Thanksgiving

When I was starting to recover from the jet lag a few days after we arrived home I was a little panicked to realize that Thanksgiving was only a week away and I had offered to host Jason's family a few months before.  Thanks to everyone's help bringing food I was able to pull it off.  As always it was a day of too much wonderful food and lots of good company.

Thanksgiving in California

My brother, Ethan, and his wife, Cecilia, were visiting LA from Europe in November so we made a quick trip to see my family for Thanksgiving. Ethan was in LA to defend his physics PhD thesis at UCLA. We arrived on Tuesday evening and he defended his thesis Wednesday afternoon. My poor brother! I don't think I've ever seen him under so much stress before! He really looked like he was in bad shape when we got there (and I think he would agree with this statement!) The kids were dying to play with him but we tried to keep them calm and out of the way until he had left for his defense. While he was gone we threw together a party for him. Here are the kids making a sign saying "Congrats Dr. Brown!"

We were all relieved to see Ethan and Cecilia walk in the door with big smiles on their faces. Ethan did a fantastic job and received nothing but praise from his review committee! Congratulations, Ethan! What a great accomplishment! He's moving to Germany now to work in a post doc position while Cecilia works on her PhD (also in physics). Here are the kids with a much happier uncle!

Thanksgiving Day we went to Long Beach to run the Turkey Trot. We were hearing from our family in Utah about the extremely cold weather that had arrived for the weekend and really enjoyed a run on the beach with temperatures in the mid 50s. Jason ran the 10K in 36:52 and placed 4th in the men. This was the fastest he has run the 10K in years! Andrew and I ran the 5K. Andrew smashed his PR by 2 minutes running 23:25. I finished first in the women with 19:55. I won gift cards to a coffee shop (which I gave to my sister-in-law) and tickets to a New Years Eve party in Orange County (which I gave to my brother, Spencer.) The only prize that I was actually able to use was the pumpkin pie although my mom had so many delicious homemade pies that we didn't get around to eating it until a few days later when we got home!

After we got back to my parent's house Kaitlyn started acting like she wasn't feeling too well. A couple hours later she had a fever and fell asleep. She slept through Thanksgiving dinner which kind of put a damper on the day. It was really quiet and we missed having her at the table with us. My mom is a fabulous cook and Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful. She makes everything from scratch. Even the bread for her stuffing is made from scratch. Cecilia is French-Italian so she got to experience her first American Thanksgiving. She thought the rainbow jello was a little strange but the boys were happy because they got to eat her piece.

My birthday fell on Thanksgiving this year. I told my mom not to make a cake but as soon as I was out the door for the race she made me one. She wasn't going to decorate it but Cecilia insisted on making it look more like a birthday cake. She had never seen food coloring before and started dumping half the bottle in the icing. My mom told her that was "gobs" but she didn't know what that word meant (by the way, her English is very good!) so she just kept dumping it in! It did make for some bright blue icing! Wow, that's a lot of candles! I got them all out except one in the corner!

A trip to California would never be complete without several trips to the beach. It was easy to tell we were visitors from a colder part of the country since our kids were the only ones in swimming suits playing in the water! The water is always cold there and with temperatures a little cooler than normal it was kind of chilly for a swim! The amazing part is that while the adults were cold sitting on the beach the kids didn't even seem to notice how freezing cold the water was. The last day we were there I wouldn't let Kaitlyn wear her swimsuit since she had been sick but the water was still just too tempting for her and when we left she was wet from the knees down! We watched the dolphins, collected seashells and enjoyed a beautiful sunset over the ocean!

Our trip ended up being cut one day short when we had to avoid driving home in a snow storm. I wish we had more time to stay but we loved spending the holiday weekend with my family!