Over the River and Through the Woods

This past July, John's parents moved from the wilds of Manila to the wilds of Provo.  We haven't seen them for a while, so we chopped off John's arm and leg and bought flights to Utah for Thanksgiving week!  (And John's 6 siblings all went too.)  John and I both agree-- it was totally worth it!

Good times with the kitchen crew

I made everyone feel good about themselves during family bowling night

Our honorary bowling ball sorters

Even Christian got in on the action 

We always like to pay homage to John's mom's picture at the Brick Oven pizzeria. She never knew that this random date she went on in the 1970s would be memorialized and displayed for the next four decades!  

Benson and Cole were delighted to romp around the backyard for hours everyday with their cousins.  

We ate a lot of calories and promptly burned them all off by laughing so much, one night with John's old roommate Nate Lowe and his girlfriend Jasmine.  

 
Rachel went through the temple for the first time!  We had 100% family attendance in the celestial room together-- what a day for the books!  

We swung down to Mapleton to visit our friends the Nances.  Jana and I (and our husbands, I guess) survived medical school together! 

We were dazzled by the zillions of Christmas lights at Temple Square

We had 40 people total for Thanksgiving dinner-- 5 tables of 8-- and we just used a room at the church to fit everyone.  The food, company, conversations, and decorations were all superb!  

Here we are as the turkey tryptophan slowly sets in...

You can't make a trip to Provo without visiting these guys!  My Uncle Gordon and Aunt RoseAnn put on a masterpiece breakfast for us one morning.  As is the custom, we solved several world problems while eating!

We decided which grandsons are destined to be engineers, based on their Lego prowess.  

(cough--NATHAN--cough)

We stormed BYU campus to watch Rachel's choir rehearsal

Then we swung up to South Jordan to visit our wonderful friends, the Irions.  We hung out with them for 8 years in Wisconsin.  It was fun to just pick up where we left off.

 The Jackson 5 have nothing on the McAllister 7!

Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house... can be exhausting!  

But a good kind of exhausting!  We're so happy that we went.