Thanksgiving

We had a fun and delicious Thanksgiving. My little brother, David, came from Provo, UT for a few days and it was fun to hang out with him. He was really cute and sweet with Kathryn and it was fun for her to have more time to get to know him better. She was very fascinated with all the "toys" he brought with him-like his phone, i-pod, laptop, etc. She loves books and easily got him to read to her...
David also got Kathryn hooked on eggnog! :) We are actually very happy about this because she doesn't like milk. So we have been mixing eggnog with milk and are gradually putting in more milk and less eggnog. Hopefully she'll be drinking straight milk soon. Thank you David! You're a genius! :)

On Thanksgiving, we slept in and then did a lot of cooking. We joined a bunch of other people at church for a Thanksgiving potluck. We brought a turkey, sweet potatoes (pretty much the best recipe ever-check it out!), mashed potatoes and gravy. It was the first time we had ever cooked a traditional turkey and amazingly it turned out so well! It was really fun to have Thanksgiving with friends and we definitely got stuffed with great food. Yum! Unfortunately we were working so hard to get everything ready, we forgot to take pictures of it all. Oh well.

On black Friday, David convinced me to get up before the crack of dawn and hit some sales at Target and Wal-Mart. I had never done that before and it was fun and we got in on some great sales-yea! :) Drew unfortunately had to go in to work that day because a big project had come in that week. My parents had a long layover at the Denver airport that day on their way home from a big trip to Australia, Japan, and Hawaii, so David, Kat and I went and hung out with them. We got to see a lot of pictures, hear about their trip, and came home with a lot of nice souvenirs :) Thanks mom and dad!
Later that day, David, Kat, and I went to the zoo with a friend that was in town for Thanksgiving. It was great to see her again. Her daughter is about 3 1/2 months older than Kathryn, so that was fun too. It was a perfect fall day to go to the zoo and we had fun even though some of the animals weren't out.

Kat and David

Bonnie, Sadie, Kat, Emily

Thanks, David, for coming and making our Thanksgiving so fun! We miss you!

Much Belated Summer Garden Post

I have been going to blog about this for months, but since it was kind of an ongoing project I kept putting it off. Well now that this project ended about a month-and-a-half ago telling you all about it is way overdue. So here we go. This past summer one of our friends from church roto-tilled her backyard, divided it into plots and let anyone who wanted to come plant their own garden. We had never really tried growing anything but had wanted to for awhile so this was a new and fun adventure for us. This friend lives about 2 miles away and we would rollerblade over to her house with Kat in the jogging stroller and work on the garden together. We planted starter plants of pumpkin, butternut squash, zucchini, green onions/chives, and green bell peppers. We also planted lettuce and parsley from seeds. We figured we couldn't go wrong with plants that had already been started for us, but we were pleasantly surprised with how well our lettuce and parsley did as well. In addition to the things we planted in the garden, we also grew herbs in planters out on our porch at our apartment. The herbs we grew (also from starter plants) were rosemary, basil, sage, oregano, green onion, and a red bell pepper plant (I threw that one in for fun because this was before we found out we could plant at our friend's house). It was a really fun summer project and so nice to have fresh vegetables and herbs! Now, on to the plethora of pictures! :)

Here is when Kathryn and I first planted our herbs:

Oregano and basil plants:

Red bell pepper and rosemary plants:

A couple of weeks later we got another planter and planted sage, a green onion, and more basil. Here is what everything looked like at the end of the season:

Green onion and oregano:
Basil and sage:
Rosemary and red bell pepper (yes, it only produced one-I learned my lesson:)

Now here's some pictures we took of our garden plot:

Kat had a lot of fun playing in the dirt and pulling off pieces of the big zucchini leaves

Zucchini:

Butternut squash:
Pumpkin (if you look closely you'll see the orange string marking our plot and then see how far out of it the pumpkin went!):
Lettuce (with some green onions/chives in the background):
Green bell pepper (with more growing room this one actually produced 4 or 5):
Parsley:

I think my favorite part of the garden was our pumpkin plant. It grew four good pumpkins. Here are a couple of pictures of Kathryn with some of them:

I became attached to our cute pumpkins, and since we never ended up carving them for Halloween, I've tried to make them last as decorations...
But now that we have below zero temperatures and they are shriveled and frozen solid it's probably time for them to meet the dumpster. Sad day!