Welcome December!

This year seems to be passing us by at amazing speed, huh??  I haven't been updating my blog much lately but I have a good reason, I promise.  I've just been living life!  We had a wonderful family Thanksgiving at our house, with Mama, Daddy, Ami, Brian, Miss Dale, Kyrie and Alita joining us, Juan, Rhiana, Elizabeth, Emma and Baby Charlotte for turkey, dressing and all the trimmings.  Ami made Mama's famous dressing this year and it was absolutely delicious!!  Larry and I roasted the turkey again in our Oster roaster and it turned out just as juicy and perfect as last year.  Again, don't follow the instructions that come with the roaster.  Get your meat thermometer out and check that bird!  I baked a ham, too, and made Brussels sprouts, sweet potato casserole and a butternut squash risotto.  I took the easy way out with the pecan pie that Larry wanted and I got Wilson's Bakery here in town to make it.  I just couldn't beat their $9.99 price, not even with my Kroger Plus card.  :)  The pecans alone would have been nearly that.  So I had them make that and a brownie pecan pie and both were, well, Wilson's usual stupid crazy amazing good.

We had a group picture made outside with our Tom the Turkey inflatable that we picked up at a yard sale for $7 last summer.  It turned out great.  Lizzy is doing bunny ears over Emma's head and that's hilarious. 

I had the best time with Baby Charlie!  I had a hard time putting her down and then letting her stay down.  She's just the sweetest little thing and I just wanted to gobble her right on up.

I wanted to have a Peanuts-themed Thanksgiving for the girls so I found some really cute plates and napkins and cups and tablecloths a couple of months ago and I also found some Snoopy Thanksgiving stickers on eBay for everybody to wear.  Larry and I found a singing, dancing Snoopy wearing a Pilgrim hat out in our travels somewhere and I bought a little plush Snoopy for each of the girls.  I have some really wonderful childhood memories of the three big holidays and I want that for them, too.



Juan and I took Lizzy and Emma to see the new Peanuts movie Thanksgiving night and that was a lot of fun, too.  It is such a cute movie and I've said this at least a dozen times since Larry and I went to see it, I am SO amazed at the animation in that movie!  They sure don't make Charlie Brown like they used to.  Larry's been collecting the McDonald's Peanuts Happy Meal toys for me, too.  We've got 10 of the 12.  Two to go!  Fifi is my favorite.  :)

I had to get new brakes for my car on Friday (joy joy) and after the girls and I decorated our gingerbread house and my car was done, all of us went and had the Black Friday Family Experience.  Now that we've done that, we don't have to do it anymore.  I hope.  I hate Black Friday.  It really wasn't bad, though.  We just went to Target and Hobby Lobby.  The girls got a toy and I got some ideas for Christmas.

Friday night, Larry and I wanted to give Rhiana and Juan a little break and a chance to get a good night's sleep so we kept Charlie in our room and she did so good!  She slept right through her 10:00 feeding and I let her so she woke up around 2:00, I changed her britches, gave her a bottle and she went right back to sleep and slept the rest of the night, until 7:00!  Such a good baby!

We watched movies and ordered pizza Saturday afternoon and then they got packed up to go home.  We so enjoyed having them and are looking forward to Christmas Eve at their house!

Larry and I have managed so far to get the Christmas stuff down from the attic and into the garage.  I've put up two garlands, spread a tablecloth and we put up a little tree on the front porch tonight.  We have just been so tired this week!  Hopefully this weekend, we'll get a tree and get some lights up zzzzzz snork.

Welcome, December, with your dreams and secrets and whispers and surprises and 77-degree self.

Independence Day Weekend

We were so happy to have Juan, Rhiana, Elizabeth and Emma with us for July 4th!  They came down yesterday after stopping by the hospital to see Charlie, who is doing soooo good!  She's breathing on her own and off the nasal cannula so she celebrated her very own Independence Day!  Yay, Charlie!!  She's going to start trying to nurse tomorrow and we're very excited about that.

Since July 1st was Emma's birthday and she wanted a Mickey Mouse party, Larry and I threw her a Mickey Mouse luau!  I had so much fun last week putting together decorations and making plans and everything turned out so cute!!

I didn't make the cake.  Publix made the cake.  :)  This is the only Mickey Mouse cake that they have permission to make and this is where I got the luau idea.  I was skeptical at first but I was able to find so many cute things that I was really, really happy with it and I really, really got into it, too!

I got this idea for the punch on Pinterest.  It was soooooo adorable and the punch was awesome.  It's Blue Hawaiian punch and lemonade.  That's it.  Equal parts.  Awesome.

I love the beach, I love pink flamingos so I was ALLLLLL over this tropical, beachy luau theme!!  Larry and I decorated the backyard with flamingos, a toucan, fishies, hibiscus garland, paper lanterns, beach balls, a hula girl, two coconut monkeys and we even got a pineapple and two coconuts to put on the table.  We had Mickey Mouse ears hats, noisemakers and we all had leis to wear.

It poured down rain most of the day yesterday but that didn't stop Larry from grilling those hamburgers!

And here's our sweet Emma.  She was so excited about her Mickey party and that made all the running around, planning and scheming that I had to do last week so very worth it.  Just look at that face.

Since real fireworks became legal in Georgia July 1st, we had an incredible show in our neighborhood once the sun went down.  We bought some sparklers and things to do with the girls and they just had the best time lighting those with PawPaw.
 

Today, our sweet neighbor, Randy, let us borrow his pool and really all it did for ME was convince me that we have to have a pool.  It was just too much fun!  Look at Larry jumping off the diving board!

 

We had the juiciest, sweetest watermelon and pineapple today.  The coconuts were a little past their prime but that pineapple mmmmmmore than made up for it.  Here's Larry teaching Elizabeth how to cut watermelon with a machete.

 
I made bacon-wrapped Oreos last night and chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast this morning.  We had birthday cake, ice cream, hamburgers, a summer luau, some pool time, awesome fireworks, sweet juicy summer fruit, the girls picked a cucumber and a bell pepper from our garden and our Charlie Girl is getting stronger every day. 

We are so blessed.

Lots to be thankful for

We had the most wonderful of Thanksgivings.  Larry and I have SO much to be thankful for.  This was our first Thanksgiving together, in our new home, and our families were coming to celebrate with us and help us give thanks for this amazing, incredible year we have had. 

This Thanksgiving was also the first time I had ever roasted a turkey.  Crazy, I know.  Forty-seven years old, never cooked a turkey.  I've just never had to.  Mama always does the turkey and the dressing.  This year, though, since we were hosting dinner in our new house, Larry and I decided we'd roast the turkey.  We were excited to try out our new roasting oven so we got up at 5:30 and rubbed that turkey down with butter and seasoned him up good and I stuffed bunches of rosemary, thyme and sage in the cavity.  That was the extent of my "stuffing" that turkey.  It's dressing down here in the south and we make a pan of it and serve it beside the turkey.  It gets nowhere near, ahem, that area.  It's okay if you do the stuffing thang, we just don't.  Okay, so we get that sucker all ready and put him in the roaster and start the clock.  The instructions say for a boy this big (22.1 pounds!), he is to cook at 350 degrees for 4 1/2 hours.  Well, I'll just tell y'all it's a good thing I watched his temperature like a crazy woman with a pointy meat thermometer because he was DONE in just under three and a half hours.  We started him out breast down and after three hours, that breast was 165 degrees.  We took him out, flipped him over onto a roasting pan and put him in the regular oven to brown another half hour.  He was completely done and registering 175 by that time.  We could have easily taken him out of the roaster at 2 hours and browned for 30-45 minutes.  Just giving y'all a head's up in case you ever want to buy/use an Oster roaster oven.  The instructions are wrong.  We'd a'been eating sawdust and dressing if we had followed those instructions. 

He was beautiful!!  Brown, juicy and delicious.  Not one place on him was dry.  Here's Larry carving him up!

We also cooked a 12-pound ham and I added a brown sugar glaze once it was done.  It was most yummy!!

Mama made this adorable cake (red velvet, my favorite!) for us.  

 Here are me and my mommy right here!

I used as many of my vintage dishes to serve in as I could.  This one is from a set of three Glasbake dishes that Rhiana and Juan got for me at an estate sale in Atlanta last weekend!  I'd seen the sale advertised online and Larry and I just couldn't go.  We were both nursing some ailments, Larry's back and my neck. So we asked them to go and I said to just get me one piece if they were even still there.  Not only were the pieces all still there but they got me all three pieces, plus a bunch of ramekins and soup bowls with lids, too! 

I steamed some fresh asparagus with lemon butter and I thought they were just perfect for that Green Floral Daisy dish!

We had a feast!  Sweet potato souffle, green bean casserole, bacon-wrapped green beans, zipper peas, homemade mac and cheese, roasted potatoes, sweet peas, those delicious Mennonite dinner rolls and Mama made about a dozen sweet potato and pumpkin pies.  I know I'm forgetting something!  Feast, I tell ya!

Juan, Rhiana and the girls stayed with us until this afternoon and we so enjoyed having them.  We had so much fun!  We planned a few activities to do with the girls and we had a great time making memories with them.  We may have even started a few traditions!

We made a gingerbread house!

And Emma and I drew pictures with sidewalk chalk...

While Paw Paw and Elizabeth made a birdhouse.

And Paw Paw showed both girls how to build a cotton ball snowman!

We watched Fried Green Tomatoes, Frosty The Snowman, Christmas Vacation and Forrest Gump and Juan and Larry even ventured out for a quick trip to Walmart last night. 

We had such a great time.  We talked and we laughed and we played and we ate and we laughed some more.  

Yep.  Lots to be thankful for this year.