American Thanksgiving weekend

Lauren's first American Thanksgiving was her second Thanksgiving celebration. She had experienced a small Canadian Thanksgiving meal back in October when her Aunt Becky was visiting. For this occasion, we spent a quiet and restful Thanksgiving Day at home with each other.

We started the day with a Thanksgiving story. The only one I could find in my personal library was an Amelia Bedelia book. It was a longer one and obviously over Lauren's head, but I still enjoyed snapping a picture of Jonathan reading to her. About halfway through the book, Lauren took a break from reading and played with some toys instead, but kept looking back at Jonathan and I as we finished reading through the book together. At one point she got most of her body off the ground. It might not be too long until she's able to roll from her back to her front!

Intent on the story (for the moment)

"You guys still back there?"

In the afternoon, after Lauren woke up from a nap, we went outside and got some pictures of her and a few family pictures together with the leaves in our apartment complex.

Wrapped in a blanket to keep her warm

Needed a little something to munch... ;)

After Lauren woke up from her late afternoon nap, Jonathan took a few videos of her and me. In the first one, I taught Lauren a Thanksgiving song that my friend Danielle had taught me and my fellow volunteers during our US Thanksgiving dinner in Tanzania in 2010. In the second one, we were finally able to capture Lauren's adorable laugh on camera. Until that evening, we never seemed to have a camera handy when she broke out into laughter, so we were really happy to finally catch her giggle in action!

We were rather delinquent in actually having Thanksgiving meal. A couple from our church hosted an "orphans" Thanksgiving meal and we contemplated going, but all we really wanted was to just relax together at home, so we ended up doing that instead. And since we'd had a great Thanksgiving meal, complete with both pumpkin and apple pies for dessert, when Becky was visiting, we didn't especially feel like we had to have another fancy meal. However, we did want to do something a little more special than usual, so on Friday we walked to the grocery store (which, happily, was much less busy than usual), got the ingredients for some special dishes, and prepped the food that afternoon. Then on Sabbath when we came home from church we had a small modified Thanksgiving meal, just some favourite dishes, with a dessert of a store-bought pumpkin pie for Jonathan (I don't enjoy it) and a Q-family special, homemade cheesecake. It was simple and delicious, just our style!

On Sunday we carved out a little time to take a dip in our apartment complex's hot tub. The pool isn't heated, so once the weather got cooler we've taken to just warming ourselves in the hot tub. I'm always super nervous about taking Lauren in pools and hot tubs because I really don't want her to have an accident... Of course she's always wearing a swim diaper when we go in, but I still get nervous about potential leaks. Thankfully, it hasn't happened yet and hopefully that trend continues. Lauren loves the water, and quite enjoys our warm dips.

Lauren is sporting my baby swimsuit. The elastic is pretty useless, but the fabric has held up great since I used it 30 years ago!

Practicing her back float...while chomping on her fingers. :)

Wrinkly feet, time to get out

Bundled up against the cold air

Becky's visit & Canadian Thanksgiving

Lauren's Aunt Becky came to visit over Columbus Day/Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, Oct. 10-13. It was great to have her here and so fun to introduce her and Lauren. She was supposed to arrive late on Friday night, but because of a delayed flight, finally arrived in the wee hours of Saturday morning. We took her to our new home church, Loomis SDA, and we enjoyed visiting after church since we hadn't been there for a couple weeks prior. In the afternoon, Jonathan's uncle Shawn and cousin Rachel drove the two hours from Reno to visit with Becky and in the early evening we all went for a walk by Lake Natoma together. When we got back we had a pizza supper and Becky and Rachel made a dessert treat before Uncle Shawn and Rachel left to drive back to Reno.

On Sunday, Becky orchestrated a Canadian Thanksgiving meal with Jonathan as her sous chef. I was able to make the cranberry sauce - a Thanksgiving tradition for me - in between attending to Lauren. Lauren woke up from her nap just as we were about to eat, so we were able to include her in our family Thanksgiving photo. She seemed quite mesmerized with my plate of food. :) That evening we played some games together.

Entertained by toys while the adults make Thanksgiving dinner

Thanksgiving dinner

Maple leaf apple pie!

Pre-meal shot (taken just before Lauren woke up from her nap)

Baby contemplating the plate of food

"Aunt Becky, it looks good enough to eat!"

Pre-meal shot of all four of us

On Monday we had an adventure planned. We had heard that there were roads all the way around Folsom Lake, so we decided to try to drive around the lake, which stretches quite a ways north. We made a picnic lunch, packed up our swimming gear in case the lake was a nice enough temperature for us to want to go for a dip, grabbed our state park pass, and headed out. Boy were we in for a surprise! As we entered the first state park closest to our house and saw the lake, we were shocked to see how much the water had dropped from the last time we'd driven by it (when Jonathan's parents were here in September). The water was so low that much of the lake bottom could be seen and we realized that swimming was kind of out of the question. Since we weren't hungry yet, we drove up a bit more north to another state park and drove around the extensive groups with the help of a very handy map of the state parks around the lake. We were amused to see some four-wheel drive vehicles descend off the park roads and into the former lake bottom for some off-roading. We decided to head to one other state park to actually eat our meal, but weren't able to find it the road to turn off on, so ended up at a farther one that didn't actually have any picnic tables, so we just ate our lunch in our car in the very dry and dusty parking lot. We kept driving north on the west side of the lake until we got to Auburn and we enjoyed driving around the downtown core and seeing the old-timey, gold town shops and statues before turning around and heading back south. We did find the one state park that we'd missed on the way up and checked it out and then continued on back to our house for our final evening of visiting together.

Tuesday morning, Jonathan said goodbye to Becky before leaving for work. Around 11 a.m., Lauren and I drove Becky to the airport where we said our good-byes. Although it was a short trip, we all had a lovely time together.

Thank you so much for all your help while you were here, Becky. A special thank you for helping so much with the meals and especially for helping bring our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner to life! It was so nice to have you here!