When my family went on road trips my dad played this song by Woody Guthrie. "This land is your land,This land is my land,From California To the New York Island, From the redwood forest, To the Gulf stream waters, This land was made for you and me. He played it over and over all the way to Idaho"and back. Ever since I was a little girl I have wanted to visit the Redwood Forest. So on our way up to Seattle for Thanksgiving we made a little side trip. The Redwoods were fabulous. Certain parts of our trip were not. (A fuse blew due to Talmage shoving a dime into the cd player, hence our portable dvd player couldn't work. We promptly got that fixed in Eureka. Our hotel room turned out to be a double wide trailor straight from the 70s. Yuck. I left the lights on in the van the night before we headed up for Seattle, we were all packed with the kids in the van, ready to go at 7am and the car wouldn't start. We found someone to jump our van, but our alarm system was very confusing and it took us about an hour to figure out how to start the van without the alarm going off. On the way up to Seattle our check engine light went on and stayed on, it turned out to be our catalytic converter, nice. $1, 200 later we were good to go.) Other than those 'minor' incidents we had a great time and I was sure glad to get to Seattle.
Teagan playing at the beach.
The trees were so big and tall, it was incredible.
The picture is dark but Trent is standing in front of a Redwood tree that has fallen over, the root diameter must have been at least 12 feet.
The whole family could fit into a burnt out Redwood tree trunk.
We drove through a tree. Cool.
Teagan made a sandwich sugar cookie for santa along with 6 others on the plate. (yikes) He wrote her a nice note thanking her for all the cookies she decorated and mentioned that he ate one then took the rest back to his workshop for his elves. 
Tommy was a little overwhelmed by Teagan and Talmage yelling, "Santa came! He left presents!" We started opening presents around 6:15 a.m. (Thanks to Tommy.)
We went to the zoo on Christmas eve. It was free and it rained the whole time we were there. So, there weren't a lot of people and for some reason the animals were really active. You know sometimes you go to the zoo and the animals just lay ther? Well, they were walking around making lots of noise and coming right up to the glass enclosures, it was so cool! 
The kids trying to sit still for a Christmas tree picture. I finally gave up. 2 out of 3 looking is good enough, besides we were almost late for church.
Talmage was really excited to sit on Santa's lap, it just doesn't show in this picture. He talked about it all the way home from the ward Christmas party.
