Better Late Than Never?

I wanted to post something sappy about Thanksgiving and about all the things I am thankful for ON Thanksgiving  but I was too busy getting ready to host Thanksgiving Dinner for thirteen that I was unable to tear myself from Pinterest the kitchen to write a post. The truth is I have a lot to be thankful for. Wonderful husband, kids, extended family, friends and….well I can go on and on but I mentioned the most important things.  Sadly I did not get any pictures of our wonderful Thanksgiving feast and the wonderful family that joined us. It does get difficult to cook and take pictures at the same time. I did get some pictures of my helpers the day before.

Handy little helper.

Handsy helper.

This year we tried a couple things to make this year’s dinner a little less stressful and share more with family.

First, we made a separate turkey the evening before so that I could package it up and have leftovers ready to go for all of our guests. I even labeled everyone’s bag with their name. Really wishing I took pictures.

Second I made mashed potatoes ahead of time. They were fabulous! You make them the night before and put them in a crock-pot (thank you Pinterest!) the day of. It allows them to stay warm during serving AND our entire house kitchen didn’t get all steamed up while company was over, SCORE!

Overall our dinner was wonderful and it was great to have everyone over. After all the hard work I had this to look forward to

Decadent Peanut Butter Pie, it is deliriously good (supposing you like peanut butter) and worth not busting into it the night before. It is making me drool just thinking about it.

We have so much to be thankful for but the best things are the little things, like leftover olives on your fingers! Oh, and the kids attached to them!

 

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving with loved ones! Christmas here we come!!!!

If You Could Turn Back the Hands of Time…

You’d get no sleep. One week into daylight savings and we are all a little cranky.  Such a difference an hour can make. I remember that once upon a time (pre children) Zippercow and I would relish the extra hour of sleep (and then some) on Sunday when we’d “fall back”. It was fabulous! Even now we are foolish and think with a little excitement “yay, and extra hour of sleep!” and we (again foolishly) assume the children will be peaceful in slumber because they too would want to enjoy some glorious extra sleep (see, I said foolish).

 

Instead the scene looks a little more like this

 

 

5:30 am and our whole house is awake. And lets be honest, not horribly happy about it. We even kept them up a later the night before assuming they might have issue with the time adjustment. Keeping them up later is a little trick we do because we hate ourselves. You see we think “smart parents, we don’t want to wake up at 7:00am on a Saturday morning so we’ll just keep them up 45 minutes to an hour later and they will sleep later!!!”

Never in the history of our children has this worked.

In fact in those cases they often go to bed later, wake up a half hour earlier than usual then are uber cranky the next day. Nailed it!

Sadly though this continued on through the week. We tried to adjust their bedtimes to get them back on schedule, but man they are persistent.  No sleep makes us cranky, them cranky and we count the minutes until bedtime so we can do it again tomorrow. We have hope that this week will be better. You see, despite our sarcastic, jaded, pessimistic attitudes, when it comes to our children we are hopeful and optimistic…

that they’ll sleep.

*even as I write this I am making some terrible spelling and grammatical errors (more than usual)  due to sleep deprivation. I’m sure there are still some there, but if you could only see what I fixed! I’m just as eloquent in person these days!

Fabulous Fall!

 

Green Bluff

Pumpkins of the orange variety and small child variety

We love fall and hope you are enjoying yours!

*So I was totally feeling guilty about not posting recently. I have multiple unfinished posts but I mostly wanted to share that we are keeping busy with wonderful fall traditions!*

Happy Fall!