Thankful for Thanksgiving!

We've had quite the break from the blog.  It's not that nothing has been happening - everything has been happening!  We are right in the middle of crunch time with school...there's just enough time to throw in huge projects, papers, and exams right before finals week.  We'll be happy when this semester is over.  Only about 8 more semesters to go before we can get big kid jobs!

On to the update.  Thanksgiving has become a huge holiday for my family.  All of the siblings come back to Topeka and my grandpa even leaves sunny California to brave the cold.  This year we had the extra bonus of having Adam's sister Kristen and her family come to Kansas as well.  We wanted to spend as much time with our families as possible, so we came up with a great solution - have a combined Thanksgiving dinner!  That's right...the Buhlers and Christensens came together for an amazing feast on Thursday - two grandparents, four parents, four brothers/brothers-in-law, nine sisters/sisters-in-law (including two pregnant ones!), three nephews and one niece.  Though we couldn't have everyone in person, we were excited to have Amelia, Joel, and Finn there too (gotta love Google's new video chat!).  My niece finally warmed up to Adam's nephews and the four little kids had fun playing with all the aunts and uncles!  Here are some highlights:

Hide and go seek...the favorite hiding spot (and of course, they all hide together!).

My parents got a new tv, but it looks like my sisters had more fun with the box.

Adam and Rachel became besties after bonding over fixing a clogged sink....good times.

We're already quite the Apple family, but a lot of time was spent this weekend teaching my grandpa about all the joys of an iPhone.  He got pretty good at playing Connect Four!

Since announcing she is going on a mission, Susan has been bombarded with all kinds of information.  Here, I am showing her examples of cute sister missionary clothing and early 90s sister missionary clothing to avoid.  We also went over hairstyles.

And, before we all went our separate ways, we finally managed to take a family picture.  We still didn't get everyone in it (Jenn wasn't feeling well), but it's pretty darn close!  Thanks to my lovely photographer husband, we actually have some non-ghetto pictures!  

The finished product:

A little more realistic:

No, no announcement.  This just happened to be the hot topic for all of my little sisters.  They're even more baby hungry than I am!

You have to have a jumping picture (I love my niece in this one!):

This was a wonderful weekend to spend time with both of our families.  We are so grateful for them, our friends, the gospel, and each other!  Our favorite quote of the week: My 3 year-old nephew Julian saying what he is thankful for: "MONSTERS!  And baaaaabies..........and flying triceratops!"  Can you beat that?