A Wild Christmas!

We were lucky to have so many of the Wilds in town for Christmas last year (What? It's June you say? Right....about that... Well, I figure that now we've started our summer adventures I'd better get caught up and the last I had posted was Thanksgiving. Oops!)

So, anyway, we had loads of fun with everyone. We had a German Christmas dinner to celebrate our German heritage. We tried lots of German food and even liked some of it.  We made a list of the ancestry we have to celebrate and we'll rotate and try new fun foods again in two years.

I made several kinds of cookies (mostly German) and Mia helped me finish off the Hausfreunde. Yum!

Cora was a big fan of the cookies! 

It was so nice to have so many of us together!

We had our Raclette dinner which is always fun. But not as fun as fondue. Per the boys. 

But still fun and delicious.

And we sneakily got a picture of Tyler.

And had a lovely Nativity pageant.

Even Bosky came to Christmas!

And then we made Ninjabread men. Some of them even included hairy armpits. 

And we'll just leave that right there. 

I'm not sure what's happening here but it looks a little fiendish... 

I think perhaps the kids thought this was Halloween instead of Christmas...  ;) 

If there's leftover frosting there's only one thing to do!

And then there was the epic Nerf gun war! Just in case you're wondering those little darts hurt! And boys who are under the age of 20 had way bigger and badder guns than the rest of us. I think we better start saving now for a Nerf bazookas for the next war. That way I'll have a fighting chance.

The girls had a fun sock exchange - the challenge was to find fun socks that aren't goofy, just enjoyable. I think we did pretty good:

The boys made a fort.

And we played games and laughed and had a great time wrapping up 2016!

We wrote down a few notes about 2016 and ideas for 2017. 

Can't wait to have a big ol' Wild party again! It's always so much fun!!

Thanksgiving in St Louis

We went to St Louis to Nate and Dre's house for a big Lund Thanksgiving. Dave and I drove since airfare was ridiculously expensive. The drive from here to St. Louis is basically one loooong (13 hours), straight, flat line which is nice for a road trip in the sense that we didn't have to deal with sketchy mountain passes or the like but it sure was long.


On Thanksgiving Day we had a Lund Turkey Bowl!  The most memorable part of this was when Julia sideswiped Kristin.  Many didn't see the collision until after the fact and saw Kristin laying flat on her back.  Sadly, there were no pictures or videos documenting this event.

And then enjoyed a delicious dinner!  We were lucky to have Dave's Aunt, Mary Lee, and cousin, Rachelle (with her family) join us as well.  They left right after dinner since they had a 3 hour drive back home!

  

 

 

 

 

Of course there was lots of silliness!

And we played lots of games:

It was wonderful having so many Lunds together over the week.

 Nate & Lexi went with Dave and I to see the arch in St. Louis the last day we were there.

 This gives you a little perspective about the size of the arch:

We bought our tickets to ride to the top of the arch but didn't realize that we had a long wait until it was our turn so we walked around the grounds until it was time to get in line. (Lines seem to be a thing at the Arch. You stand in line to buy your tickets then stand in a line to wait for your time slot line, then you move to the line for your time slot, after that you move to a line inside the arch, then stand in one more line to ride the tram up.) Anyway, it's under construction right now and will be really pretty when it's all finished.

 It's also under construction *inside* the arch:

This is the view from the top of the arch - you can sure see a long way off. The Mississippi River is on one side.

And the city of St Louis is on the other. 

We should have taken a picture of the crazy little cars you ride in to the top - very tight! And then, of course, you're walking basically uphill or downhill all while you're in the top which takes some getting used to. I'm not keen on tight places so I didn't want to stay in there long. It was tight and crowded. I'm glad we went but I wouldn't do it again. In fact, they were fairly disorganized at the Arch and it wasn't even high tourist season and I would really say, if you're going then go see the arch but don't bother paying to ride to the top. We didn't feel it was really worth the money or time (the better part of the afternoon) it took.

We had a fun Lund Thanksgiving!! And a big thanks goes to Dre for all her hard work and planning!

SaveSave