Evan's Christmas Show

Evan's Christmas Program was Wednesday at church. It is quite an improvement...my parents would agree...on the old Catholic school Christmas Shows. They have it split so Kinder-2nd goes on one day and 3rd-6th on another day. Our show was at 1:15 PM so there were no overtired, cranky 5,6,and 7 year olds. It was hard to get pics or video because the whole church was filled with parents and family.

They show was a fabulous. Evan did a great job. As you can see, he is in the back row...a status I believe he is going to keep for the duration. It is such a nice school and church community and it is at moments like the Christmas show that I feel so blessed and thankful we found such a great fit for our family!

Our Elf Buddy

...is clearly in his 2nd career after his career as a pole dancer.....disturbing!

More cookies...

My food pictures never turn out great or do my food justice....it may because my camera isn't so great.

The top ones are iced molasses cookies....they are one of my favorites and the bottom ones are chocolate crinkles. At this moment, the crinkles are already gone. I guess they are everyone's favorite.

I made another batch of Chocolate Chunkers from my new Baking bible:). They are so good, that I may freeze half of them or at least hide them. The have baking chocolate, semi sweet and white chocolate along with raisins. Really amazing!

Christmas Cookies

The 3 boys worked on icing sugar cookies and a Gingerbread house on Sunday. There was lots of crying and fussing...all from Jon...regarding the house so it fell down and I have been told we will never make one again.

The boys had a great time with the cooking. I am pretty sure they licked every single utensil used to out the icing on the cookies, so I will "save" these particular cookies just for them.:)

Beef Barely Soup

I made this soup last week. It is from the new Barefoot Contessa book. I know it seems that I am obsessed with her, but I love her cooking and I love that there usually are not 85 techniques involved to get a super yummy dinner on the table. This one used oxtails for the beef flavoring. I think Jon was a little disappointed there was not more actual meat, but such is life.

I also made the Italian Wedding Soup this week. I loved it, but I am not sure if anyone else did. The meatballs were a little extensive to make since they are so small, but it was delicious. I forgot to take a pic because it was a post soccer rushed dinner. The natives were restless:).

Luke and Mommy's Excellent Adventure

Jon and Evan are off on their first Adventure Guides campout this weekend....hopefull Jon will get some pics I can share. They seem to be having a great time...they left Friday and get back tomorrow.

Lukey and I are having "girls" weekend...teehee.

We got pizza and watched Shrek the Halls last night. Today we went for a run, went to lunch and saw Tangled. We are going to go to dinner with friends this evening.

I got all my Christmas cards done last night and watched one of my favorite movies, Love Actually.

Jon was out of town for part of the week, so Luke misses him. I am used to solo duty, so one less kiddo=a lot easier. I am not going to lie, all male peoples are hard to clean up after, take care of, etc. They are generally messy, not extremely grateful, smelly and they loathe cleaning up after themselves. So, though I miss them, being down to 1 boy has made keeping the house intact, MUCH EASIER!

It's been a month...

Evan doing his perfromance at Granparents Day

Grnadma and Evan weaving a vest

Cutie Evan

Papa and Evan

since I have posted. Lots of interesting happenings here, but mostly we had a fire at the house on Friday, November 5th. Everyone who reads this already knows the details, but it took us a few weeks to get everything taken care of, cleaned up and mostly back to normal. All of a sudden it was Thanksgiving, so that's my excuse.

Grandma and Papa came for Thanksgiving and were here for about a week. The boys love having them around and for the most part, I think they enjoyed themselves.

The pics above are Evan at Grandparents Day with Grandma and Papa. I think they all had a FABULOUS time!

I have absolutely zero pictures of my food...not sure why. The Barefoot Contessa Truffle Butter Turkey was a huge hit.

Jon, Papa and I headed out to do the turkey Trot in the morning. It was cold, but we were all happy that we did the race.

We have so many thing to be thankful for and we were very blessed to have Grandma and Papa join us for Thanksgiving!:)