Rebecca – Page 125 – Andelin Adventures

Happy Thanksgiving

This year since Jenny and her family were in town, Thanksgiving was at our house. 🙂 I spent the morning making the last of 4 pies (made the other 3 last night), and making up the stuffing to stuff the 22 lb turkey and get it in the oven. Once the turkey was in the oven Kyle and I made up the veggie platter (carrot sticks, celery sticks, radishes, snap peas, red olives, mini dill pickles and ranch dip) and the other munchy platter (beef sausage log chunks, cheese cubes, wheat thin and triscut crackers, and a cheese ball). We also had cranberry pumpkin bread ready for an appetizer. Then I got to relax until about 2 in the afternoon, at which time I had to get up and start the bread machine on making rolls. Kyle made the mashed potatoes and the turkey was ready WAY earlier than anticipated. According to my cookbook, since the turkey was 22 lbs, and stuffed it was probably 23 lbs which meant that the turkey was supposed to be done some time between 4 and 4:30. It was WAY done at 3! I put the meat thermometer into the breast and the temperature shot right up to 180 degrees (which according to the chart on the thermometer sleeve, that is DONE for poultry).

Dad sent up See’s chocolate turkeys and the kids got to eat those after the turkey was in the oven and the excitement of getting dinner under way, was over.

Karen, Laurel & her family came over about 4:00, so I carved the turkey and we got everything set up to eat. The menu consisted of the turkey, apple rice stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes. Karen made a salad, and brought a couple of cans of cranberry sauce and olives. Laurel brought mashed yams, corn bread muffins, and broccoli. We also had my home canned plums, spiced peaches, and spiced apple rings and we had rolls so we could also have some of my home canned jams. 🙂 For drink we had a sherbet mixed with lemon lime soda, punch which was very yummy. The first batch we used pineapple sherbet, and the second batch we used mango sherbet. Debby and Jeff came over late since she had to work today and they just came out after she got off work. There was still plenty of food left though so they got to have their fill.

After dinner was over, we just hung out for a bit. And we had a bit of an incident. Jenny was playing with Dinah. Jenny had tucked one of Dinah’s kitty stuffed animals in her shirt and was crawling around on the floor pretending to look for it. Dinah knew where it was and was trying to get in front of her to pull it out of her shirt. At some point Dinah tripped over something and fell, but her face hit the bucket that we use to store the kids train toys. I have no idea what the bucket was doing in the living room instead of being in the boys room where it belongs, but when her face hit the bucket it snapped the rim off and that created a sharp edge which left Dinah with a bit of a scraped cheek and a long cut over her eye. 🙁

I got up to clean up the kitchen a bit and put away most of the leftover food. Then it was time to get out the pies. I made a blackberry pie, a peach pie, an eggnog pie, and a pumpkin streusel pie, and Laurel brought a sweet potato pie.

After pie we hung out a bit more. Laurel told some jokes. Then we called it a night. All in all it was a good thanksgiving, and I’m very grateful that I was on top of things enough that I wasn’t on my feet ALL day, that was very nice. I’m glad that everyone could come and that everyone seemed to enjoy the food.

Cousins are HERE!

Jenny, her family and Tiffany were planning on driving up on Monday to visit, but they had to postpone and drive up Tuesday instead. Tuesday there were warnings everywhere about a huge arctic blizzard that was headed our way and should hit about 6pm Tuesday evening and work it’s way down through the entire state of Utah. So I called Jenny to warn her about it, and told them to drive carefully and keep me posted on where they are, and that I would tell them when the storm hit my area. Kyle emailed his second job about working from home Tuesday night so there would be no chance of him getting stuck somewhere in the storm. (February 13 2008, there was a really bad storm and Kyle hadn’t left work early so it took him EIGHT HOURS to drive home that night, normally it’s just a 45-60 minute drive.) They told him that he couldn’t work from home for security reasons, but that they would allow him to have the night off without any negative attendance penalties kicking in. YAY! So I only had to worry about Jenny and her family being on the road.

Once they got into Utah they started texting us to let us know where they were, and what the weather conditions on the road were and they kept asking what the weather was like where we are. I would look out the window and I never saw any snow falling. It was really windy, and that made it really cold, but I didn’t see the snow on the lawn getting higher and the only snow I saw flying around in the sky was the stuff that was blowing off our roofs, definitely not a blizzard amount of snow. The next morning there still wasn’t much new snow on the ground, so I don’t know why the media made such a HUGE deal about this massive storm that was heading our way. At least Kyle got the night off out of it. 🙂

Most of that snow was there before the ‘storm’. The kids really had a fun time playing in it though.

Today Debby came over too, to visit with everybody. We hung out for awhile then Jenny, Debby, Tiffany and I went to do some minor shopping. Jenny needed to pick up a few things, and I needed to go get some new decoration for our new tree. So we left Tom with the 7 kids and we took off for a bit. We were only gone for a couple of hours then we came back to the house and I got some dinner on the table. Then Tom and Jeff left to go on a bit of a trip to Wyoming. And us girls just hung out with the kids for awhile before getting them into bed. Jenny took lots of cute pictures of the kids since they were so happy to be with their cousins and have everybody else here too.

Dinah found Debby’s big fuzzy boots and was clomping around the house in them for a bit.

Aw, so cute! Like I said they were SO happy to be able to spend some time together. I love Debby’s crazy over excited smile in the background too. 🙂

All seven of my parent’s grandchildren.

After Dinah tired of playing with Debby’s boots she found Jenny’s sunglasses and decided to wear those for awhile. She’s just so cute. 🙂

Then we put the kids to bed and I went to work making pies!

6 Years

Six years ago we moved into our house. It was the first house on our street, and since we moved in in November the builder had to wait until spring to send the landscaper over to finish our front yard. So our house was in the middle of a giant mud pit for that first winter. 🙂

The builder had decided to build two spec homes on either side of our home. They didn’t have buyers for awhile.

Here I am unpacking some clothes for Tyra. 🙂

Halloween 2010

We did Halloween early this year. The kids got to dress up yesterday for their parade and parties at school. I didn’t get very good pictures of them in the parade. Ethan was jumping up and down so the picture I got of him is extremely blurry. And by the time Tyra’s class came around there were a lot more people in front of me and I finally managed to get a picture of her as she was walking away from me. So the picture is of her back.

Chloe woke up barfy yesterday as well. She couldn’t even keep water down all morning. And she kept falling asleep in odd places all over the house. She would just seem to have disappeared and I would go to see what she was getting into and I would find her someplace random just sleeping on the floor. Once I found her asleep on the floor right in front of the garage door, then another time I found her asleep on the kitchen floor right in front of the sink.

She just really was not feeling well dang it.

After school I picked Ethan and Tyra up instead of waiting for them to walk home, then we headed to Kyle’s work for trick or treating.

Dinah was so excited, and ate a lot of candy WHILE still collecting. She also had great fun pointing out every other witch costume that she saw there.

The kids went from cubicle to cubicle collecting candy. Most of the desks that had candy available had a flier with a ghost on it posted outside their cubicle so the kids could see where there was candy. I must say trick or treating like this has really spoiled us. They get a lot of candy fast, and it’s indoors where it’s warm and dry. 🙂

Chloe stopped throwing up around lunch time so I took her in for a bit of the trick or treating. But since she hadn’t had ANYTHING to eat all day for fear that she would throw up again, she kept trying to eat the candy at every desk. Every time we put a new candy in her bucket she would reach down and try to get it out to eat, poor thing.

Since Halloween landed on a Sunday this year, our neighborhood did trick or treating today. We usually order pizza as our Halloween dinner tradition, and the only place close enough to deliver pizza to our house is REALLY expensive. So this year Kyle went out to pick up pizza from somewhere else. When he got home we ate, well Kyle and I ate, the kids were just too excited to get out of the house to bother eating anything. We helped the kids get their pumpkins ready.

Then Kyle took the kids trick or treating while I stayed home to pass out candy and clean up after dinner. They just did our street before coming back to make a potty stop, and at that point Kyle dropped Chloe off and just took the others back out. Chloe was not very happy at being left behind. She ran to the door to watch everyone else go, and then every time some one came to the door she ran ahead of me to go help pass out candy.

Thankfully Chloe was feeling much better today than she was yesterday. 🙂

PS: There are more pictures in the photo gallery.

The Trying on of Costumes

I am really late in getting out the bucket of costumes this year. Gratefully everyone found something that fit, which means I don’t need to go buy any costumes this year. However I probably won’t be so lucky next year.

Dinah’s a cute little witch, and Jeremy is Snoopy for the third and last year.

Chloe the care bear.

All the munchkins.

Isn’t she just so cute?