Giving Thanks

I started this post a week ago... That's how busy we've been. In the interest of time, I'll post what I've got and try to update the rest as concisely as possible.

We've just returned from a fabulous Thanksgiving vacation to visit my family in Colorado. We made sure it was a fun-packed holiday: We went to the movies, shopped, cooked, ate, played piano duets, ran a 5K, danced, played games, ate lots of ice cream, and short-sheeted everyone's beds. Needless to say, Thanksgiving was pretty epic.

My grandma ("Gigi," to the family - short for "great-grandma," which she is now!) lives in the gorgeous Colorado mountains, and my entire family now lives within reasonable driving distance, so we decided to meet at her house and let her host our Thanksgiving! She was gracious enough to agree with our plan. Our Lundell clan traveled the farthest, 11 hours total, but the kids handled it like champs!

Our 5K race was definitely a highlight, though I think my family kind of would like to kill me, and I'm pretty sure I'll have a tough time convincing them to repeat that one. I wanted to run a "Turkey Trot" to burn off our Thanksgiving calories in advance, so we created our own! I mapped out a 5K route and invited everyone in advance. Every able-bodied family member was expected to participate, and they did! (We will excuse the ones who watched babies at home.) I just didn't know about the hills. I mean, I anticipated hills, but okay really I had no idea. At 7400 ft to begin with, those steep hills were pretty excruciating! I can only just now walk again - 3 days later! It was fun, though, and beautiful weather!

When I ran across the "finish line" where Travis and my brother and brother-in-law were waiting, Travis informed me that his GPS said we had only run 2.99 miles. I assured him that my route was right and we figured it was just because his GPS had auto-paused at one point. We sat around chatting for a while and waiting for the other runners before I finally looked around and said, "Wait a second, this is not the end!" I had changed the finish spot and hadn't really been clear on that to the fastest runners. So we sheepishly finished the route before anyone behind us noticed. Ha!

Afterward, we brought the kids out for their run. They were so excited! We were all spent, and Troy had been sick, so we shortened their 1-mile run to 0.68 (we just ran until we felt it was far enough and then turned around!) Even my 2-yr-old nephew ran that race and kept up with his siblings and cousins! We even saw a buck wandering through the trees.

 

See it? The buck? Hiding in the trees... Look closely!

This is where I summarize the rest with a photo montage.

 

And now, bring on CHRISTMAS! Yesterday we picked out a tree in a record time of approximately three minutes. We drove to the lot at the Catholic church up the street, hopped out of the car and bought the first tree we saw. We tried to look around a little, but it was a very nice tree, and there were only a few to choose from anyway. Done and done. It almost felt... too easy. Next year we will be trekking out into the wilderness to chop down our own tree!