Thanksgiving

For my side of the family, I took the kids up to Granny's. Just to warn you, there are a lot of pictures but I'll explain as I go. First, I will start out with a hammock picture.













There were some casualties again! (If you don't know what I'm talking about go here.) My kids were not "privileged" this time. I was pushing the hammock pretty hard thinking, "Sweet, I'm totally going to tip them!" When all of a sudden, the chain just broke and they all fell! It was awesome! (It's a family thing to think it's funny when other people get hurt. Strange, I know.) Just to get started here is a picture of the Tire Swing.













A lot of the cousins were there and the youngest 5 (which includes my sister, Jill and I and Rae Ann, Joey and Jesse Anderson) were reminiscing about our Helicopter Swing. While I was eating I mentioned something about it again to my nieces and they looked at me like I was weird! I looked at them with the same weird look and said, "You've never heard about the Helicopter Swing?" With excitement in my voice I said, "I'll show you when I'm done eating!!" So apparently, the 5 youngest grandkids/cousins have never actually talked about this, let alone passed on the fun! Why were we so selfish in keeping this to ourselves when we had so much fun doing it in the first place? I have no idea! "What the heck is a Helicopter swing," you say? Well, let me explain. When "we" (the 5 youngest grandkids/cousins) were little we spent a lot of time at Granny's for the summer! Granny lives in a super small town called Gisela. It's on your way to Payson. Anyway, there's not a whole lot of things to do there so we got very creative! More so when Granny tended too be busy or gone! heehee! So many great memories! I'll have to share more stories later! In an attempt to fit all 5 of us on the Tire Swing at the same time we came up with this CLEVER idea to put Granny's straight ladder in the middle of the handles. Not so much fun swinging back and forth on a stinkin ladder. Then, came the excitement of twisting the ladder to spin around on it! We learned a lot about Physics that day with many casualties! Sometimes we squished poor little Jesse in the middle, but it wasn't any different then spinning in the swing itself without the ladder, except more squished! It was mostly 2 people at one time. So more brainstorming came and we finally understood the Physics part of it all and finally found the right balance for all 5 of us to spin at the same time! Now the problem was to spin the swing as high as we could go and then get on and ride it down! Another problem! How can you jump on a ladder that was so tightly wound up so high without actually enjoying it? More creativity, of course! Granny had a step ladder that we would use for the last person to climb on while holding onto the other 4. The last person would get on and KICK the step ladder out of the way so as not to fall on it as we were coming down! (We actually hit it a couple of times before figuring out that we needed to kick it out of the way.) While showing this to all who was fortunate enough to see it, my sister, Jennifer named this our Hillbilly Helicopter! One last warning, the safest way to get off is to let the people on the Helicopter fall or completely ride it out! If you tried to stop it mid-flight, you got hurt yourself! Okay enough suspense! I'll show you what I'm talking about.


I think this is hilarious!













Adjusting for balance!













Spinning for speed!

There was also a little pellet shooting going on also. We would stack up empty soda cans and then shoot them down. It was pretty fun.













My nephew, Nathan was nice and patient enough to show David how to shoot.

















David and Matthew playing with toy guns.













Notice anything different about Matthew? His pants are on backwards. When I told him this he emphatically said, "NO! They're not!"