Thanksgiving

This was our first time hosting Thanksgiving dinner and we had a lot of fun! Bruce's brother Mark and his family came down from Minnesota and stayed for a few days. We also invited our landlord Tom and his sister Teresa but they ended up having family come into town so had to decline. Thursday morning, Bruce and Mark helped in the kitchen while Karen kept the kids entertained and out of the kitchen. We had turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, oyster stuffing, regular stuffing, yam and apple casserole, squash casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, broccoli with cheese sauce, and yeast rolls. For appetizers we had a veggie platter with ranch and bacon dip and a homemade cheese ball with crackers.

Having never cooked a turkey before, I read up on the different ways to keep a turkey moist and decided to brine the turkey beforehand (soak it in a pot of water with kosher salt and brown sugar for 24 hours) and then stuff the cavity with lemon and orange slices. It turned out super moist and delicious!



For dessert we had raspberry chiffon pie with chocolate walnut crust, blueberry pie, chocolate pie, pumpkin pie, and Shaker lemon pie. All the pies got votes for being the "best" pie except the Shaker lemon pie, which we decided the Shakers could keep. As you can see from the picture below, the whole lemon is used, rind and all. The recipe has you soak the slices in sugar overnight, which I expected to soften and sweeten the rind and be really yummy but in actuality the rind toughened up. But if you picked out the rinds it was a pretty good pie.


Afterwards, I was rewarded with a foot massage and nap and when I woke up, the kitchen was miraculously clean. What a wonderful treat that was.

The kids enjoyed playing hide and go seek in the orhards, setting off rockets, reading, and playing card games. For centerpieces I threw together a couple of baskets filled with apples and pine cones that I found outside. To make them more festive, I smeared them with glitter glue. Little Harriett (age 4) wanted to know how the apples got sparkles and someone told her that they came that way on a sparkly apple tree. Well, that afternoon she went out into the orchards looking for the apple tree with sparkles on it! Needless to say, she did not find her magic tree but I did pull down the glitter glue for her to make her own sparkly objects with. What a cutie!

Big Al's Red Hot Hog Racer

Not quite what you think of when you imagine a pinewood derby car, but hey, we are in Iowa, the hog capitol of the world. Bruce came up with the idea and we really had fun making it. At the Elder's Quorum "Manrichment," we came in 16th out of 30 cars and won a prize for creativity. The rules were that the guys were supposed to design the car and the women had complete control over the decoration of the car. There were a lot of pink cars and a lot of interesting cars. One car had a pink feather boa on it, one was decorated as Tinker Bell and another as a mouse. The top three best times raced each other for the title--they were decorated as Herbie, a bone, and a duck. Very cute and very fun. The duck won. Quack, quack!

Smashing Pumpkin

Roll, roll, roll, roll.....

Free fall...

Splat.

Squash Hill

Alice loves being outside so whenever it's nice outside (not very often anymore!) we go out and let her play. Her favorite places are the flower beds in the front yard where there are rocks galore to throw around and this hill which is in the back near the fields. It's actually just a pile of wood chips. We're assuming it's been there a long time because there is squash vine growing out of the pile. Alice likes to climb up the "mountain" and then roll the squash down (with dad acting as the fetcher of the squash).


As you can see, Alice has crazy bangs right now, which really bother me. I just don't see how anyone could stand living with hair in their eyes 24/7 but apparently Alice enjoys it because she rips out any and all hair clips, rubber bands, etc. I try to put in her hair.


Here is an action shot of Bruce throwing the squash up to Alice. We tried cooking one when we first got here but there just wasn't enough meat on it to make it worth the effort. It was tasty though, what little there was.

Tidbits

Well, Bruce's pink eye "vacation" is over. He was just saying he doesn't know if he remembers how to get to work, it's been so long.

On Friday we had some pretty weird weather. I took Alice to a friend's birthday party and on our way home it started hailing, then raining, and then snowing, all in one trip. On the highway I counted four cars in the ditch from the black ice on the road.

Today I had Alice in church all by myself because Bruce was visiting a branch for his new Stake Young Men's Presidency calling. Alice was in a throwing mood and hurled a pen across the room during Sunday school (thankfully no babies were severely wounded) and during RS, when I was sitting in the front of the room with the rest of the Presidency, she grabbed the tupperware of cheese crackers out of my hands and threw it--they went everywhere!

We went to a fireside tonight and Alice was playing near the front of the room next to the portable chalkboard. She saw a bolt sticking up from one of the chalkboard legs and I guess thought it looked like the nipple on a bottle because she started sucking on it and going "Mmmmmm" really loud. The whole left side of the room was cracking up over that one.

Pink I

We've had a fun past few days dealing with runny noses, crusty eyes, and general irratability. Thankfully, it was only Bruce and I that were feeling this way--thanks to persistant handwashing, Alice has gotten of scott free so far.

I started it off with a cold last Wednesday, followed by waking up with pink eye Friday morning. Bruce realized he also had pink eye later that day and it slammed us hard all weekend. Sunday morning I woke up not only with the usual eyes glued shut but when I finally did get them cleaned out I could hardly open my good eye because it was so swollen, which made for a blurry day. Monday we were both feeling better but decided to go to the doctor anyway. Bruce went into work and then went to the student health center where he has to go. The doctor told him he couldn't see patients for at least five days. He thought at first that they would have him stay in his office doing research or something but since he has an officemate they told him not to come back to work until next Monday.

I got really excited at first because we were both feeling a lot better and I had all these plans for little trips we would take later in the week, but then the next day the pink eye flaired up again and the cold-like symptoms came back. So pretty much we've been relaxing at home, watching the first season of Survivor that we got from Netflix (we thought this would be the perfect time to use our free two week trial offer) and taking Alice outside a lot to play in the grass. Below is a picture of Bruce and Alice looking out the window at the birds. She's really beginning to notice things more. Last week we were walking around the farm and she spotted some cows across the creek and through some trees and started mooing before I even noticed them.

Oh and another downer is the weather is beautiful! I just wish we could take advantage of it instead of staying inside feeling crudy. We are trying to get outside and go on walks around the orchards, especially Bruce who is enjoying having some free time despite being sick.

Alice is still practicing her walking and is able to take 5-6 steps now without falling. I think it's finally dawning on her that walking is more than a novelty to get attention because I see her practicing it more on her own. Bruce downloaded some different animal sounds off of the Internet (cow, dog, cat, pig, etc.) and has them on the desktop to entertain Alice with. She gets SO excited when he plays them and will repeat the sounds she hears.