Enjoying Aunt Kira and Uncle David

While Neal's sister, Kira, and brother-in-law, David were in town for the Thanksgiving holiday, we had fun seeing some of the local attractions.  We visited the Heard Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary for their cool dinosaur exhibit.

 Caught this little gem on video:

We also went to Sharkarosa Wildlife Ranch and enjoyed seeing the animals and learning a bit.  We were not all properly dressed for the chilly weather but Kira was sweet enough to share her coat--I LOVE HER for this. 

We had many up close encounters with different animals.  We got to pet a lemur, joey, deer, horse, zebra, and camels.  Nothing is more funny than a train of camels galloping out to be fed!

Mike Rowe taped a "Dirty Jobs" episode here!



World's Most Painfully Cold Tram Ride Ever!



 We also enjoyed having Opa and Oma over, visiting, and eating!  They had to share their time between families and states!  We spent our last day window shopping at local outlets and going out for yummy Chinese food at Zen Chow.

We already miss you, Kira and David!  Come back soon!

Turkey Trot and Thanksgiving Activities

We were out the door early this Thanksgiving morning to participate in the Dallas 5K Turkey Trot. It was foggy and a chilly 46 degrees!

Brrrrrr!

It was a mad house!  Approximately 38,000 people had registered to run BEFORE race day.  It was crazy running, trying to find holes between walkers, darting parking meters, and avoiding dog leashes.  It was also fun to run in those conditions and with a bunch of turkeys--really, people dressed for the occasion.

Keri ran the entirety and made the time she expected.  She was happy to be cheered at the finish line by family (Oma and Opa, Kira (Neal's sis) and David) and friends (the Garvin family).



The Garvins made her a sign!

It was great to be able to accomplish this goal a year after finishing chemotherapy for skin cancer.  Heavenly Father has blessed us with health and we are truly grateful.

Back at home we spent the afternoon having our non-traditional Thanksgiving feast--Indonesian food!  Everyone pitched in and the eating was good!

Afterward we hung out ant chatted and the topic turned to techy stuff as it often does in our family.  They even got out the scale to compare their phones' weights.  Thanksgiving fun at its best!

 Then we went for a nice walk before it got dark.  When we got back we did a few family photos.

 

Tah-Dah!

We fooled around a bit more and lost one to exhaustion--on the bathroom floor of all places..

Before sending his sister off to bed, we sat and read all the notes that had been placed in the "thankful jar" that week.  Our family has been greatly blessed and it is great to feel our Heavenly Father's love. 

It was a fun day and we were all pretty tired by 8 p.m. which just goes to show we are getting old.  But we had a great time with our family and friends and made some memories.

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving too!

Previous Quote of the Blog

If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves. --Douglas Adams

Thanksgiving Fun with Our Two Turkeys

We are keeping things pretty low key here until our family arrives for Thanksgiving but we have had some fun.  Sophie and Rhys both enjoyed preschool activities revolving around the day of thanks.  Sophie made a Thanksgiving themed place mat and used it at her preschool's Thanksgiving lunch feast.  Rhys was happy making the time honored hand print turkey.

At home, we made cool turkey hats with some friends and played a variation of hide and seek wearing them.  Sophie would hide and "gobble" and we would come and "hunt" her.

Later, Rhys worked on decorating our family's "thankful jar" with holiday themed pictures.  Sophie practiced her cutting skills to make slips of paper for us to write our blessings on.  Sophie will dictate to her parents and Rhys will use pictures of items he is thankful for.

Hope you are enjoying your own personal and family traditions this year.  Feel free to share some of them in a comment.

Live in Thanksgiving Daily

Neal and I both had the wonderful opportunity to speak in church on the topic of "Living in Thanksgiving Daily" and "How Gratitude Brings Us Closer to Jesus Christ."  What a terrific topic!  After pondering, praying, and studying we both delivered the messages we feel our Heavenly Father desired of us to share. 

Neal expounded on how we could "live in thanksgiving daily" by touching on Elder Wirthlin's 2000 talk by the same title.  He suggested that to live in thanksgiving we must:

1.  Open Our Eyes--"Our minds have a marvelous capacity to notice the unusual. However, the opposite is true as well: The more often we see the things around us—even the beautiful and wonderful things—the more they become invisible to us." (See Video)
2. Open Our Hearts--"We must let go of the negative emotions that bind our hearts and instead fill our souls with love, faith, and thanksgiving.  Anger, resentment, and bitterness stunt our spiritual growth....You can cleanse your heart. You can repent of uncleanliness. That is the miracle of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. You can cleanse your heart of impurity."
3. Open Our Arms--"Every time we cheer another’s heart, every time we ease another’s burden, every time we lift a weary hand, we show our gratitude to that God to whom we owe all that we have and all that we are."

He closed with this uplifting thought: "As we strive to open our eyes, hearts, and arms, our step will become a little lighter, our smile will become a little brighter, and the darkness that sometimes broods over our lives will become a little lighter. Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t been an especially grateful person. Rejoice and think of what an impression you will make on those who thought they knew you. Think of how delightfully surprised they will be."

My speech focused on these points:

1. Christ was a perfect example of living in gratitude.
 
"The Savior, Jesus Christ, lived a life of gratitude. He expressed gratitude to His Heavenly Father in prayer when performing miracles (see John 11:41) and for earthly things such as food (see Matthew 15:36), and He gave credit to Heavenly Father for giving us all things (see Matthew 11:27).

The Savior did not seek His own will, but showed gratitude and appreciation to His Heavenly Father through obedience to all He was commanded to do."  --Elder Wirthlin, 2001

2. Practicing thanksgiving regularly helps us to build a relationship with Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

"Through expression of prayerful gratitude and thanksgiving, we show our dependence upon a higher source of wisdom and knowledge—God the Father and his Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." --Elder Hales, 1992

Richard Edgley (Oct 2003), in observing church member throughout his travels noted, "As I have pondered these faithful members, I am struck by two qualities they all seem to have. First, regardless of social or economic status or position, their humility leads to submissiveness to the Lord’s will. And second, in spite of the difficulties and trials of life, they are able to maintain a sense of gratitude for God’s blessings and life’s goodness. Humility and gratitude are truly the twin characteristics of happiness."

I loved that sentence. "Humility and gratitude are truly the twin characteristics of happiness."  God wants us to be happy in this life, now.

"To the Lord Jesus, who bought us with a great price, we owe an undying debt of gratitude. It is impossible for us, weak mortals as we are, to fully comprehend and appreciate the suffering he endured on the cross so that he might gain for us victory over death. And even less can we understand the suffering he endured in Gethsemane so that we might obtain forgiveness of our sins.... But nevertheless, he endured it for our sake....All people who understand what Jesus did for us ought to love him and demonstrate that love by rendering to him, in a realistic manner, thanks and gratitude." --Pres. Romney, 1982

3. Pride is in opposition to humility and gratitude: "the twin characteristics of happiness."

"The central feature of pride is enmity—enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen. Enmity means “hatred toward, hostility to, or a state of opposition.” It is the power by which Satan wishes to reign over us.

Pride is essentially competitive in nature. We pit our will against God’s. When we direct our pride toward God, it is in the spirit of “my will and not thine be done.”

It is manifest in so many ways, such as faultfinding, gossiping, backbiting, murmuring, living beyond our means, envying, coveting, withholding gratitude and praise that might lift another, and being unforgiving and jealous."--Pres. Benson, 1989

Bonnie Parkin (2007), stated "Gratitude requires awareness and effort, not only to feel it but to express it. Frequently we are oblivious to the Lord’s hand. We murmur, complain, resist, criticize; so often we are not grateful. In the Book of Mormon, we learn that those who murmur do not know “the dealings of that God who … created them.” (1 Nephi 2:12)."

Neal and I were so grateful to be able to take the time to dig a little deeper and reflect on such a beautiful topic.  The speaker always learns the most through preparing and we thank our Heavenly Father for teaching us.  We hope these thoughts on gratitude will help all of us to feel God's love for us as we all "live in thanksgiving daily."

Now We Can "Remember the Alamo"

Hooray for getaways!  This Veteran's Day weekend we took off to San Antonio for the first time.  Despite Neal, Sophie, and Rhys all fighting colds, it was a weekend of fun family togetherness and famous food stops.  We made our first stop just outside of Austin at he Salt Lick for dinner.  This restaurant was featured on several Food Network shows, The Travel Channel, and The Today Show for their tasty BBQ cooked over an indoor open fire pit. 

We sampled the sausage, brisket, and turkey with sides of beans, slaw, and bread.  It was all good and especially the brisket and beans.  Then we were back on the road for a couple more hours to our hotel in San Antonio.

The next morning we visited the Alamo first.  Everyone told us that it's really small compared to what they expected so we had that in mind but still it seemed small.  We toured the grounds, went into the church, observed a special gathering for the Marine Corps, and whizzed through the gift shop.

Look!  We were Photobombed by some kid with a T-Rex!  Rwar!



There, that's better!  Scram kid!



It was interesting to learn the history, this being the 175 anniversary of the battle of the Alamo.  Overall, we learned a bit and were not allowed to touch or photograph much.

Then we set off across the street and strolled along the River Walk.  It winds and loops along the banks of the San Antonio River, under bridges as two parallel sidewalks, lined with restaurants, shops, hotels, etc.  We took a boat tour and kicked back while we learned about it's construction history, and businesses.  Some of us "kicked back" a little more than others.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at Brackenridge Park and The Witte Museum.  In the park we had lunch among a huge variety of aquatic fowl and hit the playground.  After that we boarded the Brackenridge Eagle miniature train that chugs along the tracks skirting the banks of the San Antonio River, as it makes its way through the park.

We braved the train even given its spotty history of collisions, derailments, and even a modern day robbery (in 1970) just to see the kids smile and hear both of them exclaim "Choo Choo!" repeatedly. 

We finished our afternoon at the park with a visit to The Witte and letting the kids go wild in the Science Treehouse where they were able to experiment with air power and simple machines.  We all had fun here!  


Science--it'll blow your mind!  Just look at that face!



We only were able to explore one of the four floors before they closed.  That was okay because we were hungry and off to our second restaurant.

The Cove was spotlighted on Guy Fieri's Drive-Ins, Diners, and Dives or "Triple D."  We would have never know to look for it unless we saw the show for it is squeezed into a little corner of a not so great neighborhood and has an attached laundry mat and car wash.  Yep.  We just stopped for the food though.

See the sudsy car on the right?!

They boast sustainable, organic, and local and it was really good.  We got two different sandwiches to share, the Lamb Burger with Latin Spices and Cotija and the 09er Burger - a beef burger with roasted red peppers, goat cheese, and pesto aioli.  Guy Fieri called the Lamb Burger the "Best Lamb Burger ever!" and it was tops!  The 09er lacked nothing in flavor either though.  We had a great time filling up on the burgers and fries.

On Friday, we were off to another of the five missions in the San Antonio area, Mission San Jose.  After a short video reviewing the history of the people and viewing the artifacts in the adjoining rooms, we were off to see the mostly reconstructed mission.  Not always accurately reconstructed either, we learned from one of the rangers.  For instance, in the quarter where the native people lived there are fireplace like structures that do not have any chimney's or flues but those reconstructing put there in the 1930s.  What those structures were based on is anyone's guess. 

The church was really the only original structure standing and it was undergoing some reconstruction on the artistic stonework around its front doors.  The kids were most excited about the water that powered the gristmill.  Rhys was grinning from ear to ear saying, "ya ya!" for water.  I explained to Sophie that the mill did the same thing as our hand grinder at home but a lot faster and a lot easier.

The gristmill

Then we took our irritable and snotty-nosed children to the Mercado, the largest Mexican market in the U.S.  We hit the bakery first and got the whole family sugared up. 

We sampled sugary cookies, macadamia nut pralines, coconut candy, etc.  Then walked through the shops and enjoyed the colorful flowers and clothes, the funny skeleton figures for El Dia de los Muertos, and the leather work.

We spent the rest of the afternoon napping in the hotel room while the kids wrestled each other the entire time (and we thought they needed sleep?!).  Then we went to our third famous food place: Big Lou's Pizza, as seen on Adam Richman's Man vs. Food on The Travel Channel. 

Adam signed a Big Lou's pizza box.

They really wanted to put themselves on the map so they invented Big Lou's 42" pizza!  42 Inches!!!  We like good pizza but knew that was sure death for our family so we got a picture of this group of friends about to kill themselves with volumes of food.

We ordered two 12" pizzas for ourselves.  We still had plenty of leftovers to snack on the next day.  We got the BBQ Brisket pizza and one of our own creating.  We loved both for different reasons.  The BBQ had a great sweet-salty mix, the other had fresh toppings and the best sauce ever--super fresh!  Both had the same light, chewy, yet crisp crust.  Great experience.

We were prepared to leave San Antonio Saturday morning.  We really enjoyed the speed version of the city and had a great time despite the colds that hung on.  We said our adieu by hitting one more restaurant for breakfast: The Magnolia Pancake Haus featured just this week on Triple D.  The wait was long (just over an hour) but that is pretty typical for this place even before the Triple D fame. 

Guy Ate Here employee T-shirt

Guy stenciled on wall with his autograph.

We ordered an apple pie pancake or the Authentic Munchener Apfel Pfannekuchen, a Smoked Turkey Arugula Frittata, and Corned Beef Hash and were very happy.  Service was great too.

We were happy to be home and sleep in our own beds but had a great time seeing and doing new things as a family.  Great little getaway.