Give Thanks

My parents and my sister came to visit us for Thanksgiving and we had a great three days! Sadly, my Californian parents picked the coldest two days of the year (think high of 6) and had to deal with some pretty treacherous roads. I felt so bad! Too bad they couldn't just bring the San Jose weather with them! The best part of their visit was having lots of time to spend with my family. It was really great to see them and talk with them and Miles loved playing with them. He even learned to say Gramma and Emmy!

Here's some highlights of our holiday week:

Wednesday
Since we will be with Gerrit's family for Christmas, we had a Stuart family Christmas celebration a month early. I had a lot of fun making presents for my mom and sister, but I won't put any pictures just yet because I'm making the same thing for my mother-in-law and sister-in-laws and I don't want to ruin the surprise. Miles got lots of presents from his very kind and generous auntie and grandparents.
Finger puppets that my mom made for Miles



The Rushforths gave Miles this Cookie Monster and he loves it!
My mom made this soft book with pictures of his family and it's helping him learn everyone's name really well.

Gerrit got the Christmas present of his dreams: an iPod Touch. He has wanted one of these for almost three years now and I can't even tell you how excited he was. Or still is.

We hit a few stores to do some more Christmas shopping, and then we took my family to two of our favorite Idaho Falls places: The Snakebite for dinner and Reed's Dairy for ice cream.
When Emily ordered an Italian soda, we were not expecting anything this big!

Thursday

Happy Thanksgiving! We went to my aunt and uncle's house in Rexburg and we had a BIG Stuart family gathering. Four of my grandma's five kids and their families came for a grand total of 24 people. We enjoyed a big dinner and lots of fun conversation, games, and Christmas decorating. Miles may have enjoyed himself a little too much, as he refused to take a nap and stayed awake for 12 hours straight! Here's some of our many relatives!






Friday
I wanted to make a special breakfast for my family, so we had a tasty breakfast of pumpkin scones, cranberry orange scones, maple sausage, and apple juice.
After breakfast, we went to just a few stores for Black Friday before eating lunch and taking Miles home for a much-needed nap. We also went to see Tangled, which I really recommend. We brought Miles with us and he actually did pretty well. He usually won't sit still, but he did okay with the help of lots of different laps to sit on and a big bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.
We loved having visitors and playing with everyone and we miss everyone already!

Eternity's View

The local art museum had another free family day this past weekend. The weather was really terrible, but I was excited about it, so we went anyway.


See? Horrible weather!

This time, the featured exhibit was called Eternity's View, by Rexburg artist Gerald Griffin. It was a set of prints of early Mormon imagery that look like this:





It was an interesting exhibit, sort of a cross between church history and art. The corresponding art project was to make your own prints. I had thought we could maybe have at least do the drawing/etching part of the print, but he was not interested at all. Miles and Gerrit headed to the children's room and had a blast doing things like this:



That left me free to work on my print in peace. The museum had lots of pages of symbols out for you to look at, and I decided to do a print of Celtic symbols. First, you draw your design on a piece of paper. You then trace that design onto a piece of styrofoam. The etching needs to be really, really deep, so you have to go over it a few times.


Next up, you load up a brayer with plenty of ink and roll it all over your piece of styrofoam. You put a piece of plain paper on it, peel it off, and voila!



My finished print.

Holiday Pictures

We took Miles to JCPenney to get his pictures taken for Christmas as presents for the Miles Larsen fan club (i.e. his doting grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles). He was not particularly cooperative. Who wants to sit still and look at the camera when there is an entire studio to explore? Regardless, I think we got a pretty good picture. It captures my goofy little boy with the crazy blonde hair just about perfectly.

Snow Day

We had to cancel our trip to story time because it was snowing pretty hard and I prefer to avoid driving in the snow. Luckily, Miles considered playing in the snow to be just as much of a fun adventure. He had a blast trying to eat it and catch it in his hands.

As Heard on the Radio

I was listening to the radio today when I heard something that speaks volumes about the winter weather in Idaho Falls.

Radio Announcer: It's going to be a nice day today.
Me: Yes! Maybe it will stop snowing and be somewhere in the 50's!
Radio Announcer: The high for the day is 34 and there will be light snow flurries, but we can handle it.

Oh, Idaho Falls. If the best that you can say for your daily weather is that "we can handle it," it just may not be nice weather. Of course, this is also coming from a girl who grew up in a place where a day with the above weather would be some of the worst possible weather imaginable. Sigh...

Nursery Rhymes

Miles is old enough to go to nursery now and he's gone the past two weeks all by himself. He loves it! He particularly enjoys coloring, playing with the matchbox car garage, and snack time. In fact, he loves nursery so much that he sobs when we make him put the crayons away and go home. It's a little weird to not be chasing him around the church anymore, but I'm glad he loves nursery!

Peanut Butter for Dinner

We had a lot of peanut butter for dinner last week. Just not any sandwiches...


Gerrit loved this peanut chicken stir-fry. Clearly, that is not my picture. I don't really do fancy presentations unless we have company, and even then, probably not this fancy. Even if ours wasn't particuarly pretty, it was tasty. The peanut butter in the sauce is delicious and works really well with the chicken and broccoli. Miles would probably have eaten it better had I been smart enough to hide the white rice until he finished his chicken and broccoli. That kid loves rice.

We also had this sweet and spicy peanut soup:

Gerrit and I loved this soup. It's packed full of vegetables (carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, and sweet potato) and has really good flavor. A word of warning, though...it is pretty spicy. It was too spicy for Miles. You might want to take out the cayenne pepper if you don't like spicy food.

Go Play Inside

It starts to get cold really early in Idaho Falls, which can be unfortunate when you have an 18-month-old who loves to run around outside. Luckily for us, the city of Idaho Falls has an indoor toddler/preschool gym twice a week. It costs a dollar, and they have bouncy horses, a slide, tunnels, balls of all sizes, hula hoops, and other toys for the kids to play with. It wasn't too busy, so Miles got to play with all the toys he wanted for two hours. He was in energetic toddler heaven!

This is what the play area looks like:


He loved these bouncy horses!



A ball as big as he is.
He kept trying to climb up that slide the whole time. He finally figured it out and he was so excited!
For some unknown reason, this kid loves pressing his face into mesh.

The other little boy came up and asked Miles so politely if he wanted to ride on the toy with him. I think he was a little disappointed that Miles couldn't have a conversation with him in return.