Our Feast

Sage & Dijon Mustard Crusted Turkey Breast, with a nice Shiraz to compliment it, fresh steamed green beans, creamy mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy followed by chocolate pie.

It was a nice and peaceful Thanksgiving for us. We like to have it at our home, just the four of us. The kids were loaded with cute kid-isms today:

My son:

"I'm thankful for a cute little lovely Mommy."

When told that maybe Sam (the girl who lives with us) had things to do with her own family today he responded, in all seriousness, "yeah, like maybe they have to build a dog house... or drinking coffee on their porch or something."

"What's for lunch Mom?" I answer, "Turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes, gravy..." He interrupts with a grin "Crazy. Crazy is not a food Mom. You can't eat crazy!" I explain "No, I said GRAVY." "Oh" he replies looking embarrassed.

My daughter:

"We're having chocolate pie? Is there chocolate in chocolate pie?" With wide and excited eyes. ("Yes" I answer her.) "Oh! I love chocolate! It's my favorite."

"Oh they're mashed (potatoes) like Daddy's show!" (MASH)

I had said "Get out of my hair!" while trying to cook and as they walked away she looked at her brother and said "What's, 'get out of my hair' mean?" And he said, "It means you were being annoying."

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I swear, it was like they took a funny pill!

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Little rascals in my kitchen licking mashed potatoes off the mixer!

And then, as is our custom, we put up our tree and decorated it.

Green shatter proof ornaments for the boy and purple for the yiddle girl.

What's Thanksgiving?

My cute little boy explaining Thanksgiving... (the extra clicking noise you hear is explained in the 2nd video! :)

This was entertaining us tonight.

Have a great and thankful day everyone!

(Our pilgrim)

First Decent Snow Fall

Gettin' Mommy!
The Daddy Snow Monster

Protest Wishing He Were Outside

Getting Brother

Getting Sister

Artistic Venting, Gigs, & The In-Laws

I've been dealing with a lot of things internally lately... deep places in my heart that I'm not sure what to do with... and I've been frustrated. So usually I vent my frustration artistically late at night. It helps me to process and relax. So here's what I did for the last two nights as my family slumbered. Think, paint, pray. Think, paint, pray...

Our stairwell before and after. (I'm not sure why the entire inside of this house is painted off-white with white trim - makes me shutter just to think about...

Rob's gotten use to waking up to new pieces of art! :) He knows I'm working something through my system.

I like it. Did it with masking tape... My son (who is also creative) saw it this morning and said "It's awesome, Mom!" Blue's my favorite color so that's a bonus too.

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In other news: It's only about 2 and a half weeks until Simply Still's first show (The singing group made up of my cousin Sara and I). We recently took a bunch of photos for posters:

We have some posters ordered to hang up for the various shows. (We have 4 shows booked for Dec. Pretty good for our first attempt at getting places to play.) Our first show is Nov. 30th at the Warren Center Community Building - I'm both nervous and excited. I'll let you know how it goes!

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And lastly, we got together with my hubby's immediate family Saturday and it was really great to see everyone. It's so rare to have all of his sisters in town at one time.

Roxy (one of Rob's three sisters) and Janna (our niece) have this strange thing they've always done - they sit and talk and "tickle" each other's arm. I guess Rob's Mom used to do that to both of them as children to comfort and cuddle them and they have continued the tradition. We all like to pick on them about it however! :)

At one point Grandpa Bob (Rob's dad) loaded up the four youngest grandchildren and took them all with him to run some errands. I asked him before they left if he was SURE he wanted to take them all and his answer was "No child left behind". He's a character :)

When they got home he told me they did fine but all cried at some point of the hour long excursion. (Sounds about right!) They of-course stopped for candy. Here they are chowin' down on their loot:

And I'll leave you with a pretty picture of the moon. My son discovered it's beauty and wanted Mommy to take a picture. (Of-course it was 1000x more beautiful first hand...)

Pictures pictures pictures

Hello Friends,

I had many pictures I wanted you to see so I decided to just do 'em all in one gi-normous post. Here are a couple of cute ones taken at the same time. Such peace is uncommon in our home!

Our ottoman got moved under the window one day as I was vacuuming and the dogs claimed it as their own (it sits under the window and the sun shines in on it) so it's been there ever since...

Pumpkin Painting and Cookie Making: I want you to notice how meticulous and planned things are when our son does them and how "ah, good enough" things are when our daughter does them! I love it! Two entirely different personalities.

Every Monday we go over to Robin A's house and play with her grandson and sometimes his cousins are there too with their Mommy. They introduced us to Story Hour at our local Library every Tuesday. Here we are with our story hour group getting a tour of the Candor Fire Station.
This is the little boy we play with. He's two and very funny!

This is his cousin and after about a month of us playing together we realized that he and my daughter were born on the exact same day about two hours apart!

Halloween went great. It was the first time we've lived in a neighborhood so that was cool. After the first house my son turned to me and said "Mom! All you have to do is say that (trick or treat) and they give you candy! This is great!"



Daddy & Daughter having a moment...