Thanksgiving 2011

The holidays this year were such a blast!  I traveled a lot to be with family since I am in Utah by myself.  For Thanksgiving, I only had 3 days off from school plus Saturday and Sunday so it wasn't really enough time for me to go home to Oregon.  The drive down to Snowflake, where Devin's family lives, is about 8 hours from Provo so I drove down there for Thanksgiving.  I adore Devin's family and always have so much fun with them.  It is such a change of pace compared to my family growing up.  It was always my mom, dad, sister, me and occasionally some distant family members for holidays.  So most of the time a total of 4 people.  Dev's immediate family has 30 people so it is a little bit different than the Flood family get-togethers! ha. But I absolutely love it!  It is so much fun to have so many little ones running around and so much going on.  

 Thanksgiving day morning Devin, Sherika, Teagan, Shayelle and I all got up early to run the Turkey Trot.  It was completely freezing and I don't think any of us had much motivation  (maybe it was just me :/)  but we went and ran and it was actually pretty fun!  Shayelle and I just ran the 1 mile race which Devin, Sherika and Teagan ran the 5K and they all did awesome!  

The day after Thanksgiving it is a tradition for Dev's family to go cut down their own Christmas tree so we went and did that.  They had told me that they always get really big trees so I was excited to go help look for one.  We went out into the woods a little ways outside Snowflake and spent about 6 hours searching for the perfect tree.   We had a lot of fun riding on the tailgates of the trucks, shooting random things with pellet guns, driving through big herds of cows, eating lots of snacks and trying to stay warm since the wind was freezing that day.  

They don't mess around with their Christmas trees! By big, they meant BIG!

The tree they found was pretty far away from the truck and we started by taking turns pulling it two at a time.  We were struggling so my strong man hauled it the rest of the way to the truck on his back! Good work, babe!