Thanksgiving!

My grandparents the Kohlers, on my mom side, recently got home from their 4th mission. Therefore, this year for Thanksgiving my mom's entire family gathered down here in St. George at my grandparents behest. They wanted to celebrate with EVERYONE! And so we did! There were 71 people at our Thanksgiving meal! We actually celebrated on Friday rather than Thursday to make sure that as many people as possible could be in attendence. The only 3 not there were my 3 cousins, Josh and Sara and Ian, who were spending the holiday with their other biological parent. Because it was a first in a long time for having us mostly all in one place, we met at a park on Friday morning to get a gianormous extended family picture. Don't have a copy of that yet, but just let me tell you now, Ollie was the one crying!

It was cold outside, but the kids all had lots of fun playing and running and climbing through and over this very dangerous, cement trench.

None of these pictures do any justice to how many people were actually there.

Ollie loved the dangerous cement trench! He crawled through it and jumped over it until....

...you guessed it, he cracked his head right on the jagged edge! This is the disgusting bloody burp cloth we used to mop up the blood. It was everywhere! Including dripping down both of our nice shirts that needed to be clean for 2 more pictures (the Oliver clan and our personal family pic, and yes, his crying only got worse - in my book, all of the pictures will be horrible).


Here's his gaping head wound. The shock and panic when it happened was almost unbearable for Ollie and I, with so many people telling me what I should do and trying to examine his head. When we finally got in our car to leave, he instantely settled down. We didn't take him to the hospital or anything, just left it all the rest of that day.

And it turns out, that he's fine and still as beautiful as ever!

Oh, and I can't forget my sweet Dexy, eventhough he wasn't injured. This is his new cheeser face that he makes whenever he realizes that I'm taking a picture. He kind of looks like a Klingon with his nose all scrunched up like that. He even says, "cheese!"

My beautiful, happy boys!!

We gathered at the clubhouse of my grandparents condo development a couple hours after the picture debaucle. Ollie was happier now, especially when he saw all the many, many cousins to play with. The kids loved all the fallen leaves! They would gather up huge armfuls, count to 3...


.....and throw leaves everywhere!



When it was eating time, Ollie refused to eat inside with the 60+ people, so I took a little table outside where my boys and Jude enjoyed their Thanksgiving dinner.

After the delicious meal, more leaf fun insued when uncle/cousin Derek (we have cousins as young or younger than our own children) started a leaf throwing chase!

Which culminated with him jumping into a tree to avoid the barrage of leaves coming his way! We then went home for a very short, very late nap, before returning for more massive extended family fun.
The families of each of my grandparents children (my mom and her 6 younger brothers and sisters) took a some time to do a little something for a semi-talent show. Ollie intently watched, for a while anyway. My mom's family now consists of 29 people, so my dad said that our talent was getting all 29 people in the same place for this shindig! We then sang a few of our little kids favorite songs (ie. ba ba black sheep and ABC's) before singing a few of the Kohler family favorites.

It was a long, long, long day! But still very fun and so good to get to see basically everyone! There were some families that we haven't seen for a very long time. I have soooooo many pictures from this weekend! We all had such a good time together. I'll have to post more later, becuase now I've been doing just this one, lengthy post for about as long as that Friday was. It was so fun to see family!