Our First Thanksgiving

Last Thanksgiving, there wasn't much we wanted to celebrate as all we wanted to do was to see Lydia at the hospital. Next weekend, we'll be done thinking about what happened this time last year and still thinking about her being in the hospital. Lydia has almost been home for an entire year! It seems like such a dream, all of that crazy stuff that happened at the start of the year.

This year, Shannon and Bryan and the kids decided to go camping. The plan was for everyone to get together for Thanksgiving day. We thought, hey, why don't we go camping too? It'll give us some time to catch up and for the kids to get to know each other. What was strange is that, 'Let's go camping' came out of MY mouth! So we got a tent, sleeping bags, all the bits and bobs that you need to go camping (apparently there's quite a lot of stuff) and went up to Santee state park to stay a couple of nights. If you look really closely in the photo below, you'll see Lydia on the floor of the tent. She was making sure that Gary had everything set up the way she wanted it to be.
The weather turned out quite nice seeing as it had been raining for the better half of a week. By Thanksgiving day, I was worried that we'd be miserable and wet! I can deal with cold weather, but cold and wet weather outside is not really my idea of fun! SO we were very grateful that it didn't rain at all for the couple of days we were there. It got a bit chilly at night, and I think Lydia got a bit cool so we stuck her in the sleeping bag one night and she promptly fell asleep for a few hours. We didn't realize how popular Chili and Toffee would be. Poor inside doggies got a bit cold at night, so we spent the majority of our time trying to keep them warm! Although I think they got some help from the kids. As you can tell, Zachary liked Chili a lot.

Here's Lydia with Monty and Averie. Lydia looks like she's very comfortable, as does Chili!

Here's a pic of all the cousins together. I'm a bit off centre as Shannon has some better pics of this. But I thought this was a good way to show how brave the Picketts were with their camping experience. Gary and I just had one to look after whereas Zachary, Averie, Taylor, Kaelyn, Monty and Lauryn had been there all week! It looked like they were all having a lot of fun.

Here's Gary and Lydia taking a walk on a trail. There were a lot of leaves on the ground so it looked really nice out there. And it wasn't too cold when we were walking around.

Well, we've been home for a week now. We stayed close to home this weekend as we have all come down with the lergy. Lydia brought a cold home from daycare, Gary got a bit achey and had a sore throat, and I have been battling a sore throat and now a cough (boooo) all weekend. Not very fun! We hope to be much healthier this coming week...wish us luck!!