A Christmas tradition that will change

Every year I make a gingerbread house for each boy to decorate including one for mom and dad.  This year after eating too many ginger bread houses and thinking it was too much work we are deciding to make one big gingerbread house and everyone will get a side to decorate.  Sounds fair to me.                   

 Jack loves to give me these little poses these days.  Funny kid.  His is supposed to be a section of a castle.

 David's is also supposed to be a section of a castle.

Sam's is an actual house because he took his to school to show his class.  They read a story about catching a gingerbread boy in a gingerbread house and his teacher thought it would be fun for Sam to tell he class about it.   I was there when he told them about it and it was so fun to see him proud of his little house.  Cutie patootie.

Surprise B-day

 Mike's birthday breakfast was strawberry cream cheese stuffed french toast.  Even the kids liked it.

 This party was supposed to be a surprise but most of you who know me know that I have a hard time with surprises and it didn't help when I accidentally emailed him the invitation.  Mike did think I cancelled the party though so I guess he was somewhat surprised in the end.  The kids had a blast.  They tied Mike up with streamers and shot Nerf guns at him, fed him, and then we had him blow out the candles on his cake.

 It was fun and many wonderful friends showed up.  I know that Mike loved it! He's impossible to buy gifts for so I tried something different and it worked, kinda.

The day before the party we were still pretending there would be no party and it would be just a regular birthday when Sam turns to me while in front of Mike and says "Mommy, can I tell him?  I just really want to tell him"  Then he says "Dad did you pick up your keys for the " and I cut him off.  My kids did pretty good keeping it tight lipped until that day and then Mike said something about the email and I knew he knew.  He had minimal confidence in me though because he thought that since I couldn't get my computer to work that I had never gotten the word out.  Ha ha showed him. :)

The only reason I had accidentally emailed him the invite was because my computer wasn't hooked up to the printer, so while he was out I emailed it to his computer and slid right over to print it up and found out he didn't have Internet and I couldn't take the email back.  It was terrible and as soon as I could jump on his computer I had deleted it but by then he had already down loaded it on his phone.  Dang modern devices.

I love my man and was happy to give him something he enjoyed for his birthday.  I had a friend take him gun shopping before hand, it was supposed to be window shopping but then I found out he bought himself a gun, see he always buys his own gifts anyway.  Little turd!

Thanksgiving

So I set a pretty table for Thanksgiving dinner but I didn't take any pictures of it.  This was my only picture.  My mom always made a lot of pies for this holiday growing up.  She'd make two apple, two pumpkin, two cherry.  I made one apple (that no one liked) one banana cream (that almost everyone liked, I have one banana hater in my house) and one pumpkin.  It felt like it took forever to get rid of my pies.  My crust is nothing like my mom's though I have her recipe.  This frustrates me every year.  My mom also always drew a little something on the pie to ventilate it while cooking.  I loved this and had fun doing it for my own pie.