The Rest of Thanksgiving Weekend

Thanksgiving weekend was so nice and relaxing.  Friday, we ran over to Fred Meyer's to catch the end of the Black Friday sale--mostly the 1/2 price sock sale.  We are not big black Friday shoppers, and this is the closest we will come to it. 

Later Garrett took all the kids out in the back and they raked the leaves and played.  It was a beautiful day and while they were outside, I worked on cleaning the house a little bit...it was SO QUIET and peaceful!!

Later that night, we took the kids to McMenamins to see "A Dolphin Tale". First of all for all you non-Oregonians, McMenamins is a chain of nearly sixty microbreweries, music venues, historic hotels, and theater pubs. The one we went to is a grand hotel and they have a movie theater in the hotel and you can eat dinner as you watch the movie. It's a lot of fun and the tickets for the movie is pretty cheap. They have the best cajun tater tots, ever! Anyways, we went to see "A Dolphin Tale" and we loved it. It was such a good movie and my kids loved it because of the dolphin!

Saturday afternoon, we went to see the pianist Jon Schmidt in concert. He is an amazing pianist! I used to listen to his cds in college when I would study. I got reaquainted with his music recently when I found this video of him and his friend, Steven Sharp Nelson (an amazing cello player) on youtube. It's called "Love Story meets Viva la Vida". If you haven't seen it, you should check out the link. It's so awesome! My kids love watching it. Anyways, since Maggie and Lydia are taking piano lessons, we took them to the concert because we thought they would appreciate it and enjoy it. It was awesome! They are both so funny and talented, but I personally think that Steven Sharp Nelson should be included in the title of the concet heading because he added so much to the show!  He is hilarious. It was a great outing and I know the girls really enjoyed it, too. Lydia was grinning from ear to ear the whole concert.

These two pictures were taken from our phones and they didn't turn out so well.  But the following three I got off the internet.

He actually played a song like this at the concert!  Crazy talent!

Here is the link for "Love Story Meets Viva la Vida":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXtVBJDPs6k

This is a link to something they did in our concert as well that had us all cracking up.  They were playing Pachabel's Canon and Steven thought it was so boring that he "was falling asleep", but then changed it up a bit and threw in a little U2.  The recording is not the best, but you can still get the idea. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2xgLL52xds&feature=related