This thanksgiving we had absolutely no plans for the first time ever! My parents are on a mission down in Mexico and Mike's parents are down in central America on one of their bi-annual humanitarian service trips. Most of our siblings left town or had plans elsewhere, so we were left to celebrate Thanksgiving on our own this year, which actually turned out to be a lot of fun! Like I said, we had no plans so we played the entire day by ear. This is how it went down...
Mike started the day off by making a delicious waffle breakfast, which the kids devoured.
I had to throw in the pic below because it shows Bryson and Lilly's awesome teeth. As you can see, Bryson lost one of his top teeth (the other day) and Lilly is getting a mouth full of fabulous teeth as well. She loves having teeth and eats like crazy!
After breakfast we lounged around and played with the kids for a couple of hours, got a few chores done, got ready, ate lunch and then decided to head downtown. We feel like we've been blessed with so much in our lives and wanted to spend the day giving back in whatever way we would could find. We initially planned to help serve Thanksgiving dinner at a soup kitchen, but by the time we got downtown most dinners were already finished, so we changed plans and decided to buy some cookies and pass them out to the homeless people we came across on the street.
Bryson begged me to take that picture on our drive because he just loves having his picture taken SOOO much...haha!
When we got downtown we decided to first head to
Temple Square. On the way there we met two homeless folk and gave them each a cookie.
We enjoyed looking at the Nativity and then we walked a few blocks down to where Mike works so we could get some hot chocolate. On the way there, we passed out a few more cookies and created a few more smiles. We rode the elevator up to Mike's work, but sadly none of the hot chocolate machines were working so we left hot chocolate-less.
I love that Salt Lake has these red donation meters scattered all along the streets that provide you the opportunity to donate directly to homeless shelters instead of giving money directly to homeless individuals. I have never noticed them before but was very pleased to see them.
We left our last cookie next to a man sleeping in the doorway of a building and then set off to find some food for dinner. I wasn't about to spend the day cooking a huge thanksgiving meal for just the four of us, so we planned to pick up some sushi for our Thanksgiving dinner instead. Unfortunately none of our favorite sushi restaurants ended up being open, so we let Bryson pick where to go and of course he picked McDonald's (bleh!). He was ecstatic.
Then we went home, changed into our jammies and snuggled up as a family to a movie. Can you guess what movie we watched from the picture?
Yep, you guessed it--Ghostbusters! It was Bryson's first time seeing it and he loved it.
We are so grateful for all that we have. We know that everything we have comes from a loving Heavenly Father and that it can all be taken away from us just as easily as it has been given to us. We hope we can continually use the blessings we have been given to bring glory to His name.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Favorite quote this week:
"Our degree of gratitude is a measure of our love for Him."
-Elder Russell M. Nelson
Life rules!
