Thanksgiving Hangover

We love our families...don't get me wrong...but I am so thankful to be home from all of the hustle and bustle of the eating and socializing and eating and shopping and ...did I mention the eating??? In all truthfulness, we had a good time visiting with family and friends and we weren't hungry for several days. Here are just a few highlights...

*Driving all night in the rain through the back roads of Louisiana going 45 mph...

*Sleeping through most of Thanksgiving day due to the all night driving...

*Watching Maggie pine for Bob (her uncle), Sydney (her aunt), and Bailey (her second cousin) for 4 days solid...Poor girl, no one wants to play with her. (Dennis shielding Bob from Maggie's advances)

*Maggie's first Thanksgiving dinner...

*Seeing Jon, Ashley, Evie Grace, and Ian (and especially spending quality time with Ian, maybe too much)...

*Mom cooking her first Thanksgiving dinner EVER!

*Shopping with the whole family...(Beth, Kayla, Me, E and Maggie pining after Bob, yet again, after a long day of picking out Christmas gifts)

*Mornings of Christmas quiche and Scrapple (yes...I said Scrapple...Props to Oscar and Dennis for bringing Scrapple home from Delaware)

**Wikipedia's definition of Scrapple

"Scrapple is a savory mush in which cornmeal and flour, often buckwheat flour, are simmered with pork scraps and trimmings, then formed into a loaf. Small scraps of meat left over from butchering, too small to be used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple to avoid waste. Scrapple is best known as a regional food of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland."

Good...yet questionable.

*And my favorite part of Thanksgiving was coming home to a heater that refuses to start, and the living room, dining room and master bathroom circuit continually breaking for no good reason. It sure was cold and dark waiting on the technician to arrive.

All is fixed and Christmas decorations are on their way up. Thanks to all of those who made Thanksgiving so memorable. We love you all.

Expensive Obsession

Well, since I now consider myself a blogger (after a week, HA) I have started checking other blogger sites. I am so envious of everything I saw today and now have a new crafty obsession (as if it wasn't bad enough). Now I want to spend a trillion bucks at every craft store in town and start making stuff I would never use or get around to selling. I have just discovered an expensive habit.

Well, just to share a personal favorite of the day... This Lara Cameron's Christmas Collection.

You can find a large amount of her designs at Moo.com under Lara Cameron Designs.

Oh...What a Weekend!!!

What a weekend!!! I am exhausted! I need a weekend to recover from my weekend! Friday night was date night...We haven't had date night in a few months, so dinner and coffee went a long way after a long stressful week.

Saturday started early with some Souffle'd Banana Pancake and coffee breakfast. Then the fun started...

We spent most of the day tearing down the rest of the wall that was left from the work we did last weekend. We worked hard at delicate demolition for most of the day. Maggie did nothing but stay in the way all day long...It's what she does best.

The night ended with a Tennis and Golf Themed Karaoke-House Warming party (say that 10 times fast) for a friend of E's from work. We went as 70's tennis pro's. E's rendition of "We work hard for the money," "YMCA," and "The Final Countdown" was a crowd favorite. Sunday consisted of church, grocery shopping and rearranging furniture. More pics of the house to come...

The Great Bailey Pumpkin

Maggie was terrified of the pumpkins. Once we put them both on the front porch, she refused to walk past them to go outside...some guard dog she will turn out to be :)

This is Maggie's Halloween costume. She was the cutest bumblebee on the block for the five minutes before she ate her own wings. So, being the gracious parents we are, we helped her take off her costume. Plus, her antennas kept falling in her eyes.


E and Maggie with our pumpkins we labored tirelessly over for hours... Next year we will remember to buy a pumpkin carving kit... I came home and E had his drill out, my X-acto knife from my art supplies, several drill bits, an electric jig-saw, a swiss army knife, steak knives, several different screw drivers... It took longer to clean the pumpkin goo off the tools than to actually carve the pumpkin.

Tuesday Tell All...

Sunday night I made Sesame Seared Tuna with Asian Cooked Coleslaw- I put a link up to the recipe on the left hand side of the page. This was so good and only took about 10 minutes to make.

As we solidify our plans for the holidays, I am more exhausted each day...and the holidays haven't even started yet. However, I am appalled that Christmas music has been playing in the grocery stores for the past 2 weeks and the butchers are wearing santa hats. We are still two weeks out from Thanksgiving. We are leaving on Wednesday evening after work and heading to Mobile to spend the night with my grandparents. Then we are leaving Thursday morning, Thanksgiving Day, to head towards Huntsville to spend the holiday weekend with E's family.

As much as we are looking forward the the break, the 13 hour drive, one way, in the car with a large puppy will prove interesting at best.

However, we are looking forward to family, holiday shopping, lots of traditional food, food, and more food!!!

We are also looking forward to seeing our friends Jon and Ashley from TN. They are coming to have dinner with us in Huntsville and we will finally get to see their new baby, Ian. Ashley and I have been friends since 3rd grade and I love her dearly. She is living the life I am terrified to live as a stay at home mom with 2 small children. She gives me hope.

We look forward to spending time with everyone during the holidays.

New to the block...

Welcome friends and family...
As I embark on my blogging journey, I hope you enjoy all there is to offer.

The blog is mostly about getting my head back into the skill set that I worked towards as a young naive college girl. My goal in college was to work for a big corporation managing their website but somewhere between wanting hurry up and get out of school, getting married, 2 major moves in the past 3 years, 3 major job changes in the past 3 years, buying a house and getting a dog...I lost sight of that. I am hoping to rekindle that passion having been completely removed from design and web development for the past few years.

It's also an outlet completely different from myspace and facebook. Yes, I can use those sites to talk to my friends and see their pictures, but I am incredibly distracted by the advertisements, music, backgrounds, videos, you name it. This is an outlet I can feel like the adult I "sometimes" am without developing epilepsy from all of the flash movies.

I am also working slowly towards posting our Bailey family website. Check it soon...
http://www.everydaybailey.com/
It is a work in progress and something for me to fiddle with while I am reactivating my mind and starting a current portfolio.

I hope you all enjoy...