A Blessed Thanksgiving Weekend

This past weekend was wonderful! It was also a good reminder of just how truly blessed I am and how I need to remember each day, not just Thanksgiving and my birthday, to sing His praises and not take anything for granted.

We spent this Thanksgiving with Jason's aunt and uncle in Austin. We started the day's festivities with a traditional turkey trot (Jason and I have done one the past three years and plan to do one every year if possible).

Afterwards we helped get ready for the big meal! Jason and I made a carrot souffle from the recipe in the cooking class I took two weeks ago. It was amazing!! There was a full house with lots of little ones running around and we enjoyed getting to know new family.

Then there was the traditional Black Friday shopping - the ladies spent time looking through all the ads and mapping out the plan of attack. Jason and I made a list of our top picks and practiced our motto - "Buy now, return later, elbows out!" ;-)

All in all it was a successful night! We visited Walmart, Kohls, and Best Buy. Our top finds were a sewing machine travel case that wil be perfect for the sewing class I'm taking next spring, a bluetooth keyboard for the ipad, and five seasons of Criminal Minds for just $15 each. It wasn't without effort though! Here are a couple pictures from the night - the Best Buy line is stil at least two stores down from the Ross you can just barely see in the distance.

At Kohl's the line wrapped around the side of the store and along the back. It was ridiculous.

Friday morning we headed back to Houston, but not before stopping at Shipley's to get a birthday donut!

On the way back we stopped in Brenham to see if the Blue Bell creamery was open for tours. Unfortunately it wasn't, but the gift shop and ice cream store were! We got a scoop of a new seasonal flavor called Christmas sugar cookie and sat outside enjoying the nice weather. (Hey, calories don't count on your birthday right?? Hmmm, well, good thing I ran 19 miles on Sunday...hopefully that helped!)

Friday night we had a birthday dinner with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law at our favorite Houston restaurant, Ruggles Grill. It was delcious and I was thankful to be able to spend my birthday with family!

Afterwards we went to drinks at Anvil. The only person missing was my sweet niece who was at home in bed with her grandma and grandpa. Hopefully I get to see her again soon!

Jason got me Adobe Creative Suite (woohoo student discounts!) and a birthday cupcake from my favorite store, Ooh La La.

My sister-in-law knows me so well. She made me a icing cupcakes - JUST ICING! Amazing! :-)

Saturday was spent doing odds and ends around the house. I made homemade turkey noodle soup with the leftover bones and turkey from Thursday.

I used my laminator (yes, I own a laminator. But amazingly enough, not a label maker...) to make garden labels for the different plants. The beans are still growing like crazy and we are on our way to having a second cucumber soon! We've started harvesting basil and freezing for future use because there is so much!

It was an absolutely amazing Thanksgiving and birthday weekend. I have so much to be grateful for and so many blessings in my life. Here is just a small list of some of the things I cherish and am blessed to have in my life:
- A personal and ever-growing relationship with Jesus Christ
- An AMAZING husband that works incredibly hard at school and work to provide for our us
- Family - as widespread, unique, and complicated as they are (we have four families in four different states)
- Lots of friends that are incredibly supportive and uplifting
- Jobs that we enjoy and that more than adequately provide for us
- A house that has room for us to grow someday (in five years ;-) )

I hope your Thanksgiving weekend was just as blessed and memorable as mine was! :-)

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Advent Wreath!

I realize it's not even Thanksgiving yet, but it seems Christmas is on everyone's mind already! Including me! :-)

Everywhere I turn I see Christmas decorations up and I am anxiously waiting for this weekend so I can put my up. One of the things that I am lacking though is an advent wreath. I have nativity scenes galore, stockings, reindeer, and santas, but no advent wreath. And lighting the advent candles on the Sundays leading up to Christmas is a tradition I love and want to incorporate in our home each week as a family.

It seems however, that no one else is in agreement with me. At least the higher ups that decide what Christmas decorations to market and sell each year. I have seen very few advent wreaths in years past and none that I was crazy about. So I decided I should try making one.

Some would argue that engineers are inherently creative, but it's a different kind in my opinion. We are creative in solving problems (my decision to make a wreath when I couldn't find one!). However, my creativity fails in that I am a very visual person. Show me a picture of something and I can probably take a good stab at re-creating it. Ask me to artistically create something on my own and I laugh at you. So I started this project on Google images - trying to find a picture of something I could create. I looked and looked at various advent wreaths, searched for blog tutorials on DIY designs, etc. and came up with nothing tangible. Enter creative mode.

On Saturday I took a trip to Hobby Lobby hoping for inspiration and having a few scattered ideas in my mind of what I wanted. I saw plenty of circular hanging wreaths things that could easily be converted to a table advent wreath once decorations were added or even used as-is as an advent wreath since they were decorated (and a bit $$ for the decorated ones). However, either of these would require using separate candle holders sitting around the wreath and be completely independent pieces. I wanted one cohesive piece that's sole purpose was an advent wreath - not 4 votives and a wreath all sitting together on a table in the pattern of an advent wreath. Call me picky, but it's not the same to me.

So I wandered around and was able to start putting together the makings of a wreath - a circular green foam from the floral department, a long piece of garland, little pine cone thingys (that's the technical term), and a random assortment of other Christmas-themed florals used for wreath-making. I bought everything I thought I might use knowing I would keep the receipt and probably return a few things.

Here's what I ended up purchasing for this DIY advent wreath:

I fully intended to take progress pictures along the way...and then the next thing I knew I had put all of the garland on. And I definitely wasn't taking it off for a photo op!

First, I measured and marked where the candles would go (yes, the engineer in me required a ruler for this project.) Then I cut small lengths of the garland, stripped away a small part of the branches, and bent the metal to push into the foam core. I did this along the side and the top. I used the extra small branches I cut off to help fill in open spots and bent and fluffed the garland around the foam core.

Here's the result:

I liked the simplistic look so much at this point that I debated just leaving the wreath be as-is, "undecorated", to really emphasize the candles. That or I was tired of craft time - one or the other. All joking aside though, I do like a more simplistic look over one of extravagance. I played around with some of the decorations and decided to use just the gold accents. I plan on purchasing one or two more "strings" of the gold balls that you see in the photo and add them, but then I think I will be done. And I will have accomplished my goal - to create an advent wreath. Not too bad for an engineer if I do say so myself! ;-)

Here's the final product!

(PS. Overall this wreath cost ~$13. I feel accomplished! :-) )

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We Have A Cucumber!!

It's become a semi-daily habit to check the garden and see how everything is doing. We move the bean stalks to force them to grow up the chicken wire laying along the fence. We frown at the place where the bell pepper plants have disappeared. We take notes (yes, even Jason!) in our garden diary on what's doing well and what's not.

This weekend we found our first cucumber!!!

The beans have all sprouted and are climbing up the wire. Some are doing better than others and this weekend we had to research which ones we pick fresh and which we let dry on the plant. We ended up picking 12 beans, 6 of which we ate straight from the plant and 6 of which we used in our stiry-fry dinner tonight! We picked cherokee wax, bush snap, blue lake, and tiger's eye.

The basil is also going crazy!

As is the cilantro!

And soon we will have a carrot!!! :-)

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