::thanksgiving report::

We had a good thanksgiving day yesterday. We had been invited to have dinner with a doctor and her family from Kris's work. Unfortunately they had some sickness in the family and so that didn't work out. Hopefully they're doing better now!
Our friends Chad, Melissa and Grant were also going to go over there also. So we talked and decided we'd get together and just have our own little celebration.

I've cooked a turkey one time before, so I figured I could do it again. With some good advice from moms and dads and a yummy not frozen turkey from Trader Joe's we pulled it off.
The turkey turned out really good. My mom told me to use a turkey bag and it sure worked well. By the time Kris went to carve it the meat was basically falling off the bones. And despite a little scare about cooking the giblets in the turkey, all turned out ok. (we couldn't find the giblets, and then my dad told me they're up in the neck cavity.  By that point it had already been cooking for several hours.  I was just hoping they weren't in a plastic bag, or else the whole turkey would be ruined. Luckily they were in paper. Phew.)

We did about half the food and Chad and Melissa brought half the food. It works out well that way I think.

Poor Grant didn't get to eat anything for his first thanksgiving. It's hard to be little sometimes.
Speaking of first thanksgivings, remember this boy?

Luckily for him he was big enough to eat some of the goodies--he had a couple of months on Grant.

Anyway, back to today.
Here's Kris handing out some denture ice to everybody.

Have you heard of denture ice?

It's ice in the shape of dentures. Kind of gross huh? Pretty funny really. Kelly and Lechelle gave us the ice tray and Max loves it. It's pretty weird to see transparent dentures floating in your drink though.

We had a good meal. I didn't get very good pictures of everybody, but I did get pictures. It's so dark around here these days.

Kris got a whole bunch of Stewarts sodas for us to drink. Mmmm they're good.





Max was wearing Kris's scrub top before dinner. He was pretending to be Dr. Max. This was inspired by Kris getting called into the hospital an hour before dinner. It's nice to be on call...
Anyway, Max wore the scrub top all through dinner, and it made for a wonderful bib. We may start using scrub tops for every meal.

Max, of course, was way too hyped up to actually eat his meal. He was busy talking and giggling and fooling around. So as usual he ended up at the table trying to eat long after everybody else had left. It was so funny--I went in there and there he was very carefully cutting slices off his piece of cranberry sauce with his knife and fork. It was surprisingly civilized of him. And cute of course.

He didn't get all his food finished, but he did end up eating at least some of it. It was quite the effort to get that much done.

After dinner we cleaned up, then we watched some football of course. Then as per Max's request we watched Wall E. This was thanks to Grandma Kathy who had sent it to Max as a thanksgiving gift the day before. It was fun. Then we ate some delicious pumpkin and pecan pie. I was really full after all that.

Then Max held Grant on his lap for a while, which was hilarous.

Grant loves Max, and Max loves Grant. They're good buddies.


And then we called it a day. A good day.

We're thankful for good friends, food, family and our religion. We feel so lucky and blessed this thanksgiving.  Here's hoping everybody else had a great day too.

::happy thanksgiving::

In honor of Thanksgiving today, I'm going to show you some pictures from the "Harvest Feast" at Max's school earlier this week.

It's basically a Thanksgiving party that's held the day before thanksgiving vacation.  But there are a lot of different people here in the city, and nobody wants to offend, so Harvest Feast it is!

The kids and teachers started making food for the feast at the beginning of November, and I think they made at least one different thing every week.

When I arrived at the school all the kids were outside playing on the playground. They were all being fire fighters. Max was up high on one of the slide platforms yelling, "FIRE!! FIRE!!"

The other kids came running and put his fire out. It was pretty cute.

The menu for the feast was pretty extensive:

Pretty impressive, huh?


Here's the butter and pickles. Max's teacher said that Max's class is the first class in 13 years that actually made the butter all by themselves. They made it by putting cream in a jar and shaking it. They took turns all through the day I guess. How cute!

Max was especially proud of the pickles. The kids cut up the cucumbers with those little pumpkin carving knives that aren't very sharp. I was told Max ate at least as many pieces of cucumber as he put into the jar.
The pickles turned out tasting pretty good!



Here's Max getting served some oatmeal bread. I was the helping parent the day they started working on the bread. They talked about yeast and kneading and all sorts of things. It was pretty fun.

Here we have applesauce and apple crisp.

Max had about 17 servings of apple sauce.


My plate! I especially liked the corn bread and the pumpkin bread.


The kids had decorated art for each table. I don't know if this is Max's or not, but it could be. He didn't know when I asked him. He said "Maybe I drew that." Silly.

It was so fun to get to see what the kids had been working on. We're thankful to have such a fun school here that Max loves. It's helped us all to feel more at home.

We're lucky.

::november::

I can't believe it's already November. Seems like it was just yesterday we were hanging out at the beach.
I can't believe that Murphy has already served almost a quarter of his mission. Wow.

We found out a couple of days ago that our poor red Land Rover didn't make it through the accident. The insurance company declared it a total loss. It looked like there wasn't really that much damage in the pictures, but there was some underlying non-obvious stuff that wasn't in good shape. And the cost of Rover repairs is high, and since our "value" was relatively low because of tons of miles and the age of the car it was a lost cause.

So we're car shopping. Against our wills. We loved that car and we didn't want to have to get rid of it. But oh well. C'est la vie, right? What happens happens, and at least we were ok. That's the important stuff.

The bummer is in all this is that we only have our rental car for a very limited period of time--through this weekend. So our car shopping is very rushed. But hopefully we can find something that works, and not completely stress ourselves out in the process.

In other news, we now have a:

not too far from our house. Can you read that? If not it says Trader Joe's. For those of you that don't know, Trader Joe's is a well priced grocery store with a lot of healthy food. Max likes it. We've been a couple of times and gotten some yummy frozen dinners that were pretty easy to cook up.
Do you see the little sad faces there in the drawing? Those are there to represent how Max acted at Trader Joe's today. Yeah, he was bad. Bad enough that he knew he was being bad. Anyway, I thought those little sad faces were pretty funny. He copied the letters from the bag in the car. He's getting really good at writing his letters.

And to finish off tonight, I have a little teaser. Melissa and I took the boys out on a walk yesterday and parked them in somebody's leaves to take some fall pictures. They turned out awesome.
Like this:

and this:

and this:

I have lots of other good ones. Tons. I'll show you all some later. But that's all for now.
Happy thursday!

::halloween par-tay::

We hosted a little halloween party for all of the residents and their families. About half of us ended up coming--lots of people were out of town and such. But we had such a great time!

I started out with some fun decorations.

These bats turned out looking really fun.

Some party favors for the kids.

I made this ghost with my mom a long time ago. It's enjoying the blacklight we put up in our little mudroom/front hall area.

I made a big batch of the delicious Hendricks chocolate chip cookies--with peanut butter chips as well. Mmmm they were good.
The highlight of the treats though was Erica's homemade oreos. Wow were they good.

And easy to make too. So thanks for the recipe Erica!


Our first guests were Joanne and her girls Claire and Francie. Claire was a very cute ghost. I think Francie won the best costume award for the night. She was a garden gnome and it was a perfect costume for her. So cute.

Somehow I didn't get an official photo of Joanne, but she was a pirate. And looked pretty swashbuckling too.


Then came Brian. Looking awesomely like Dwight Schrute. I especially like the nunchucks. And all the gear hanging off his belt.


Then came the Boboias. Very excellent costumes. Bonnie was a very cute Bee, little Carson was an octopus, Vincent was an organic banana and Dan took the cake as Richard Simmons.


Then came Chad, Melissa and Grant. Melissa was a soccer player (which evidently is her classic costume), Chad was a referee, and Grant was a baby giraffe. A really cute one.
Max was a giraffe too. So we tried to get a picture of the baby giraffe and big giraffe together. Things were just a little too exciting though and all the kids were running all over the place.

Plus I couldn't really get back far enough to get everybody in the picture. And extra parts of people kept getting in the way.

For a second Grant forgot he was supposed to be a giraffe and thought he was a seal.

This one is really cute of Grant.

And here's the best I could do.
But much later we caught them both hanging out on the bed together.

They're buddies.

We ate and hung out.
Francie thought for a bit she was Santa Claus, and wanted all the babies in her lap. The funny thing is that the babies weren't that much smaller than her.


The kids had some fun in the blacklight. It made the fun vampire teeth from the favor bags glow very nicely. Max loved those teeth. He loved being a rabid giraffe.

Yikes!

I didn't get a good picture of me, but I was some sort of princess--like maybe an elf princess or something cool. Kris was a wizard. A cute one.

Here we are watching the movie we made especially for the party. It's a Max halloween movie. I'm going to post it here later. It was fun to make and Max loved showing it to everybody.


We ended the night with a little guitar hero. Some of those at the party hadn't ever gotten the chance to enjoy it before.

But it made the kids insane and so we stopped and everybody went home.
It was a great party and we were glad everybody could come, and that their costumes were so awesome. Yay for Halloween.

.::Kris Graduated::.

I know youguys probably thought he didn't actually graduate because it's taken me so long to post about it, but the man did wear the gown and walk across the stage. And we were SO proud!
In fact, I really wish I had the cable to download video from my camera here in UT, because then I could show you how loudly Max was screaming for his daddy when his name was called. It was really cute.

Here he is just before graduation, in the room where they were all mingling and waiting. The light was obviously not so good, but oh well.

Does he look ready to graduate or what?

Here's Kris and one of his best friends from school, Jeff.

We had great seats during the ceremony and could see Kris right where he was sitting. They didn't start out with their extra robes on, they had to carry them up to the stage where one of the professors placed them over their heads. It was interesting. At mine we just wore ours. I guess these dentists think they're a little different or something... :)

Coming down the steps...a graduated man. Please note his shiny sneakers. We had to go buy new ones just before the ceremony because we had accidentally packed all his shoes except a pair of very casual sandals. At least he got some cool new shoes out of it!
At the end of the ceremony the audience was all supposed to wait for the graduates to leave the hall (oh, I mean the gym. We're pretending it's some sort of hall.) But Kris motioned to me that he wanted Max to come with him. So I sent him running over there. He was thrilled to parade out with his daddy. How special!
I don't know if you can see much of that in this picture, but at least now you know what it's supposed to be.

It was great. Actually graduating actually made the last four years almost worth it!! Just kidding, now that it's over I can say it was totally worth it. I'm just so proud of Kris for finishing it all, it was quite the big job and VERY stressful. Yay for being finished. It's an excellent feeling.