Today and Yesterday.

Happy Birthday, Austin!

I can't resist sharing a few pics... since I have them. 

And since they totally help me see where Sweet Scarlett gets some of her darling features from.

Like that hair.

Yep, that's from daddy-o.

But I think that cute little round 90th percentile head...

...comes from her mum.

Speaking of Sweet Scarlett (or was I speaking of Austin? Happy Birthday, Austin!), I saw this the other day in the Sunday coupon pack and had to snap a pic:

Maybe I'll start calling her WONDERFUL Sweet Scarlett. Hah!

I like to shorten names, but Scarlett's name, seemingly unshortenable (my own word, btw), just gets longer and longer. I like it. It makes saying it more... deliberate.

Last night we had the annual Bishop's Christmas Bash at our house.

The youth meet together, then split up into groups and rotate between three houses for games (it's so convenient that the YW President and a Bishopric counselor live in our culdesac - I'm sure that was determined solely on the ease of musical houses for the Bishop's Bash... not).

Then everyone meets back at our house. In the past they've just had treats and visited, but this year Bill planned an awesome spiritual message to end the evening on. What an excellent idea.

 We had over 60 people in our basement, most of whom were youth. It's funny how you can smell a large group of young people. Hah!

I ran downstairs to catch the message and to snap some pictures for the ward history.

Yes, I am still the Ward Historian.

Early this year my two assistants were released, so I think I'm on my own this year.

I keep telling myself that if I start early, it will be cake. Early would be now.

I had a great prompting last night to ask individual youth to write about specific events of the year - what the activity was, and how it helped strengthen them. I think I'll do this with the adults, too. I'm hoping to have lots and lots of different ward members contributing to the history. Better get on it.

 Three of the four in this group of youth won't be here to see the Ward History completed. They will by gone by January. Kelcy (second from the left) is headed to Milan, Italy to serve a mission (Yay!), and sweet Mary and Claire, along with their family of 11 (not all are at home right now), are moving to Utah. Boo. Christopher will graduate high school, serve a mission, then come home and marry that cute Kelcy (my prediction - wink).

 Sarah won a cherry pie in the white elephant exchange... I wonder where that came from?? (Shhhhh. I told you we had way too much dessert for Thanksgiving.)

 The YM were in charge of the refreshments. This was probably the most pathetic showing for a Bishop's Bash EVER. What you see there... is what there was. Maybe next year I will have a few things ready for fill-ins... unless they decided to put the YW in charge.

I didn't participate fully in the Bash because I was reminded that I had offered to make invites for next week's Laurel activity, and they were needed. Now. I figured that the myriad of other youth leaders could keep things in check, so I planted myself in front of the computer and tried to come up with something lovely... and quick.

The girls had planned to invite the older single sisters in our ward to a Christmas sharing activity.

I found this idea on Pinterest (wishing I had doilies, then remembered my large stack of for-crafting-purposes-only coffee filters which I morphed into snowflakes), thought it would be fun to add a vintage picture, and oh-so-quickly designed, printed, and cut these little babies out. 

 I had them ready to go by the end of the evening. Phew!

Mar loved her white elephant gift...

 She did a few magic tricks for us while we watched this promo Bill will be running at a special showing (pre-release) of the new Hobbit movie in a couple weeks:

Gotta run - I have work today, followed by a doctor's appt... hoping to get some things figured out!

Lest you think I've forgotten, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AUSTIN!

Thanksgiving Weekend 2014.

Here's a quick rundown of our Thanksgiving weekend.

I spent much of the day before Thanksgiving making pies.
I had forgotten that we would only have 6 (six!) people for dinner.
We had made several offers for others to join us, but everyone already had plans. The elders were supposed to stop by for dessert, however, so I figured I would make a big variety. I had also promised a new single sister in our ward who had to work on Thanksgiving a homemade chocolate pie, and I made another one for a visiting teaching sister I had yet to officially "visit."

Here are my totals: 4 chocolate cream pies (2 to give away), 1 coconut cream, 1 lemon velvet (sounds better than it was - note to self: don't try a new recipe for lemon pie to serve on Thanksgiving), 1 pumpkin roll, 1 apple crisp, and 2 small purchased cherry pies (per Bill and Mauri's request). Did I mention that I was only planning for 6? (Okay, for some reason I thought I was planning for 8, and only realized we had 6 at breakfast on Wednesday when I had set the table for 8 and only 6 showed up. Brain fog.)

I roasted a nice 20 pound turkey. (Did I mention I was planning for 6?)

We had a large variety of veggies, pickles, and cheese.

And since I had quite over-boiled my sweet potatoes, we had mashed sweets instead of the traditional chunked with marshmallows.

I thought it was quite tasty, but still have at least half of this 9x13 casserole sitting in my refrigerator.

The girls did a nice job setting the table... for 6...

...and we snapped a few timer pics before digging in.

Looking back, it would have been a good idea to move that prominent empty chair for these shots.

There's kind of a funny story behind the splotches on Bill's shirt.
While carving the turkey, he had splashed some grease on his shirt.
Before dinner he went to change, but I insisted that he still wear this shirt - I had selected my blouse that day because it had the colors of everyone else's shirts. I knew the girls wanted to snap some pics after dinner, and I would be the coordinating element that helped the corals, pinks, blacks and greens go.  So Billy-my-hero did a little scrub job on his shirt. We got a total kick out how well it showed up in the pics. Once it finally dried, the tiny grease spots were still there, but much less noticeable than those ginormous water splotches.

Fill your plate, girl! This is Thanksgiving!

After dinner we headed outside to snap some pictures.
We couldn't have had a nicer day, and we had such a fun time laughing it up.

I just told my family the other day that I thought it was corny when people published something funny they said on Facebook. Seriously, just the other day.
But today I'm inclined to share something I said that I thought was supa funny.
I won't, however, be posting it on Facebook. There's a difference, right?

When getting the camera ready for a timer shot, Bill asked, "Where am I going to go?"

My {supa funny} response: "I think you're going to go to the Celestial Kingdom." Hah!

Seriously, I couldn't stop laughing at my own wit.
It's not as funny as I re-read, but I'm sure I burned some Thanksgiving calories from it.

It wasn't until yesterday, as I was cutting the elders' hair and questioned them about not dropping by on Thanksgiving (they had promised they would), that I discovered they HAD stopped by, knocked, rang the doorbell, then moved on to their next Thanksgiving Day destination. They had seen us out back taking pictures as they drove away. We could have used their stomachs to help alleviate our dessert overload! I texted one of my visiting teachers and invited her small family of three over for dessert and games. She brought a pumpkin pie. We ate until we couldn't stand it, then I sent as much dessert and pie home with them as they would take.

After some leisurely Black Friday shopping (Mar and I headed out about 10am to find things calm and quiet), and a hair color for Lolo (a hairstylist is always on call), we headed off to the tree lighting celebration at the park in the center of our town. We have gone to this little ceremony only once before... about 10 or 11 years ago. I'm inclined to believe that it was the FIRST tree lighting ceremony. Our good friends, the Baumgartners, were pretty much in charge of it that year. It was a small, quaint little gathering that included a few Christmas songs, a quick blurb from the mayor, then the lighting of the trees in the park.

This year things were much different.

Crowds of people, choirs singing (Legend HS choir in the background here), dancers dancing, vendors vending, and the mayor's very commercial emceeing in between songs and performances.

We moved to a quieter location in the park, near where we had stood 10 or 11 years ago. By the big tree, not in the packed-with-people parking lot.

Mauri insisted that we needed a treat (wait, don't we have loads of pie, pumpkin roll, apple crisp, whipped cream and ice cream at home??), so we stopped at the local frozen yogurt shop on the way back to our car.

The lovebirds found their own quiet spot to enjoy their treat.

On Saturday we set up the Christmas tree, listened to Christmas music, then went to the mall. Other than having to park at the very back of the parking lot, the mall didn't seem too bad either. We felt blessed that each time we needed to make a purchase, the line was short.
I think I'm pretty much done with Christmas shopping... YAY!

On Sunday the chidlets headed out.
(I won't mention the stress I feel when they are making this trip. In bad weather it can be a tortuous drive. I know because I've been there too many times to count. They hit weather coming and going, but I'm so grateful that Jason was at the wheel, being an oh-so-cautious driver. A friend told me yesterday that a family she knows hit black ice just outside of Rawlins on I-80 around 11pm on the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving. The car rolled and two occupants were ejected, both suffering severe injuries and in comas. These kids were on the same road around the same time that evening - give or take an hour. In a not-so-trusty vehicle. I'm counting my blessings that they traveled safely!)

Now it's back to the routine... temporarily.
I can't wait to have everyone back + some at Christmas!

Check out Britt's latest post about sweet Scarlett here.