For Thanksgiving this year we were with the Andersons down in California. Since we'd just had our first bit of real cold and snow here in Utah we were really excited to head to a warmer climate :)
As those of you who have been following our blog know, Eric had been working an awful schedule of 6pm - 2am. Well, after Daylight Savings Time ended his schedule changed... to 7pm - 3am. As much as I had hated his schedule before, this was worse. We slowly got so mixed up that we were going to bed at 8am and waking up just in time for Eric to go to work. It got us all wacky. But just before Thanksgiving I'd had enough. It just wasn't working for our family and it was making it hard to make it to church on Sundays. More importantly, the reason Eric was on the night schedule was to take Chinese calls and he'd only received one... since August. Since this was pretty ridiculous I proposed to Eric that he offer to switch to a normal schedule and just stay on call during the nights so that we could get our schedule all worked out.
When Eric went to get approval for this change we found out that he was supposed to have switched to working 5pm - 1am rather than 7pm - 3am, which would have been a totally different story for our family. However Eric's manager approved our proposed solution we were able to start making that transition over Thanksgiving. Eric's last day working the super late shift was Thursday the week before Thanksgiving.
This was such a blessing because it meant that we were able to be starting to be on normal hours while we were with my family. Plus, it meant that we had all of Thanksgiving break to transition before Eric went back to work. In retrospect, I'm really glad that Eric got the time change mixed up because otherwise we never would have made the switch to him being on call at nights and that really was a good change to make.
Anyways, our drive down was actually pretty good. We drove down with Taylor and Ryan Lockwood (my sister and brother-in-law) after a trip to Tucanos - a little bit belated for my birthday, but we wanted to use my birthday club free meal before the end of the month! Sam slept pretty much the whole way, which we attribute to a lot of prayers on the part of my family.
Our time in California wasn't super eventful. We spent some of our time letting Sam chase around my dad's chickens. Yes, my dad now has chickens. And no, my family does not live in a particularly rural part of Southern California. But earlier this year he got it into his head that he wanted to raise some chickens in our backyard. So, he built a chicken coup next to our Sport Court and found a website where he could get mail order chickens. As Dave Barry would say, no I'm not making this up. Apparently you can order chickens and they throw them into a box right after they hatch and overnight them to your house. And then you have chickens. It's been really funny to watch my family's adventures with chickens. For example, one day my mom came into the front room to find all of the chickens laying on the floor staring at the blank TV. They're as bad as her kids!
Anyways, we also spent some time going to the beach where we got some really cute pictures of Sam. The whole album is here but I thought I'd include a few highlights -
Sam took this sand stuff very seriously, actually this is a very common look on his face
Sam really wanted to get in the water. No surprise there! He loves the water!
I think we can safely say that Sam enjoyed the beach
We spent Thanksgiving just at home. I think that's the first time we've had a Thanksgiving dinner without having a bunch of other families from the ward or neighborhood or extended family there. While we always enjoy having guests for Thanksgiving, it was nice to be reunited as a family. It's weird to think that our immediate family is now getting big enough to have an "extended family" Thanksgiving with just us!
One cool trick that Sam learned for Thanksgiving was how to gobble. Eric would put his finger up to Sam's mouth and wiggle it back and forth to make Sam sound like a turkey. It was pretty funny and totally appropriate for Thanksgiving. Sam really enjoyed it too and liked showing off his new trick.
For the most part our time in California was pretty low key - which isn't to say it wasn't fun. It was a lot of fun but we spent the time just hanging out and enjoying family rather than doing big things. In my opinion that's the best kind of vacation. We played board games and nerf guns and Wii and visited together. Hooray for family! I have a bunch of video that I'm working on editing down to a reasonable posting length, but I've decided it's just time to get this post posted and we can work on the video later.
Our drive back to Utah was as successful as our drive to California. Sam slept really well almost the entire way. Re-adjusting to normal life the next day was no picnic, but it was worth it for the fun we had in California. Thanks Anderson Family for a fun time together!
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