Thanksgiving Day

For Thanksgiving this year, Corey thought it would be fun to go away somewhere, so he booked time for us in Bear Lake for two days. It was a fun get away. We came up last night and had our Thanksgiving feast up here today.

...but the feast had to wait until after we first tortured the children with a little historical drive. We drove up the west side of Bear Lake up to Idaho and stopped in PARIS!

The kids are excited to tell their friends "Yeah, we went to Paris over Thanksgiving..." Ha ha, so clever. The town's sign appeared to be smeared with blood... nice. Kids were grossed out. Ambrose and his parents, Thomas and Ann, lived in Paris during the late 1800s (pretty sure).

I'm going to have to do some research about that now. I had to stop and check out the list of graves at the Paris Cemetery. No Hibberts. But it would be fun to find out who were the families and people buried there that Thomas and his family knew.

And apparently the first Oregon Trail came through the Bear Lake valley - it was an important Fur Trade center. Neat!

So, after me inflicting great suffering upon my children, by making them sit in a comfortable and heated vehicle while I stopped at 4 road side historical markers, we decided the kids had endured enough and we headed back to the hotel for dinner. I had wanted to stay home and have our holiday dinner there, but I'm glad Corey arranged this retreat for us and didn't let me talk him into cancelling it. With 11 of us in our family, we have to get two rooms (max occupancy is 10). It was good - we had one room that was kids' territory (the messy room and where we ate most of the time) and then Corey and I (and Natalie) were able to go into our room for peaceful, quiet, and clean surroundings. 

For our Thanksgiving Dinner we put both of the tables into our clean room and were able to set up our surprise dinner in there.

The kids saw me cooking, cause I did that in their messy side, but they didn't know we'd set up a banquet hall in our room.

It was a cute surprise for them.

Mel had helped me make the little fall tree center pieces and name tags -

I had to pack fall colored papers, markers, and hot glue and we were good to go craft.

We also made a little turkey treat for lunch:

I'll post more about that tomorrow. And after dinner I put Natalie to bed while they went back to the messy room for a game of Compatibility.

That's a funny game to play with these up and coming teenagers, they get pretty goofy.