It's Been Awhile

I just realized I haven't blogged in over a week! crazy.
Our Oma/Trudy has been in town the last 10 days and it was busy busy busy!
Lots of food, wine, playing, and shopping. It's amazing how it all flew by and seemed like only a few days.

We had a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner. Trudy and I worked hard for two days to prepare a most delicious meal. She is like a Martha Stewart only sexier and more fun! But she can cook and put together a party like nobody can. I've been taking notes.
We had our Finnish friends over with their little girl for their very first American Thanksgiving. Sophie and her little friend tore it up... running around playing and laughing all the way!

Here they are taking a moment to pause and reflect on all the things they are thankful for.

We DID NOT do the after-Thanksgiving-biggest-shopping-day-of-the-year sales. Never have. And probably never will unless you feed me some chocolate covered Xanax. I know there are some fantastic deals out there to be had that day, but I just can't do it. Too many crowds make me coo-coo.
BUT, we did do some great shopping in the many days after. I am now officially and absolutely done with my Christmas shopping!
My next feat will be the Christmas cards.

We also went to the annual Blue Santa Parade downtown. The only day it's rained all month.

But it was exciting for the kids to see all the bands, floats, musicians, giant floating characters, costumes, cheerleaders, and Santa too! We forgot to bring our toy to donate again this year. I had one, still sitting up in the closet from last year. I swear next year we are really going to remember.


It always seems so weird around Thanksgiving and Christmas here because you're out shopping for your tree and decorations, but it's so warm you're wearing shorts and flip flops.


We have exciting plans to drive to Houston this weekend for my friend Carrie's 30th birthday party. Woo woo!
Wait till she sees the present Percy got her for correctly identifying his spiderness type. You do remember Percy don't you??
We haven't seen Percy around ever since our handy man Jim came over to put screens in the kitchen windows and accidently probably on purpose knocked down his web. Percy scrambled quickly into our deck umbrella and hasn't reappeared yet. I haven't opened the brella to see if he's still in there and he hasn't come out to spin another beautifully ginormous web for us. That might have been the last sighting of Percy. We'll see...
you never know if Percy was really a Percella and might have left us many many of her offspring. ahhhh!