Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was spent in OK this year with my family this year.  T and I drove down there the first part of the week and while T met with clients and worked the first half of the week I spent time with friends and took my sweet grandparents to breakfast.  The rest of the week was spent cooking and hanging with my family, going on walks, and T played like 42 holes of golf while we were there.  

 

Actual Thanksgiving day we celebrated at my mom and stepdad's house with 20 family members.  My mom and I had spent the day before baking pies and prepping all the side dishes so things would go smoothly on actual Thanksgiving day and so things would be low stress.  The meal was yummy and the company was great!   These pictures are of my and my sister K and of me and T.  I think these are the first pictures we have taken with the bump (which happened to be acceptionally large with all the rich food--its now back to its "normal size" about half that!)

The day after Thanksgiving was mom and daughter day for my mom and I so we decided that we would go and look at baby stuff together.  Since we live so far appart my mom is missing out on some of these mom/daughter moments during the pregnancy and really, I miss having my mom around to ask questions and just talk to.  We went to a big baby super store to look at all the gear, because I don't have a clue.  It was fun!  Even when we couldn't figure out how to colapse strollers (eek!).  We then went and got smoothies at my favorite place Jamba Juice (they don't have them in Indiana--boo!) and then decided that we had had enough baby shopping and went to Macy's to poke around.  It was soooo fun!  Then we got mexican take out and met the family at home for a laid back meal of fajitas (that we didn't have to cook!). And my mom and sister got to feel the baby kick while we were there--cool huh?

On the whole it was a relaxing and great holiday week!

A Little Something

So I don't normally talk about my work here on the ol blog.  I like that the blog is alot about my life outside of work simply because my work is very involved and very public.  But I was published in an online publication for young women in my field and thought it was blog worthy information.

Here's the link if you want to read:

http://www.youngclergywomen.org/the_young_clergy_women_pr/2010/11/who-are-we-going-to-be.html#continue

If not, have a wonderful Thursday! 

Halloween

I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!  We had a wonderful evening.  We took a long walk late in the afternoon, then came home and make hot tea and cider, grab our Halloween candy and a book and sat on the front porch until the trick-or-treaters came along.  It was fun too because all of our neighbors did the same thing and we have some cool neighbors.  So we all hung out and talked and oohed and awwwed over the cute little kiddos in thier costumes.

Once it got dark and the trick-or-treating crowd transitioned into teens and adults in street clothes carrying trash sacks, we packed it up and brought our pumpkins inside to carve.  One of the things I will never understand about this holiday is how absurd it looks from a food stand point.  We Americans, set perfectly good food out on our front porches to rot, which encouraging our kids to go door to door collecting items that are basically chemicals and sugar.  Baffles me, but anyhow.  My favorite part of Halloween is gutting all of our pumpkins and pulling the seeds out and roasting them.  Its such a yummy treat we only get once a year!  One year, we went a got a dozen of left over pumpkins the church was just going to toss in the dumpster after the Pumpkin Patch and gutted every single one for the seeds!  This year we just had the ones from our front steps though so we took them into to carve while we watched the Wizard of Oz. 

After we had gutted and carved our largest pumpkins, I had an idea.  I asked T if we could put Ranger in a pumpkin.  T was pretty apprehensive at first and worried Ranger would be mad, but after a little coaxing, he agreed.*  Ranger was actually pretty non-challant about the whole thing.  He just sort of hung out until we were done snapping pics.  And the only thing that got messy were his paws.

Oh, and if you are interested in how we roast our seeds here's the basic idea:

Pumpkins seeds cleaned and patted dry

Melted butter (just enough to coat the seeds very lighly)

Wostishire Sauce (same as butter--just enough to lightly coat)

Preheat oven to 350 lay seeds out in a roasting pan and place in oven.  Roast for about 20 minutes, checking every 10 minutes and turning and moving with a spatula, or until golden brown.

Lay on a towel to cool and salt to preference. 

On the whole it was a great Halloween!  How was your Halloween?

*Basically by "a little bit of coaxing" I explained to T that it was either Ranger this year or the baby the next, but that I needed to get putting the dog and or baby in a carved out fruit or veggitable out of my system after seeing this YouTube video. Hehe!

All Bets Are Off

Actually all bets are not off...they are lost.  As you already know, our beloved Texas Rangers lost to the San Francisco Giants in the World series earlier this week.   We were pretty bummed around our house.

T watched the final game in the series with some friends at thier house.  I had already gone to bed when he got home and when I woke up I had this vague recollection of him telling me something about the baby before he went to sleep.  

Later that next day I checked facebook and was reminded suddenly of what T told me the night before.

Apparently he has already gotten started on using the baby as a betting tool.  Sheesh!  You see, T's cousin J lives in San Fran and is due with a little one of her own about two weeks or so before us.  Apparently in all thier trash talking via texts, they agreed that the person who's team lost the World Series would have to dress their baby in the winning team's onesie.  

So I hope my little one looks good in orange and black...