Merry Christmas!

Thanksgiving 2007

Happy Thanksgiving! Can you believe Thanksgiving has come and gone? Most Thanksgivings, Michelle's extended family (the DaBell's) does some sort of vacation. Well this year the vacation was to stay over at the Pond's home. A lot of the extended family stayed over night a couple days. We decided to stay over Thursday night, which was a lot of fun.

Another fun thing was my family did their first "Church Thanksgiving." You know, the family is getting too big to do the get-togethering at the house, so they reserve a church? Yeah, the Lynn Droge family is blossoming I guess, so we got a church. I think the main reason was so we could get together and play basketball/football and race our X-Mods. Most of the boys in the family have an X-Mod (a small and upgradeable radio-controlled car). So we played games and raced cars, played some Elimination (aka Lightning or speed -- basketball where you play with two balls and shoot from the same spot to get each other out). It was a lot of fun. We should have taken pictures!

Then around lunch time we went up to the Ponds for the feast. There was plenty of food and fun. Here we are one of the nights playing some games.

Well hello!
Here I am.
The game is killer bunnies -- crazy, nutty, and random.
Ralph -- If it's not risk or liars dice, there's probably something better on tv!
Heather -- Right, mmhhmm, sure, okay, yeah!.
(She's trying to get me to go away -- for clarification see Strongbad's emails -- Office Dullard)
Spencer in deep thought...
Hooray! People are visiting which means my favorite grandson must be close by!
Brandon (and Kimberly) -- Bwahahaha! I got them to play Killer Bunnies!

Halloween!

Happy Halloween! We were at Walmart a few weeks ago and saw some absolutely cute costumes just Sammy's size. The options were a little devil, a lion, and a pumpkin. We thought that the little devil was the cutest, but thought that it might not go over well with the birth parents, because Sammy really isn't a little devil, in fact quite the opposite -- it was just a cute costume! Anyway we decided against it. The lion just looked cheap so we went with the pumpkin eventhough it seems everyone does a pumpkin for the first couple years.

At our ward halloween party, or harvest festival, we all put on our Incredible t-shirts because Sammy's pumpkin outfit is quite warm and we didn't want an ornery little squash! So the incredible onesie was an easy alternative, and it allowed Michelle and I to also "dress up" and look fun. We should have taken a picture but didn't, so you'll just have to take our word for it that we looked incredible!

So this isn't exactly halloween but it was at gardner village during the halloween season. Michelle, her mom, and a couple sisters went out to enjoy the dining and shopping.

Sammy's first halloween started with me dropping him off at grandma Droge's house for the late morning and early afternoon as I went to school. Mom had a good time with him, and took a bunch of pictures. Then we went up to visit grandma Pond for a little while for dinner and before we left we put Sam in his pumpkin costume and took some photos outside on the porch.

He was such a good sport, even though it was cold, hard, and he kept nearly falling over.

Guys, I'm gonna need a spotter here!

By the time we finally got to our house, Sammy was ready for the night to be over. We still wanted pictures of all our little pumpkins together, but Sammy refused to happily participate!