Wednesday, November 28, 2007

First snow!!! Finally..

SLC had its very first snow this season. The Gudgell family is all excited due to our deep love of skiing. We're hoping to introduce Alex to skiing this year if all goes well.
P.S: Happy Birthday, Dave! We all love you very much!



Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Porter's boots

If any of you guys are in the bad mood or feeling sad, just watch this video and it surely will make you at least smile if not laugh :)

What a great vacation!

I have to say we had a great Thanksgiving, thanks to the Sullenger family. Even my mother enjoyed the whole thing, despite the inability to understand everything 100%. This was probably the best Thanksgiving in my 10 (really?) years in the USA. This trip started with a blue tongue, literally. Just look at the picture.

The trip down was anything but long and hard. We actually enjoyed the car ride and Alex did so well! When we got to St. George it was refreshing to see green plants and even some flowers.

That evening all the grown-ups went out to eat at a nice steak house. Since Dave's birthday is not far away his family decided to embarrass him by telling the waiter about it. So Dave had to sit on the fake bull while they sang to him. Priceless if you know Dave at all :))

The next day- Thanksgiving- we had a huge feast. I can't thank The Sullengers enough for providing us all with great food, even better entertainment and a relaxed atmosphere.

Everybody enjoyed the food very much. And I, of course, got my favorite turkey leg. It just wouldn't be a Thanksgiving without a turkey leg for me. Those who know the garbage story will understand. But I'm not ashamed, this is who I am :)

This was my mother's first Thanksgiving in the USA and she received the best of the best. I'm pretty sure she was very impressed but I'll let her speak for herself. One thing I know for sure is that she loved hanging around Dave's family and found them all very warm-hearted and kind to her.













On Friday after a lot of the shopping was out of the way (don't get me wrong, I didn't go shopping, I slept in until I couldn't any more) a lot of us went to the local Dinosaur museum. It was very interesting. I remember visiting it the very first year they discovered all the bones. Has it changed sine then! They've done a great job!

Then- great surprise! Another turkey (and subsequently another turkey leg for me) were in store for us at Liz and Brian's house. Wow! I didn't think we could repeat the Thanksgiving feast but some of us sure did (I'm not really blushing, no!)

Then we celebrated Savannah's 4th B-day. Surprising but we managed to get cake and ice cream in most of us. After which we played games and hung out for a while. Oh and I forgot to write that some of the lucky ones got to play on the 2 gorgeous golf courses over Thursday and Friday. But it's ok because the rest of us had just as much fun doing other stuff.

In the evening we went to see the Lights ceremony at the local temple. We had fun but it wasn't exactly the "southern" evening, it was chilly. Nevertheless, the kids had so much fun, Alex is particular, that they didn't want to come back home.
















That evening ended with the tired little kids watching TV and the big kids and adults playing fun games.

On Saturday we all dressed warm (as much as we could considering we weren't exactly sure of the weather) and headed out to the forest in the mountains. Most of Dave's family were looking to cut Christmas trees. We decided against it since it's too early in the season for us but went along anyway for some fun. It was a beautiful sunny day with deep blue skies. It was perfect. I only wished we brought more warm clothes for Alex. He enjoyed being outdoors no matter what kind of shoes he had on.

After everybody got the tree of their dreams, we had some hot chocolate and other yummy snacks. Then we had a competition "Who got the biggest tree?" Clearly, Bubba was the winner.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The new beginning

Today is Halloween and I decided that it is a fun holiday to start a new tradition. So here we are finally- blogging. This is the first year that Alex really understands what Halloween is all about- candy! He had a great time going around the neighborhood collecting candy :)
It all started a couple of days ago. We were cutting the pumpkins while palying real Halloween music.

Finally the day came and Alex could hardly wait to go "trick or treating". He was on the edge of his seat during dinner. Then he got dressed in his Spider Man costume and we headed out the door.

We all decided to ger dressed up, including the grandma.


It happened to be a relatively warm night and we enjoyed walking around our street talking to the neighbors. The grandma stayed home to pass the candy to the "trick or treaters".













This is the picture of our house from the outside tonight.