So let me bring you up to speed.

Alright I am aware that the past several months I have gotten behind on all my blogs. I am a bad blogger. My life the past couple months has been crazy to say the least. I know a lot of you follow me on Facebook so you are aware of the drama, but for those of you that don't, I will give you a play by play of the past several months and get you up to speed.

September....

I realize I have blogged since then, but I know I left out a lot of things that we did.

Such as...fruit harvest. This fall we harvested a ton of apples that were juiced and made into applesauce. Sunshine loved climbing up the tree to pick the apples out of Grandma's tree.

We also ended up with lots of plums that ended up as plum sauce, jam , dried plums and fruit leather (which I documented here) . Then I had a friend of mine get hold of 3 boxes of concord grapes that were made into juice and now reside in my freezer. Also we got a hold of a box of figs from a friend's tree and made several things.
Also with fall comes all sorts of activities starting up. Bug has been busy with twice a week swimming lessons and Sunshine started ballet. They both love doing these and have really been thriving.
Then in October we had Halloween. I had every intention to post pictures of the kids carving pumpkins and in their costumes, but time just got away from me. So better late than never.They were not nearly as enthusiastic about pumpkin guts as we were.Then came the costumes. Bug was Batman, Peanut was the boy wonder sidekick Robin and Sunshine was a cat. NOT CAT WOMAN!!! She yelled at more than one person on Halloween for making that mistake. We went over to my in laws house to go trick or treating but not before stopping off at my aunt Donna's house. Also my mom was able to go with us this year so that was cool.


Then believe it or not, the majority of the month of November was mostly quiet. Hard to imagine I know. But the weekend before Thanksgiving is when my side of the family does Thanksgiving. So we all met the Saturday before and had a nice Thanksgiving with family and also celebrated my Grandma's 90th birthday.
As soon as we got done with our Thanksgiving dinner we came home to find that Bug was not feeling so chipper. He started running a fever and had an upset stomach that soon came to be known in our family as "flupocalypse '09" in our house. After 5 days of fever I took him in to be seen and he was diagnosed with the H1N1 virus or the swine flu. He sort of got better, but then Sunshine got it. She had it worse with more unpleasant symptoms. She soon got over it after about a week, then Peanut got it. his was the worse of all. Just when it seemed that Peanut was getting over it, Bug got it again.....then Sunshine got it again.....then Peanut got it again. It cycled through our house relentlessly keeping us quarantined for a full month. It was horrible. We were advised to stay home at all costs and if we did leave we had to wear these dumb masks by request from the health department. We were like social lepers. So we just stayed home. For a long , long month.
But once it passed, we were able to get back out in the real world.

In December we had ballet recitals.....

My perfect ballerina was the one closest to the teacher that actually followed her. She is the oldest in the class and you can really tell by her attention span and the fact that she is so much taller than everyone else. Did did great though.Then we were desperately trying to get into the Christmas spirit. We put a tree up for the kids and decorated the house.
And I did my usual holiday bake-a-thon. This year Sunshine helped as much as she could.
Then we rounded out the holiday season with the magnificent zoo lights. For those of you that are not in the Portland area and have no idea what the zoo lights are, it is the Oregon Zoo, but much like the Disneyland's electrical light parade but not moving. It is hard to explain so Rockstar made a cool video to give you a glimpse. You do see some of the animals at the zoo, but it is mostly about the thousands of twinkling lights.


I am still trying to compile our pictures from Christmas eve and our day after Christmas camping trip. But this about brings you up to speed from the past couple months.

So there you go.

Gobble Gobble!!

So I know I have been sort of letting my blog slide lately. This time of year is just so stinking busy I can barely find the time. But tonight I figured it was well overdue to put up some holiday pictures of our Thanksgiving.

My family always celebrates Thanksgiving on the Saturday before the actual holiday. It started many years ago when my Mom used to work a retail job and just couldn't do both the holiday and get in enough sleep to brace herself for black Friday too. Plus it has always worked nicely so there was no competition with in laws wanting that Holiday too. There has never been an issue of having to make several stops at different Thanksgiving dinners.

We had it over at my Mom's house in Battleground, Wa. The entire family came out and we even celebrated my Grandma's 89th birthday. We all made her something to commemorate the event. My mom and I worked together to make her a scrapbook chronicling her life. She was really tickled with it.

We ate, the kids had a great time playing with their cousins which are pretty close in age to them and we had a great day.

Then came the big day.

We did what we do every year. We all gather around the television in our Pj's and watch the Macy's parade.

Have I mentioned my utter annoyance with my furniture situation. We do not have enough seating in our family room, so everyone just piles on me in the chair.


Then we made up our vegetarian dressing and side dishes and headed over to my in laws in West Linn.


It was another great day. We visited and ate and I planned out my attack plan for black Friday. Also Bug got turned on to guitar hero. We all but had to pry it out of his hands.

This is the worst possible picture ever taken of my husband. Although he assures me he has worse. Here are some of the real pictures of our family Thanksgiving dinners.

Martha Stuart falls from grace...

Today we went to my mom's house for my family's Thanksgiving dinner. She lives about 45 minutes north of us. The whole family had planned to be there. My Aunt and Uncle, their 2 kids with their families, plus my Grandma came up from The Dalles (about 1 1/2 hour away). We were going to eat AT noon. No exceptions!~

Ok, let me just give a little background here. If you know my Mom, you'll get just how great this all is. My mom is all about etiquette and protocol when it comes to these kinds of events. We arrive at a set time...and we certainly ALWAYS eat on time. She painstakingly plans out all details. Agonizes over whether there are enough matching linens for all of the guests. If not arrangements need to be made. Mis match anything is defiantly unacceptable. You get the idea. It's a formal attitude, but a pretty informal setting. It's all very confusing.

So skip back to today....We arrive at 10:45. Now we're eating at 12. Thats the plan anyways. We get there and realize we may need to run to the store. As soon as we get there, mom is freaking out. She put the turkey in at 7 AM and it's barely even warm. It turns out her oven picked today as the day to slowly die. Perfect timing. She is a little panicked that we won't eat at noon, but we reassure her that it's no big deal. Things happen.

So we decide to run to the store while the bird cooks a little more. While at the store we had the slowest checkout people on planet earth. One of them cut their finger on some cardboard while they were checking us out. She actually stopped in the middle of ringing us up to go in search of a band aid. We just sort of stood there looking at each other and blinking. She found one, came back and finished ringing us up. It was the weirdest thing. Needless to say we ended up taking longer at the store than we wanted. In the midst of this...I call my mom to let her know what was going on. She was sounding really panicked at this point as more people showed up, but the turkey still wasn't ready. By now it's about 1:00.

So we get back to her house about 1:30 and she is in a full blown freak out. She has taken the bird out of the oven and instead, put a full "bone in" ham, in the hopes that maybe we could just sort of re heat the precooked ham and call it good. We could at least get the show on the road. We started in on side dishes and the ham came out of the oven around 2 ish. As soon as the ham came out, the turkey went back in to try to salvage what we could out of it.

What was funny was all in all, it really wasn't that big of a deal. We all sat around and talked and had a great afternoon. I got to spend time with cousins that I only get to see once a year. I also got to spend time with my grandma. Which I never get to see my grandma but once a year or so.

So finally, about 3:30 the turkey was done. My mom goes to pull it out of the oven.....and SPLASH!!!!! The pan slipped out of her hands and all the juice and grease and anything else that collects at the bottom of a turkey pan went all over her kitchen floor. At this moment I was having a hard time holding my giggles in. She just gave me the "stink eye" and said "This is the last year I do this at my house!!!!!"

All I could say at that moment...."I am soooo blogging about this!!!"

I wrote about this elegant disaster of a holiday meal not to embarrass her, but to let her know that the end result was the same whether everything went as planned, or went drastically off course. We all spent the afternoon together as a family enjoying each other's company.

Plus I included some pictured of our day. I got some pictures of the kids and their cousins plus one of 4 generations .

It was a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well happy Thanksgiving one and all. We are here and officially in the holiday season. I watched the parade on TV with the kids this morning as our Thanksgiving day ritual while we prepared the dishes we were bringing to my in-laws house for dinner.

We brought the green bean casserole and a vegetarian stuffing (as my husband is a vegetarian, but REAAALY likes stuffing) Plus I had to take the fabulous chex mix that we made a couple days ago.

It was really a nice meal. We had my five, husbands parents, sister in law, her boyfriend and his parents. So we had a pretty full house. It was pleasant though. No fights broke out, nobody got drunk and started taking swings or anything like that. You hear about these people that dread going to family functions because of stuff like that and that alone makes me pretty thankful. Although I do have a lot to be thankful for. I am thankful for healthy kids. I am thankful for my husband that he has put up with my gruff this long and doesn't seem to be shaken. I'm thankful for my nutty dysfunctional family. They may be crazy, but they seem to be my kind of crazy :)

Here are a few pictures of our day. I think my favorite is Peanut perched in his favorite place on planet earth....Grandpa's lap while he's eating pie :)

Now I need to get some sleep if I'm going to be outside Fred's at 4:30 for my cheap socks!!! I wait all year to buy socks and do my full combat shopping. I have a route to plan.