Tuesday, November 30, 2010

November

November has been a busy month.
I've got my Etsy shop open and running finally. And, I've made my first sale! Yay! I'm excited. Now I just need to finish up the stuff and send it out.
We had our first Thanksgiving just as our family. We've traveled or hosted people for every other thanksgiving since we've been married. It was kind of nice to be just us. It was a lot less stressful. We smoked a turkey breast which was delicious. I think it is almost gone already. We made "potatoes jubilee"- mashed gold, white, and sweet potatoes with turnips and garlic. They were so yummy. We didn't even want to eat them with gravy. They were just perfect. It was the best combination of potatoes and were creamy and just yum. We also made stuffing from scratch and it was actually very good. I've always failed at homemade stuffing. But this year it turned out good. Apparently, the secret to homemade stuffing tasting like the box stuff is sage. Lots and lots of sage. We also made cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, pineapple pie, potato rolls and roast duck. The duck didn't turn out too great. It was over cooked. It was my first time trying that. We wanted to have something different, but that wasn't really it. The best part of Thanksgiving was the kids slept through the meal. Alann and I go to sit and eat and enjoy ourselves, and the kids woke up about 20 minutes later. They took long naps that day. So then they ate. Claire seemed to enjoy the meal. I gave Alex some of the potatoes, but he was not into it.

Alex did NOT appreciate the potatoes.






Over the weekend, we also put up a few Christmas decorations. We have Alann's mini fiber optic tree in the living room. Claire asks me to turn it on, then turns the lights off and claps. "yay!" She also enjoys a little tree we have with a train that runs around and through it. It plays music and lights up and the train goes around. She loves to watch it. She has figured out the button though, so thank heavens it also has a switch for permanent off. We also have some singing bears that she wants to carry around with her. We pulled out a Fisher Price Nativity Set (read: plastic!) that Grandma and Grandpa bought us last year. They had one too last year, and she loved playing with it when we were visiting last year. When we got ours out, she was so excited. She "helped" Daddy unpack it (i.e. pulled each piece out and handed it to him to take the plastic off, faster than he could actually remove the plastic). Then she played with it and threw the pieces around. We are hoping to put a big tree in the formal dining room for presents. We may need to take down the table, but that won't be a big deal since we don't eat there usually anyway. I'm hoping she won't play with it too much, but we will put the unbreakable ornaments at the bottom. I'm also working on a surprise for the kids and Alann. I'll post about it when I finish. I have a few more things left to do, but I hope they love it.

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