For Thanksgiving Chris's sisters Molly and Beth came with their little families to stay with us from Wednesday to Sunday morning. It was a fantastic time.
DAY ONE {WEDNESDAY}
Everyone arrived at 4:30am so we took the morning easy. It was CR-AZ-Y windy here all day and so when we went to the park to play it was freezing. Seriously, the windiest day I have seen here. As we were getting out of the car and walked to the play area I was holding Fiona against me so that the wind didn't beat into her face. It was blowing so hard I couldn't breath. Then I looked to my right and saw the Rocky Mountains and I thought about (cheesy moment alert) the pioneer women trekking across the mountains in the crazy cold winter wind. It was a pretty cool moment that gave me one more thing to be grateful for this year.
DAY TWO {THANKSGIVING}
We baked all our pies and rolls Wednesday night and then the cooking and baking started up early Thanksgiving. Chris, Molly, Beth, and I were literally in the kitchen all day. It was exhausting and the kids were driving me crazy but everything tasted AH-MAZ-ING! I made a gorgeous "GIVE THANKS" sign but Chris didn't get a photo of the food with the sign above it. Everything but the olives, most pie crusts, and fruit filling were homemade.
Had I known Chris was going to take the photo was this angle I would have switched the bowls around. I had 8 bowls when we got married and now I am only down to 5. So I had to borrow from my fanciest gold dishes.
I saw on a blog a lady who made cake plates by gluing sunday glasses to the bottom of a fancy plate. I got the idea to glue plates to candlestick holders.
homemade pickles
butternut squash with walnuts and vanilla... my new favorite
sausage apple stuffing and then in the bowl is sweet potato soup
green beans with bacon and cashews
Our oven is LAME! It was burning food left and right and we had to be strategic with when we cooked things so everything was warm by the time it was dinner. My potatoes look amazing but they probably needed to cook an additional 20 minutes.
The kids table. I uses a paper table cloth so they could color on. We were going to make them mac & cheese and chocolate milk but I completely forgot! Asher was offended we put him in his high chair and Porter was not going to sit at the kids table so he ate alone at the counter.
As a thank you to our guests for driving all this way to be with us for Thanksgiving I put together a gift basket and we had T-shirts made. The idea behind it was to make it something like the Vegas slogan "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" but we wanted to incorporate thanksgiving in it. Chris came home from work one day and told me "We rocked it like Plymouth!" and I loved it! {we totally did rock it BTW}
While cleaning up from dinner we spontaneously decided to go see Rapunzel (which is totally cute!) When we got home it was pie-city.
I think I'm going to leave you with a huge cliff hanger and tell you about day 3 & 4 later. (I'm totally procrastinating my homework to do this).
Life is still sweet in the Richards' house. Chris is a rock and is staying completely positive, getting showered and ironing a button up shirt every morning while I get to sleep in. I was 4 days breakdown free when Thursday hit and we got our first "thanks for your interest but we're not going to hire you" emails. I had kept myself busy all week with crafts and my etsy store (I sold 3 cards in one day!) then on Thursday and Friday my momentum hit the wall. But Chris picked me up and dusted me off and I'm back to holding it together again. I love that Chris is home all day with me, he's so amazing. The first week we couldn't be alone with our thoughts, we just stayed together all day and hugged at least every 30 minutes.
We got a couple good leads we're going off of that will probably bring us back to Arizona. (So keep your eye out for decent rental houses). Right now we're just looking for a job that will pay the bills while Chris gets his masters. Cecily told Chris the other day all she wants for Christmas is for him to find a new job. Thank you for your prayers and good vibes. We feel everyone's love and positive energy everyday. Thank you!
