Thanksgiving and the Post/Pre-Holiday Activities

Thanksgiving was spent differently this year for our family. We were WITH family! Juan and his friends are getting really good at finding amazing deals online and when his friend, Kurt, found out that you could get $300 off a trip to NYC, Juan came up with a plan.

The deal only worked through Expedia Canada and you had to book both a flight and hotel. So he found cheap flights and booked rooms in a hostel, applied the code for the discounts, and wound up with tickets for his family to come out here at $58 per person, round-trip. Deal of the century!

Thanksgiving morning, he went to pick them up in The Big Apple. The went to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and after they got home, we had a Mexican-inspired feast!

Before eating, we told the story of the pilgrims and the native Americans, complete with costumes from preschool.

The Adamsons were kind enough to lend all their beautiful hosting supplies (plates, chargers, goblets, tablecloths, placemats and napkins! I love having friends with nice stuff.)


The entire menu spun from this month's issue of Sunset Magazine. We served:

Pumpkin Taco Appetizers
Cranberry, Apple, Orange Relish
Chile and Spice Grilled Turkey with Mole Gravy
(...And another turkey to feed the crowd, using Alex's Thanksgiving Turkey Brine.)
Chorizo Apple Stuffing
Grilled Rosemary Sweet Potatoes
Roasted Chile Cornbread
Fall Salad with Nuts, Pomegranates and Goat Cheese
Roasted Chile-Lime Broccolini
Spritzers of Ginger Ale and Grenadine
Mexican Chocolate Cakes with Vanilla Ice Cream
Long Beach Lime Pies
...and a delicious addition of Pumpkin Flan that Juan made.

We were stuffed!















The next day, instead of doing any Black Friday shopping, we slept in, then went to eat Vietnamese food in South Philly. Afterward, we went to the Italian Market to browse, bought some cheese at DiBruno Bros., and went to the Hispanic Heritage Festival for the Stake, which turned out to be pretty different from what we had imagined it would be. It was a good day.

Saturday, we went to see the sights of Philadelphia, including the Masonic Temple, Reading Terminal Market, Chinatown (where we ate delicious hand-drawn noodles,) Love Park, The Christmas Village at City Hall, and the Comcast Building Holiday Spectacular. To finish the day, we drove out to King of Prussia so the girls could do some shopping. (As you can probably imagine, our feet were so sore by the end of the night.) I'm sad that we didn't get a chance to go to Liberty Bell for Sandra, but we'll probably get a chance to do that when they come out for Juan's graduation in May. (We have a bazillion pictures of the rest of the trip, but those may have to wait for their own post, because I want to just PUBLISH this already!)




Sunday was a normal day, besides the baptism we all attended after church. It was definitely a day of rest... and leftovers.

We needed a day to recuperate, especially since Monday we were on our way to New York City again. More on that to come....

Happy Thanksgiving

I'll get to posting the real holiday buzz later, I just wanted to say how wonderful Thanksgiving was for us because Juan's family came to visit; the food was deeeeelish, the company was sublime, and our blessings are innumerable.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving to all!

Whoosh!

The month of November has gone by in a flash! Qiana and I went to Utah for a week to do my cousin's wedding flowers and to see the family, while Siena was bounced from friend to friend in Philadelphia. Sounds rough, huh? Well, Siena loved it! She probably thought she was being punished for something when they came to pick us up from the airport. Juan was amazing, as usual, and had the whole house cleaned, some repairs finished, and yummy food in the fridge. I'm glad to be home, but so happy we got to see everyone, (including my best friend's 6-day-old baby.)

While we were there, I went to my sister, Sierra's, dance concert. It was ethereal. (I actually got in trouble from a lady sitting next to me for taking pictures. It temporarily ruined my night.

...Somehow, I got over it.)

With the fam at Pizza Pie Cafe, reminiscent of my college years. (Qiana, of course, mad that she's being roped into yet another picture.)

Cousins!
My sweet, little pizza-lovin' girl!


The wedding!
Her colors were plum, brown, cream and turquoise. This was what we planned out:
...and this is how they turned out: (pretend you don't see the pins.)

Check out this hot little thing! Love ya' Kell!

Most of McKell's flowers came from Australia, and I ordered her Lucite beads from Germany. The rest of her flowers shipped from the U.S. and Colombia. What a worldwide effort, eh? I got a few pictures of the centerpieces with my phone, but I didn't think to get some of the bouts and corsages. Sometime in the future, I hope to get my act together.

Primary Help and Holiday Hope

With the Primary Program almost out of the way (I know, I can't believe I'm saying it like that) it's time to get the Christmas Program under way. Any favorite Christmas songs and memories to go along with them that I can use when I outline the new holiday presentation?

I'm hoping that the holidays this year will not be as stressful as last year. After thinking and thinking about Christmas gifts I want to give this year, there are a couple ideas that are starting to blossom. Question: How hard it is to find a gift that fits into the following categories?

• Thoughtful
  
• Unique
  
• Easy to pack in a suitcase
• Not incredibly time-consuming (for the giver as well as the receiver)
  
• Useful
• Inexpensive
• Enjoyable

Answer: Hard. Very hard.

Catch Up

My phone pics transferred!

I had these matching shirts I bought a while ago for $2 and they were just itching for a design; so I made a necklace template in AI and printed it off on freezer paper (*if you do this, make sure you iron it lightly to another piece of paper first.) After cutting out the positive space like a stencil, I pressed the paper to the shirt and painted with acrylic paint + textile medium. After peeling the freezer paper off really carefully, I was able to reuse it for the other shirt. It was such an easy project and cost me nothing since I already had all of the supplies.

I also got to indulge myself in another craft project that morning... their trick-or-treat bags. I had only 45 minutes, and after I thought I had broken my sewing machine 20 minutes into it, I thought it was a project in futility. However, press on and improvise I did, and by golly, they were finished in time for the morning Pumpkin Hunt and extravagant Halloween breakfast at Amber's. (I tried writing a quick tutorial, but I soon realize that I don't know any of the technical sewing terms and I can't give directions to save my life. Sorry, the tutorial is now in the trash.)

Juan's FIRST time ever carving pumpkins. Fantastic job, no?

Halloween was fun... a little frustrating, but fun. The girls dressed up as Fancy Nancy and Fancy Nancy's little sister. It was quite an easy costume since we're growing a little collection of dress-up clothes. Qiana actually loved it more than Siena, who refused to wear the hot pink feather boa. What's a fancy girl to do?!

As for my costume, I was a little proud of myself for putting thought into it (which is more than I can say for ANY previous year.) I went with a classic Halloween costume: a mummy. HOWEVER, as I started wrapping the gauze shreds from my feet to my head, I realized it was not as easy as it had appeared. By the time I got to my neck (a fifteen minute ordeal, mind you,) I looked down at my legs and realized that all the wrapping was for naught--it had all unraveled. I tried a second time, a little tighter, but still wound up with the same results. FRUSTRATING. So I bagged my costume, and started heading out the door.

Besides an exhausting 20-minute power struggle with Siena on our way to the car, we were able to leave in time to catch at least the last half of the ward activity. The girls spent their time well: twirling and dancing, and gobbling anything that contained fat, salt, and/or sugar. They slept their sugar coma off very efficiently, because the next day, they were up and at 'em at the crack of dawn.

Juan was in Chicago at the annual Hispanic Dental Association Conference until Sunday night, so he missed out on all the Halloween fun here, but was kind enough to document his adventures for me.

Our poster, woot woot! I scrapped it all together the night before he left, but it did the job. It was NOTHING like last year's poster because we took a different approach and because there was no prize money to work toward. Sad, but true.

Juan's colleagues from school




Chicago is known for it's architecture.









Juan's cousins just happened to be in town, so they stopped by for a midnight chat.

Inside the hotel lobby. Crazy beautiful.