eyes aren't real 😂

Some of these are replicas. They were amazing. It was pretty neat to see a T-rex skull that was found in South Dakota. Not too far away. 

We had a great guide. I went with the younger group.

I guess this is the only photo I took at the Planetarium but it was an amazing "show". We looked at "rocks in space" including planets. What is amazing is how much their is yet to learn, how little we human know of God's infinite knowledge and creation. Amazing. It's comical that we often think we know so much when, in fact, we know very, very little. We ARE very little!