This year's Sloan Thanksgiving was well above par. A road race, 15 person dinner, musical performances, games, a celebrate the wedding party, friends, a trip to the movies, a trip to the Spanish branch and oh, the food...FoOd...FOOD! It never stopped! I even actually got some work done- crazy, huh? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.
Laura and I traveled to CT Wednesday night to find that David and Naomi had already arrived from Virginia. There were already 4 cars in the driveway by dinnertime and Dad wasn't even home from work yet. The next to arrive were my Mom's youngest brother Dave, his wife Mina and their two children. We had a running debate about their ages, but David won with the guess that Lydia was 10 and Taylor was 6. Now we're up to 5 cars. Dad came home bringing it to the nice round total of 6. The first event of the day was to go to the famous Manchester Road Race, or "Turkey Trot" as we locals affectionately call it. This is a 10,000 person race for charity with a group of serious runners followed by a good percentage of the rest of town watching, running or walking- with or without fun costumes! David and Naomi valiantly ran it (it's 5 miles) while Arielle, Laura, Uncle Dave (there were 3 Daves at Thanksgiving), Lydia, Taylor and I watched from the sidelines and entertained ourselves in various ways. Sorry to all of you who are sorely disappointed in me for not running- next year...
Here are some pics from the race. See if you can spot Dave and Naomi in the crowd in a couple of them:
Lydia being funny.
Here's a cuter one of Lydia.
Where's Dave and Naomi?
Dave and Naomi again?
Sponge Bob and a Turkey. Not Dave and Naomi.
Dave and Naomi were pretty tired after.
Taylor being cute. We rode a shuttle bus to and from the race and he sat in the back with me (That's right, we were the cool kids).
After the race we returned home and shortly thereafter Naomi's brother and sister-in-law Brigham and Christine joined us with their 2 kids Lucy and Elijah (1 and 2 respectively I believe). They live in Boston, so of all Naomi's relations we've gotten to know them the best. Sadly, I do not have a picture of Lucy, but she's very cute. Below are Christine, Elijah and Taylor and the next picture is Mom, Lydia, Aunt Mina and Uncle Dave. Aunt Mina is from Greece, did I mention that yet? Lydia loves the camera. And the camera loves Lydia.
Dinner was absolutely delicious- and there was so much food! Christine and Mina both cooked many many delicious additions to Mom's already delicious feast. Afterwards we worked it off by tossing around a football and then playing soccer. Here's Brigham about to throw a perfect spiral.
Brigham and Christine left Thursday night, but there was still more fun to be had, including a heated Boggle competition. David (my brother) took the victory, as usual. He's really good at Boggle.
Friday night was all about David and Naomi's 4th (yes, 4th!) wedding reception. Dave and Mina had to leave before the reception, so it was just us "core" Sloans left. I guess Uncle Dave had to get back to his "spliching" job (several of us misheard that he works with "supply chains" and it became a running joke).
The reception was actually more of an open house at our ward building with very excellent food. Sister Gillmore from our ward did an amazing job making all kinds of appetizers, desserts and a punch fountain that even had rose-shaped ice cubes.
The food spread....mmmm...
This is around the table left to right- Naomi, David, Steven Capson, Andy Hamilton (who's baby, Spencer, threw up on me) and Laura. Steven's wife Liz and Andy's wife Andrea are also friends from the good old Hartford Stake Young Men's/Young Women's and YSA. Good times. Baby Spencer is named for his grandfather, who we've known forever. So I let it slide that his namesake felt the need to vomit some kind of orange babyfood on me.
David and Naomi are being fake mushy here. But I'll have you know they were real mushy all weekend. It still strikes me as funny sometimes that someone would want to be mushy with my brother- my BROTHER! Doesn't she know how many cooties he has? He's covered!!!! Yech!!!!!!!
If inquiring minds want to know, we did again perform that old David and Naomi reception favorite- Orange Colored Sky. It was just Arielle and I as the doo-wop girls this time. Where were Ashlee and Crystal one may ask? Totally MIA.
PS- I also saw Heather at the reception, but my picture with her came out funny, so will not be gracing the blog. She is doing very well and is excited to go hang out with Crystal in Utah this winter!
Other activities before leaving CT included playing the card game Guillotine (Naomi won), getting some work done on my paper, but then mostly being very lazy. Oh, and going to see the movie "Enchanted" with Heather which was very cute and funny. You know, my team lost at soccer, I lost Boggle and Guillotine. It was not a great weekend for gloating. But it was Mom and Dad's time to shine as they spoke at the Spanish branch this morning (Mom with a translator, Dad without). David and Naomi even decided to stay Sunday morning just to go see it. We then had a leisurely lunch before going to Manchester Ward's Sunday School and Relief Society. Manchester Ward is still it's same old self, by the way. When asked by Sister Dark if she thought she could endure to the end, Sister Polowitzer replied "I don't know if I can endure to the end of this lesson!" It was pretty funny (and not an affront to Sister Dark's lesson, Sister Polowitzer was just obviously very tired). But in what other ward would you ever hear something like that? I mean, really.
And last but not least...The picture above is of Dad playing the piano. Yes, Dad! He has a goal to learn all the hymns in the book before Mom and Dad are ready to go on a senior mission. So he played "The Spirit of God" for me (he's been working on the first seven hymns). For those of you Sloan siblings who have always known that Dad could play the piano in his youth but have only seen him sit down in front of it maybe 5 times in their life, this is pretty amazing news, no?
I thought it was. And with that I'll end my very long blog entry. Except for a Happy Birthday shout out to Dane who turned 25 on the 25th! Happy Birthday!
And though Thanksgiving was awesome this year, I'm getting ready for an even more exciting Christmas!!!!
Here is me at my very first snowboarding lesson, which took place at Okemo yesterday. Next stop... 180's.
Here are some older pictures from the original posting. Elyse got baptized, which is very, very exciting. A few days later we celebrated her birthday at Margaritas. There was a guy doing balloon animals there, hence all the fun balloon things. My giraffe's name is Larry. Last but not least, Maurice apparently jumped a fence in order to kiss a donkey at the Joseph Smith Memorial Christmas lighting (but I wasn't present for that, someone just sent me the picture.)
