Christmas!!

Oh my goodness, how is Christmas over already?!  This month has seriously flown by. 

Earlier this month I flew to CA for a few days to surprise my brother for his 40th birthday!!  It was SUCH a quick trip, especially since I still had to work because I'm completely out of PTO for this year!  But my boss was nice enough to let me switch around some work-from-home days, and she was totally ok with me heading to CA to be there to surprise my dear brother.  I got in very late Wednesday night (I left after work), and then I had to work on Thursday and Friday, and then Saturday we had a surprise party for Brad!!  And then I left very early Sunday morning.  It was a whirlwind trip!!  Trips to CA always go by way too quickly, but this one was wayyyyyy faster than any other trip!! 

The night of the 22nd (Saturday) we hosted a party at our house, so that whole day we were cleaning and prepping for that.  We were exhausted by the time the party started!!  It was a really fun time though, and it was really great to have people over to our house for Christmas!!  We've never done that before!! 

Sunday (the 23rd) during the day I did a bunch of Christmas baking (3 kinds of cookies, plus fudge), and Kevin met up with his friend from high school that lives in L.A. now, and he was just home for the first time this year!  Sunday night Kevin and I got to hang out at home together, so we watched It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street (the old one, NOT the new one... I can't stand the new one, but the old one is one of my favorite Christmas movies!!).  Kevin and I had not seen It's a Wonderful Life in sooo many years, and we both really loved it this time around.  It was SO great!!  I feel like I never appreciated it when I was younger... Maybe it's one of those that you have to be a bit older to fully appreciate. We also made some pasta and homemade alfredo, and had a lovely evening of relaxing in front of the fire while watching movies :)  It was perfect! I'm so happy we got some time for us. 

Christmas Eve Kevin and I both had to work all day, but after work we drove over to Kevin's parents house and spent the evening there hanging out with Kevin's family.  Christmas morning we were able to just hang out at home and have a nice relaxing morning.  We made cinnamon rolls for breakfast!

We have watched a LOT of Christmas movies!! Here's our list:  Scrooged, Bad Santa, The Grinch (Jim Carrey version), The Grinch (old cartoon version), Santa Clause is Coming to Town, The Year Without a Santa Clause, Rudolph, Frosty, Elf, National Lampoons Christmas, Muppet Christmas Carol, Mickey's Christmas Carol, Die Hard (it counts!!), Love Actually, Prep and Landing (thanks Lizzy and Claighton!!), The Man Who Invented Christmas (it was pretty good!), Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, The Holiday, Home Alone 1 and 2, and Charlie Brown Christmas. That's 23 movies!! 

I was terrible about taking pictures, so I'm sorry this post is picture-free!  This weekend we're going to Longwood Gardens to see the lights, so I'll take pictures of that!!  And I'll do the Bucket List update too :)  Love you guys!!!

Christmas is Coming!

You guys!  I'm getting so excited for Christmas!  I can't believe it's only a few weeks away!  I feel like October, November, and the first bit of December have all gone by SO quickly! 

Our house is looking VERY Christmasy, and I'm loving it.  We went and got our Christmas tree on December 1st, and we decorated it that evening!  We also put our lights up on the house that day because we actually had pretty good weather.  Here are some pictures of our tree and our inside decorations!  I'll take some exterior pictures soon. 

Here's our Christmas glasses and a few little plates and bowls!

Here are all of our Christmas mugs!  So many good ones.  There's a Homer Simpson one for McGee right in front there, and we both love the Bumble one of course, and I love that adorable Mickey and Minnie one on the left!  

Some gifts made by the amazing Lindsey! 

Here are a few of our pillows!

Our fireplace!  This makes me so happy!

Some decorations on a side table, including an adorable picture of my nieces when they were little! 

Our tree!!  I think this is our best tree yet!!  I love it so much, and it makes me so happy. 

I've worked on making a few Christmas presents this year!  I'll try to show some pictures of some others later, but here's one I made for my Uncle Jim!  He loves A Christmas Story. 

I also made a Bucket List for Christmas! I have SO many movies I want to watch this year, but I will just tell you them as I watch them because it does not fit nicely on the list!  So far we have watched Bad Santa, Scrooged, Elf, and the Jim Carrey version of The Grinch!  So, 4 out of 24! :)  We are going to have a fun month!!  Here's my Bucket List: 

Love you all, and I hope you're having an amazing December so far!!

Quick Thanksgiving Recap!

Wow, November seriously flew by SO fast!!  That was crazy!!  Kevin and I went to CA for a week to have Thanksgiving with my family, and OH MY GOSH we had such a great time!  We went to Sacramento twice to try to see some friends and family, and the rest of the time we hung out in Oakdale and had a really great time!  I love being at the ranch - It's so peaceful and relaxing!  And Thanksgiving dinner was AMAZING of course - Wow can my mom cook!!  It was delicious.  I loooved getting to spend some quality time with my family, and my nieces are growing up way too quickly!! It was so fun getting to hang with them. 

Here's my parents' sweet dog Maggie!  

I never posted about our Thanksgiving decorations!  Here's a bunch of pictures: 

 I'm sorry it took me so long to post about Thanksgiving!  Crazy.  I'll do a December post soon!!

Our Halloween! And don't forget to vote tomorrow!

Hey guys!  I can't believe we're already about a week into November!  Crazy!  And on that note, don't forget to vote tomorrow!!  It's such an important election, so please please please vote.

Our Halloween was pretty good. It started out GREAT, and I was having so much fun hanging out outside with McGee and our neighbor Ed, and giving candy to trick-or-treaters.  We bought full-sized candy bars to hand out for the first time ever, because Amazon had an amazing deal, so we were like "Let's go for it!".  So, the kids were loving it, we were getting a good amount of trick-or-treaters, and it was super fun! But... 

Then McGee went in our house to use the bathroom at around 7:30pm... and this van of kids pulled up (so they weren't even walking around the neighborhood... they were just driving around).  One 17-year-old-ish kid got out, along with 4 other kids that ranged all the way down to about a 5-year-old kid.  So, 5 kids, aged 5 to 17.  Well, they came over to me and I was like "Hey guys!  Happy Halloween!  Go ahead and pick one!".  Well, these kids started grabbing handfuls of the full-sized candy bars.  And I was like, "No wait!  Just grab one, you guys!", and they were all still going back for more candy.  They basically told me "No, we're going to take more than one", and I had to pull my bucket away as they were still reaching for it and grabbing more.  I told them again that they were just supposed to take one and they again told me no, and I was so frustrated that I actually went into one of the kid's buckets and grabbed some of the candy bars (he had literally taken 8 of our full-sized candy bars), and I grabbed like 6 of them back.  But while I was doing that the oldest kid was reaching back in for more.  They finally felt like they'd taken enough and left me to go across the street to Ed.  So, it was truly awful.  They took almost all of our candy, and I felt totally violated and pushed-around and sad.  We ended up having to borrow some candy from our neighbor Ed so that we had candy to give to the rest of the trick-or-treaters for the night.

Our front window! 

Our front door! 

Our pumpkins in the daylight!  It was about 5:30 when we went out there and started getting trick-or-treaters! 

Our set-up!  We also added some bat-shaped lights to our table once it started to get darker, but I forgot to take a picture of those! 

Here's the sweatshirt I wore!  I had to cover it with a jacket later in the evening when it got really cold. 

Our pumpkins once it got dark!  Mine is on the left, and McGee's is on the right. 

I've taken a bunch of pictures of our neighborhood lately because it has been pretty glorious to look at!  So, get ready for an overload of trees/leaves pictures:

This is just up the hill from our house, looking down the next street!

Further down that same street... 

And further down that street again! (it's a very long street)

Just around the block from us. 

Our house and our yard!  You can see our pumpkins on our front porch! 

Around the corner from us!  And this isn't a filter or anything... Those are the ACTUAL colors of the leaves! (they almost look like flowers, but they're leaves!)  

So tomorrow is election day and I feel excited to vote but very nervous/anxious about the results.  I am planning on doing some cooking when I get home from voting (I get to leave work at 2pm tomorrow thanks to a crazy project I was working on last week!  I get to leave 2 hours early one day as a reward, so I'm choosing tomorrow so I can hopefully avoid long lines).  I'm going to make a version of shepherd's pie for dinner because it'll make me focus on something besides election results for a while :)  It'll help calm me, hopefully!!  I love you all, and I hope you had a great Halloween!  Don't forget to vote tomorrow!! 

Happy Halloween!

I'm SO happy and excited that it's Halloween!!  I'm excited to sit outside tonight with our neighbor and hand out candy to trick-or-treaters!  Today (Wednesday) is my normal work-from-home day, so I'm so happy I get to work from home on Halloween!  I am watching The Sixth Sense right now, and I think I'll watch The Shining next!!  And we just carved pumpkins last night, so today I'm going to roast up the pumpkin seeds! 

I'll give you a better look at our pumpkins after tonight!  

We have had a really amazing Fall so far!!  We've been busy with lots of fun Fall activities, but we've also had lots of time to relax and enjoy being home.  Last weekend we were supposed to go camping at Assateague Island with McGee's family and a bunch of their family friends.  If you haven't heard of Assateague Island, it's the island that has a bunch of wild horses.  We tried to go camping there a few years ago with this same group (there's a blog post about it), but a hurricane decided to hit so we had to quickly go to a hotel.  Well, a nearby hurricane was supposed to cause a lot of crazy weather issues again last weekend (thunderstorms and crazy winds), so this time the group called it off ahead of time because they didn't want everyone to travel there and then have to scramble to leave again like last time.  So, we ended up having a free weekend!  Since the weather was supposed to be pretty terrible (crazy rain, etc), we thought it would be the perfect time to go to the Philadelphia Zoo!  We looove going to the zoo when the weather is terrible, because there are ZERO people there and the animals love it.  We had a great time and the zoo had lots of cool Halloween decorations, etc! 

You guys!  Look at the beautiful colors in the trees at the zoo! 

These two tigers REALLY wanted the leopard that was next to them! 

You guys!!  Seriously!!  Such a beautiful tree at the zoo. 

The otters were SOOOO playful while we were there!  We watched them for awhile! 

The giraffes! There's a new baby giraffe there.  

Beau!  The baby giraffe!  

Here's another picture of cute little Beau. 

We got the see the Sloth Bear climb the tree (SO crazy fast!) and go after this pumpkin that the zookeepers had hung from the tree! 

After he knocked it down he scurried down the tree SO fast and started eating his pumpkin.

Baby gorilla! 

The dad gorilla... He was NOT amused by the baby. 

Another AMAZING tree at the zoo!!!  I can't even handle all the pretty colors. 

Time for a Fall Bucket List update!!  We've done a LOT of the things from our list already.

We've decorated for Halloween (I'll take more pictures tonight and post them later this week!), we went and got apples/pumpkins/gourds, last night we carved pumpkins and today I'll roast the seeds, and we watched a LOT of Halloween movies!  You guys, Halloweentown is GARBAGE!!!  That movie was just awful.  I'd heard it was cheesy yet amazing like Hocus Pocus (and I loooove Hocus Pocus!), and it's actually just really terrible.  I apologize if you like it and I've offended you, but please know in your heart-of-hearts that Halloweentown is a really terrible movie.  I felt bad for all of the actors in it (especially the amazing Debbie Reynolds).  We will NOT be watching that one again!  But, all of the other movies have been AMAZING!! And for the "one more horror movie" we watched The Lost Boys.  That movie scared me SO much when I was a kid, but now it's just awesome and funny.  Kevin had never seen it, and he really liked it too!  It's 80s amazingness for sure.  

For the rest of the items on the list, we've definitely had lots of Oktoberfest beers (I love them!  I think they're my favorite kind of beer), and I've made some apple goodness!  I made apple-cheddar scones.  This weekend I will also be making an apple pie!  For pumpkin goodness, I haven't really made much aside from the Trader Joe's things I previously mentioned. We've made some soups but no breads yet, and we've definitely had some football and Crockpot Sundays!  And for the Fall camping, I'm not sure if that's going to happen this year or not now that Assateague was cancelled. We might still try to go in November, but I'm not sure if we'll have time and if the weather will cooperate. 

Apple cheddar scones!  They turned out really great.  

Apple picking! 

Happy Halloween!!  I hope everyone has a really fun and safe night!!