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!