Thanksgiving Kentucky Style

 We've lived in Charlotte for over two years now and had yet to make the pilgrimage to Greg's only living grandparent's house in Kentucky--we were this close to getting written out of the will, so we went.  I was not excited.  I've driven with the kids the 5 1/2 hours to DC a few times and it was not fun.  Now I was looking at 10 hours (actually 12 due to traffic and kids needing to stop a lot).  Luckily we got a van with a DVD so we went from one movie to the next and back to the first, but all in all the kids were good.

And Kentucky gets a gold star in my book.

First, it was fairly warm considering it was the end of November. It was in the 50's most of the days we were there--warm enough to play outside.

Second, no trees.  Or at least very few.  Don't get me wrong, trees are nice, but when you grow up in a desert and then a flat treeless valley and then move to another desert nestled in the mountains, you get a little used to being able to see for miles and miles and all the trees of Charlotte have gotten in the way of me seeing the sky.  Oh, lovely, lovely Kentucky sky.

And third, and most importantly, Kentucky-ian parks are hard core.  We went to two--neither one of the which the likes I have seen in years.  Like sense I was a kid.  They were they type of parks where you could actually hurt yourself in a bad way--one had a spider web-like play structure a good 10 or more feet high.  They other had two, two!   merry-go-rounds.  When's the last time you saw one of those and didn't think about your crazy cousin Pete getting stuck under the one by your grandma's house?  Gold star for not being a pansy Kentucky.

I also got to met 3 of Greg's 4 cousin's and they were all pretty cool.  I wished they could've hung out for longer, but they each had like 3 Thanksgivings to go to since they all married people from their same city and had multiple families to visit (I guess that's a very, very slight plus of only living near half of our family--no double Thanksgiving).

Otherwise, the kids just had fun running around Nana's house because she let them do just about whatever they wanted--including watching hours of cable TV.

Here's Rex on Thanksgiving--(he would not let me take a normal picture of him)

 Alice wanted to do her make up so I let her.

 Rex played with Greg's cousin's kids.  Greg's awesome aunt played all sorts of crazy games with the kids--games I would NOT have let them play--such as bed jumping and the like, so they lucked out with her.  At one point she tried to come sit down with the adults when Rex found her, "Lolo, the game isn't over yet."  "Oh, ok.  I'm coming."  Pretty rad aunt--I just had to sit on my butt since Greg's other two cousins went to town on the dishes--and they are both more pregnant than me.  Oh well.

 Rad park #1

 We went to see some Christmas lights.  Nana told me it was just a drive through thing so I wore flats with no socks and a cardigan.  When we got there, turns out Nanna is 80 years old so prefers to drive, but Greg is 4 years old and wanted a closer look.  Luckily, as mentioned, it wasn't too cold and I had a baby heater inside me to keep me warm.

 Rad park #2--throw backs to the park in Upland.

 And then Sunday we went to the Princeton Branch.  We had intended to go to the Baptists church with Nana, but it was at 1 and with a 12 hour drive back... we went to the LDS branch with NO children.  Seriously, there were like 40 people there and Rex and Alice were the ONLY children.  And the building was super small so no matter where Alice was even when we took her out, everyone could still hear her screaming or whatever.  After a very long and stressful hour of trying to keep the children quiet, I found the only other family that had children tucked away in the nursery playing with toys.  Cheaters.  We left after Sacrament for the long drive home.

Anyway, we had a ton of fun and so did the kids.  We plan to return this summer on our epic drive to Yellowstone for the Brian Robins Hannah's-Getting-Home-From-Her-Mission Reunion.