November

Can you find my camouflaged kitty?

 Welcome to November- the month of raking leaves, yes, we probably should have done this in October, but oh well we still beat the snow -we raked up about 40 large black garbage bags full of leaves, ridiculous!

 November is also the month for eating great food.  This year for Thanksgiving, with Jacob being down in El Paso, we decided to go to Albuquerque to spend time with the Sants. Sadly, Miranda could not go with us.  Her two jobs (on campus @BYU and Aeropostle) kept her too busy.  She stayed back and had Thanksgiving with the Hatches.  

 It was a fast trip-just Wednesday- Sunday, but we were glad we were able to go.  We stayed at Bret and Debbie's so the boys could get in plenty of gaming time with cousins. Bret got Nathan working on a new penny collection...He's been trying to get my boys into coin collecting for years.Debbie and I prepared a delicious Thanksgiving dinner-one of the best yet. And as you can see we had plenty of pie--all prepared for a great pie day.

Brian, Jayson, and JJ

 and there was much silliness with these yahoos around!

But sadly, things didn't stay cheery and this is where my photos of the vacation end:(  As per tradition, we went to the movies Thanksgiving night. The boys were quite excited to see Ender's Game. We had told Nathan that if he read the book we would let him see the movie.  As we were walking in to the theater my mom tripped and hurt her leg.  An ambulance came and took her and my dad to the hospital while we watched the movie.  After the movie Matt and Debbie took the boys back home while Bret and I went to check on mom.  As it turns out, she broke her hip in three different places.  She went into surgery early Friday morning to have some metal plates inserted and ended up spending the rest of our visit in the hospital. It's going to be an uphill battle to recovery.  Poor Grammy!  So, we had lots of pies left over, the boys were able to go shooting and to the nuclear museum, we had dinner with Chris and Kim, and I even got in a quick visit with Elizabeth, but our thoughts were with grammy,visiting her at the hospital and evaluating how much help Papa needed too. It was very hard to say goodbye to my sick mom in the hospital and leave my mom and dad when they really needed help.  Not very fun to live 600 miles away at times like this:(