Happy Thanksgiving!!

Dear Friends & Family,
This Thanksgiving I am very thankful for lots of things! First, I am thankful for everyone in my family and everyone in Jordan's family (who have welcomed me into their family). I am thankful for my wonderful Fiance who puts up with just about anything, is very supportive, loving and caring!! I am also thankful for my children & families that I work with and my co-workers. This year we will be going to Jordan's sisters house for dinner and my family will be going to the cities. Yesterday afternoon I went up to the cities to see my relatives. It was nice to see them because I wouldn't be there for Thanksgiving. Our trade off is Easter. Easter is spent with my family.

Christmas is easily arrangeable because Jordan's family celebrates on Christmas Eve and my family the day of Christmas. I am thankful for having two families (almost)!!!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!

Love,
Annah

Halloween 2008: Pumpkin Carving and Baked Pumpkin Seeds

This post is a couple of weeks behind schedule, but so is our Oregon Trip post...which will be coming soon in a number of posts which are broken down by day. We are sorry for the delay with our blog posting but we are going to try to update more often. It has been difficult without internet at home, but it's a good thing we have a library in town with wireless internet!

Anyway, on the weekend of October 25th and 26th, Annah and I went to a local pumpkin patch and selected a few pumpkins, and in addition we got some (delicious) jalapeño pepper jelly and we got to play with a little farm kitten, which was fun!

On Wednesday, October 29th we decided it was about time we carved the pumpkins, so after I arrived in Austin we placed the pumpkins on our table, gathered the supplies, and dug in!

Annah had never tried baked pumpkins seeds and it had been a few years since I had cooked up some so I decided that I would gather up all of the seeds, bake a few batches, and see what happened.

Apparently I never took a picture of the finished product, but the batches turned out pretty well. They were a little salty, crispy, and quite tasty.

While I was working on that, which took me a while, Annah carved out her masterpieces and did a fantastic job! I always carved out simple faces after drawing a simple design on the pumpkin, but Annah used a carving kit and made some awesome-looking jack-o-lanterns!

On the actual night of Halloween, I brought my parents' dog Lucy down to help us with handing out candy...she ended up being our doorbell since we don't actually have one installed. We had about 35 kids come by, which was much lower than we had expected, but we had leftover candy to enjoy for the next few months! We both had a great time and hopefully next year's Halloween will be just as fun!