(For starters...this was not part of our Thanksgiving trip.)

A few days before school got out we meet Preston at school for Thanksgiving lunch. So I'll go ahead and perfectly start this post by saying how thankful I am for my little boys. They are kind and sweet and full of so much love. I am Thankful everyday to be there Mother, even the rough days...I just don't usually recognize it as much until those days are over ;) Hehe

For Thanksgiving this year we packed up and headed back to Iowa. 

...And this picture makes me happy because our trunk space almost can't even be called trunk space. So the fact that I packed all of our stuff in the back without having to lay down any seats made me happy enough that I had to take a picture and document it. :)

So Skylers parents pulled and quick one and found us tickets (for an early Christmas). Pretty  awesome, right?

It was FREEZING COLD. Like windchill 10degrees. But we loved it. Bundled to the brim, packed full of hand/foot warmers. We cheered on our Hawks to victory. 12-0 for the first time in history!

In my head I had a list of all of the things we had to see one last time. Like this wall... How could we not, right? 

Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa!

Pretty much sums up our 4year in this place. If you've never lived in Iowa, you're missing out. Just trust me. ;)

Graduation Herky. Fitting.

We spent hours hunting for Herky's. When we would see them around town the boys would YELL with excitement. HERKY!!!! We just had to finish off our herky hunting with this guy. 

(Oh, and Preston is totally in this picture. Hiding behind Herky because the sun was blasting us to death.) 

And pack the moving truck :(

I never knew how much I would fall in love with Iowa. Small town, college life, farm living, corn growing, Herky loving, good people. And how can one be sad to leave a tiny little apartment? The place we raised our boys, brought home 2 new babies to, celebrated birthdays, school days, tests passed, boards passed, dental years completed and graduation. This place was good to us...NO, GREAT to us. We will always hold these memories close to us.   

Iowa...you'll always have a chunk of my heart.

Peace out Iowa. We're cashing in the school life for the real world.

Good things to come.  

The student life was pretty darn good to us, but we are super excited to step into the "real world". And I'm super excited to finally get to sit down in a dental chair and kiss my Dentist :) Hehe

Congratulations Skyler, You did it!

We're eating up as many Iowa adventures as we can before we have to say goodbye to this beautiful place. Last week didn't fail us!

We live like 10min from some gorgeous recreational areas and a state park (McBride State park)...really cool right?

Well maybe not that cool if you haven't seen where we live. 

...But remember how we live in IOWA?

Across the street and surrounded by corn and soy bean fields. Little farm town with not much in sight but farm land. So the fact that we can hop in the car, drive up the road, and be in a forest in minutes is really cool to me. 

Simply amazed every time.  

And I think this picture marks our first family car selfie :)

The boys love being outside. What boy doesn't? But they love it even more when we tell them we are going geocaching. For those who don't know what that is (in my kids eyes it's treasure hunting), you just follow GPS coordinates to find the geocache. Sometimes small, sometimes big. We usually just go for the larger ones that have small little toys hiding in them. Then when you find them you trade out something you brought for something you want to take from the box.   

(What better way to get to where you're going than riding your stick horse)

To top it all off the boys think the Captain Hook is always on the hunt too. We have to be fast to beat Hook to the treasure. :) We have found around 25 geochaches over the years. We mostly just do them because it takes us on some pretty wonderful little hikes. 

And we like adventure...even in little Iowa.    

WE LOVE IOWA!

 Really though...I love this place.

Have I said that enough?

You know what else we like? Iowa football. If you remember, I posted about going to a football game last year here. We thought that would be the only game we would get to go to while living here. Tickets aren't cheap. End of story. 

Well, last Saturday Skyler woke up and checked his school email. The was a faculty member who sent out and email out at 6am saying they had a few FREE tickets to the game that day. She said she would be at the school until 10am come get them if you want them. WHAT??? Crazy right? It was 9:30 though. It takes at least 25min to get to the school, but we figured we would give it a shot. We bolted to the school thinking we either wouldn't make it in time, or she wouldn't have any tickets left. A few minutes later Skyler came back to the car with 4 ticket in his hand. AHHH we were so excited!

Another Iowa football game and this time with our boys!

Wesley LOVED IT! He was up cheering and shouting pretty much the whole time. Our seats ended up being right below the lady that gave us the tickets. I hope it was fun for her to see how much fun the boys were having. We took her a thank you card a few days later to make sure she knew how grateful we were. 

The game was pretty slow. If I recall we were tied at half time, then down until the last quarter. With 7 minutes left in the game hundreds of people just got up and left. Iowa was losing and nothing seemed to be happening. All the sudden Iowa tied it up with 3 minutes left. The crowd started going crazy, which made Prest and Wes start getting excited too. Literally less than 1 minute left in the game we pulled ahead and WON IT! Great way to end the game.   

Our {creepy} little Herky.

Check out the tailgaters. This is no joke. Every large parking lot in like a 5mile radius from the stadium is full of tailgaters...in huge RV's. They get there at like 8am and seriously party all day. Before the game, then they go to the game, then they go back and hang out after the game. This town has some strong school spirit. It's probably like that in other towns, but we have heard Iowa is pretty crazy when it comes to their football team....which we agree. It's slightly awesome to actually experience it. 

We had such a fun time at the game and are very grateful for all of the incredibly nice people there are in this world. We were able to do something with our family we would have never been able to afford right now.