Thanksgiving

We hosted Thanksgiving (on Wednesday) this year for Brian's family since trying to travel long distances (and especially in holiday traffic!) with a 1 1/2 month old is not ideal.  We were very grateful his family was able to travel up our way.  We were in charge of the turkey, stuffing, gravy, and pumpkin pie.  I found a recipe for an herbed turkey and I'm not sure how everyone else liked it, but I thought it had a great flavor!  I used fresh rosemary sprigs from our herb garden along with 12 cloves of fresh garlic (as the recipe called for) in the cavity.  You then put butter just under the skin and a salt/herb mixture over the top.  It was delicious!  After dinner, we took turns playing the Xbox Kinect and catching up.  It was a great day!

We then celebrated Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday.  My sister-in-law's family joined us as well, so we had quite the crowd at my parents' house!  After eating lots of good food, we relaxed while socializing and watching football games.  We truly enjoyed both Thanksgiving celebrations and are so grateful for the family we have.  We are so blessed!!

On Friday, we took our Christmas card photo in the morning and then worked on putting the rest of the Christmas lights outside.  We also put away all of the Fall decorations and then started working on putting the indoor Christmas decorations out.

On Saturday, we went to see the movie, "The Muppets", which wasn't that great.  It was way above Hailey's head and really not that funny.  We were very disappointed.  We then did some shopping and went out to eat for dinner.


This morning we went to church and then after lunch headed over to see Santa at our town's "Santa's Castle".  And now that I'm finished with this entry, we can do our Advent celebration and light the first candle to celebrate the first Sunday in Advent!

Mommy's cute little turkey

The finished turkey!

Cousins: Jack, Clara, Hailey, Alex, Emma, and Stephen

Annual Thanksgiving photo: Brian's Family

Emily, David, Stephanie, and Natalie - the twins are now 9 months!

Hailey and Laura playing on the iPad.

Annual Thanksgiving photo: Lindsey's family

Austin, Sheila, and London (Austin's mom and sister)

Clara in her other Thanksgiving outfit

Hailey was entertaining Clara before we left for church this morning.  Clara loves watching Hailey!

Can't keep her eyes off her! :-)

Visiting Santa...Clara was a little unhappy in this picture.

I wish I was able to take a picture of the moment right before this when Hailey was looking up behind her with awe at Santa's face while he was looking at Clara.

 Clara is starting to "coo" and make noise now.  The sounds are so sweet.  Listen very closely at the beginning of this video.