Christmas Season is Here!!!

Happy December!  I'm soooo excited that it's Christmas season!!  Our house is decorated (pictures coming soon), I've made a good dent in my Christmas shopping, and I'm starting to feel that Christmas spirit!  But, before I can share my Christmas Bucket List and my Christmas Movie List with you, I should wrap up November!! 

My first time ever cooking a turkey went great!!  In case you missed my last post, our sweet neighbor gave us a fresh turkey on Tuesday, so on Wednesday while I was working from home I cooked my first turkey!  It was 20 lbs, so it took like 4.5 or 5 hours, and it was actually kinda fun to cook!  I didn't love prepping it, but I liked basting it and seeing its progress throughout the day.  Plus, the smell was amazing.  Kevin got home from work and it was all ready to come out of the oven (perfect timing!), and then he carved it up!  While he was carving it we both had the idea that we should give one of the breasts to our neighbor that gave us the turkey, so we took that over to her house before we even started eating our meal! 

My turkey!  I rubbed it with butter that had sage, thyme, and I can't remember what else.  It was delicious though! 

Our Thanksgiving was awesome, and McGee's dad out-did himself again!  The food was awesome, and we also got to hang out with Kevin's cousin's new baby!  Her name is Elena, and she's only about a month old.  I didn't take any pictures of her or of the family, but I did take a picture of my handsome husband carving the turkey on Thanksgiving at his parents' house! 

Ok, now onto Christmas!!  I have a list of 26 Christmas movies I want to see this year!!  I was going to do 25, but then I just had to add one more!!  Here's my Bucket List first: 

Here's my list of 26 Christmas movies: 

1. Elf
2. Mickey’s Christmas Carol
3. Muppet’s Christmas Carol
4. Frosty the Snowman
5. Rudolph
6. Santa Clause is Coming to Town
7. Year Without a Santa Clause
8. Christmas Vacation
9. Love Actually
10. The Grinch (old cartoon)
11. The Grinch (Jim Carrey)
12. The Grinch (new one - never seen it!)
13. Home Alone
14. Home Alone 2
15. Die Hard
16. Charlie Brown Christmas
17. White Christmas
18. Miracle on 34th Street (1947 version OF COURSE)
19. It’s a Wonderful Life
20. Prep & Landing 
21. Scrooged
22. A Christmas Story
23. Fred Claus
24. The Night Before
25. The Nightmare Before Christmas
26. It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947).  My Uncle Jim just told me about this one, and it sounds great!  I want to find it and watch it.  

And just for fun, here's a cute picture of Guinness from a few days ago: 

November is almost over!

I can't believe Thanksgiving is in just a few days!  I'm sooo excited for Thanksgiving.  I love the parade, I love football, and I love food!  So, it's a great day.  Now, I usually wish for crazy weather (snow, rain, freezing temps, winds) for Thanksgiving for the parade to make it more exciting, but now I feel really bad because apparently the winds might be SO bad on Thanksgiving morning in NYC that they might not fly all of the big balloons!  So... it's basically all my fault, and I'm really sorry.  Maybe it won't end up being as bad as they're thinking, and the balloons will still fly in the parade...

I'm making an apple pie as my contribution for Thanksgiving dinner, and tomorrow (day before Thanksgiving) I'm actually cooking my first turkey, because our neighbor gave us a fresh turkey.  So, I read online that fresh turkeys are only good for 1-2 days in the fridge, so I didn't want to risk it by waiting til this weekend!  I work from home tomorrow, so we'll be eating turkey for dinner tomorrow night as long as it turns out ok!  I'll be sure to take a picture of my first turkey!! 

I took a picture of my Thanksgiving decorations! 

Here's everything!  Including 2 gourds :) I love gourds! 

Here's Guinness cuddling his pumpkin toy leftover from Halloween!  He loooves his pumpkin toy.

A few weeks ago Kevin, Mo, and I took the train up to NYC to visit Kevin and Mo's cousin Ryan and his wife Janet in Brooklyn, and their new baby Elena!  Elena is sooo tiny and cute, and she just slept the whole time we were there!  We all took turns holding her though!  

Here's Mo and little Elena!  Mo also knitted that blanket that little Elena is wrapped in!  It looks amazing. 

While we were in Brooklyn, we decided to stop by Brooklyn Brewery because it's a pretty huge and awesome brewery, and it was literally like 2 blocks from Ryan and Janet's apartment. 

Last weekend Kevin and I took a quick roadtrip up to Hershey, PA!  It's only like an hour from our house, and we wanted to go see the Christmas decorations at the Hershey Lodge, and we also picked up some concert tickets at the stadium in Hershey because Hall & Oates are going to be playing there this winter!  And while we were in Hershey, we also stopped by Troegs Brewery for a tour and some lunch. 

Hershey Lodge!

Hershey Lodge! 

Hershey Lodge! 

Troegs! 

Troegs has this whole area where they put really cool art that people have made for a Troegs art competition.  Here's a cool hop bearded man! 

Here's a cool skull made out of some Troegs parts (a bottle opener, some bottle caps, etc)

A little felt man! 

A recipe for making Troegs beer. 

 

And here's a super cool painting of an octopus with a hop body! 

 And lastly, here's my updated Fall Bucket List:

I've finished almost everything!  Still have to watch Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and the Thanksgiving Day Parade.  We did not make it to Lambertville to look at Halloween decorations this year, and we didn't see Young Frankenstein but we DID see Hamilton so that's even better!!  Haha :) . I had never seen What We Do in the Shadows and I LOVED it - It is SO funny!!!!  I was cracking up.  And Kevin and I had never seen A Quiet Place, and we LOVED it too!!  It was so good. 

That's it for now! I'll do another post after Thanksgiving with a picture of my turkey! 

Halloween, and other Fall activities!

Hey guys!  Wow, November has already started off busy!  I haven't even posted about Halloween yet!  I can't believe it's already mid-ish November!  So, here is a quick update with what we've been up to since we got back from our roadtrip, since that was my last post:

Decorated for Halloween!

Here are our new Halloween decorations for this year!  I didn't take a picture of all of our decorations (dang it!), but I did get a picture of these amazing new additions

 Bought Guinness some cute Halloween squeakie toys for $3 total! They were on clearance, and I couldn't resist:

He loooved them.  And for like 75 cents each, they lasted a pretty good amount of time! 

Went to an orchard to pick some apples and get some pumpkins! I made an apple pie with the apples!

After visiting the orchard, we stopped by the little town next to the orchard to go to a few breweries and see all the cool Halloween decorations in town! 

Amazing! This thing was huge. 

Brewery #1: Chatty Monks Brewing. We weren't super impressed with the beers we tried!

Brewery #2 was Saucony Creek Brewing, and it was in this beautiful train station that had been abandoned. Apparently it was in really bad shape when they bought it, but they did a beautiful job of fixing it up!  And when we were there they had lots of Halloween decorations too.  The food was amazing, and a few of the beers were great too! 

We've also been going for tons of walks around our neighborhood with Guinness! The trees have been looking amazing. 

 Halloween was great!  The weather was kinda nuts that day, so we didn't get a TON of trick-or-treaters, but the ones that did come were really great and so fun and polite. So, that was WAY better than the group of kids from last year that like mugged me for all of our candy while Kevin was in the house using the bathroom. 

Our pumpkins!  Kevin is on the left, and I'm on the right. 

All lit up! 

 A few weeks ago we also went to the zoo!  We had a great time.

And after the zoo we stopped by Crime & Punishment Brewing because we'd never tried it and it's so close to the zoo!  We loved the beers and the food there. 

 That was the rest of our October and the beginning of November!  We've definitely been busy, but everything is good!  I'll do a Fall Bucket List update in my next post, I promise!

Roadtrip Post #4: Cooperstown, NY

Cooperstown is ADORABLE.  It's such a cute little town!  Loved it. And the Baseball Hall of Fame was so well done!  It was in a beautiful building, and I really liked how it was organized. Here's a bunch of pictures from our time at the Baseball Hall of Fame:

My favorite team is the O's! 

I took this for my family, because they love the A's!

And Kevin loves the Phillies! 

They had an amazing section on Babe Ruth, and kinda took you through his life chronologically!  It was so great, and I learned a lot.

Jackie Robinson!  

Women's baseball! 

A League of Their Own! 

This was the uniform of a woman who played on mens teams, and she thought it was difficult to play in the skirt she was supposed to wear so she used bloomers for her uniform instead! 

Some cool vintage A's stuff! 

They had a little section on ALS in baseball

Kevin and his buddy the Phillies Phanatic! 

Hank Aaron!  They had a nice section on him too. 

They had a whole huge section on records within baseball.  This particular one was about Most Consecutive Games Played (formerly Lou Gehrig, and now Cal Ripken Jr!).

 The Hall of Fame was beautiful!  I took a picture of the "First Class" from 1936, and then we found a bunch of other players we liked from other years:

After we were done with the Baseball Hall of Fame, we were ready to head over to Ommegang Brewery for a tour!  If you've ever had any of the Game of Thrones beers, then you've had Ommegang!  They do a lot of other delicious beers too! 

 

 

 That was Cooperstown!!  We had an amazing time, and the next day we drove back home!!  Our trip flew by SO fast!! We're already feeling ready for another vacation, but our December CA trip will be here in no time!!