giving thanks

For Thanksgiving this year we went to my parent's mountain cabin near Boone, NC. This was the first year that we have spent Thanksgiving there and we had a great time!!! It was nice to have a break from Raleigh and go somewhere else to celebrate! We had beautiful weather the whole time we were there. The ground and trees were frosted over each morning, but by the afternoon it was sunny and warm. We relaxed and did some new things this trip, which is always fun to do! My favorite thing was our day in West Jefferson on Friday. We spent the afternoon shopping and playing at the park and ended the day by going to the tree lighting downtown. I always put the pictures in order on the blog from how they happened, but I went "crazy" this time and put the tree lighting picture first because it was my favorite picture of the trip!!! Santa also came to the tree lighting by riding in on an antique fire truck, which the girls got to take a ride on too! Frosty and Rudolph were also there and there was free hot chocolate for everyone too! My other favorite thing was cutting down our Christmas tree. We got a tree from Todd last year, but my parents brought it home to us, so this was our first time looking through the field of trees and picking one out. It was SO fun and we love our tree. It actually ended up being too tall to fit in our house, but we solved that by cutting quite a bit off!!! Don't worry, we have 8 foot ceilings in our house! Mom made the best Thanksgiving meal on Thursday and I all I could take credit for was the corn pudding! We relaxed that afternoon and had fun working on a new puzzle and Legos log cabin. We rode out and saw lots of beautiful views and of course took lots of pictures too! It was a wonderful Thanksgiving for sure. We missed being with Clay and Court and the girls, but got to briefly Skype with them while we were in West Jefferson. At least we got to "see" them for a little bit. It was not the same without them, but we know how special it will be when we can celebrate with them when they get home. We of course are SO thankful for them!!!