Thanksgiving 2012

This year we were with my side of the family for Thanksgiving and we had the opportunity to host the dinner at our house!  I was excited and nervous since Thanksgiving is a big deal--it's the only holiday that is completely centered around a meal!  And since I'm not a great cook I was worried, but thankfully everyone was willing to pitch in and bring food, so we only had to worry about mashed potatoes and gravy, and rolls.  Easy, peasy.  I found a super yummy mashed potato recipe (from "Pioneer Woman") and they were...super yummy!  We wanted to be sure we made enough, so we made a ton, and Bryan happily ate leftovers for days.

It was nice to have aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all fit into our kitchen/family room.  Our last house's kitchen was itty-bitty, so hosting would have been out of the question.  I'm so happy that we can accommodate more people now.

As for Black Friday shopping...we are done with it.  After Bryan's experience several years ago of camping out ALL NIGHT at Best Buy and STILL not getting what he wanted, the whole Black Friday magic is gone for him.  (And I have never really been a Black Friday shopper myself.)  That said, Cyber Monday shopping is AWESOME!  We are all in!  We spent a few hours last night on our tushes in front of the computer and got almost all the Christmas shopping done!  Now we just wait for the magical knock-knock-knock of the FedEx/UPS/USPS guy and voila--Christmas!  :)

Great-Grandma Terry

We attended the funeral of Bryan's Grandma, Mary Terry, yesterday.  She was just one month shy of celebrating her 90th birthday.  She had been married to her sweetheart for 71 years!  In the 10 years that I've known Bryan and his family, I've never really gotten to know great-Grandma Terry because she was a shy, quiet person who let her chatty husband do all the talking, and she was in the early stages of dementia/Alzheimer's disease.  At the funeral it was really interesting to hear stories about her as a young mother and wife.  The most repeated thing everyone kept saying about her was how service-oriented and kind she was to everyone around her.  She opened up her home to anyone who needed it, at any time, for any reason.  She was also notorious for sending the kids sneakily through the neighborhood with treats or dinners for neighbors who needed it--all anonymously.  What a great example.  I really enjoyed hearing more about her!

Happy Halloween! 2012

We had a really fun Halloween this year.  Bryan and I aren't usually costume people, but this year we were invited to a Halloween party at our friend Jennie's house, so we decided we better figure out something to dress up as.  Bryan remembered that he had a Native American costume that his talented-seamstress mom made for him way back when he was about 14-years-old for scouts.  So, we decided to be "Cowboy & Indian" and it turned out really cute.  I darkened my hair with some black colored-hairspray.  I've never seen me with dark hair before but I really liked it!  (It was not very fun to wash it out though...took about 4 shampooings and 2 serious conditionings!)

The next day, Bree wore Bryan's cowboy hat and loved running around the kitchen with it on.  Here are a few cutie pics of her...

Oh, I love this face!!!

Tuesday night was Jack-o-lantern time... here is Miles's:

 Here is Tess's: (she did fangs for a vampire, and drew red marker "blood" but you can't see it in this photo.)

 Here are the kiddos on Halloween night:  Tess was a vampire, Miles was Bumblebee Transformer, and Bree was a duck.  They all looked great!

We did the black hair for Tess too; I told Bryan to spray it a lot thinner than he did for me--it only took 2 good shampooings for her :)

Bree was just happy to ride around in the stroller.  She didn't really seem to "get" the Trick-or-Treating yet. Probably by next year she'll really be interested in knocking on doors, but I was happy to just keep her in the stroller this year with a candy now and then, not at every single door.  I did the candy buy-back again this year and paid the kids for however much candy they wanted to sell.  They both ended up selling about half of the candy to me, so I'm happy with that.  (Hopefully to prevent cavities!)