Thanksgiving

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!

Jocelyn

With the craziness of getting ready for Thanksgiving I kinda overlooked blogging about Jocelyn's birthday. We took the family and one of her friends to see Megamind (which wasn't as awesome as I had hoped) and to eat at chic-fil-a. Her birthday fell on a Sunday so we cooked a dinner of her choice and had cupcakes and opened presents. The nana's video chatted so they could see her open their presents.

This is the face of a little girl who got something she wanted but didn't know that she wanted it. She has spent countless hours in her room just coloring on it.

(an Asher napkin)

Etsy

I actually opened up shop a few weeks ago but I have been waiting to announce it till I had a few more designs in the shop. Since we're job hunting I decided I would do what I could to help pay the bills around here. So if you are planning a baby shower, getting married, having a baby or sending out Christmas cards please consider me for your designing needs. KATIE-DID DIGITAL DESIGNS

So far this is my only top seller. I've sold 5!

And here are some etsy banners I have designed for LOVE, AUNTIE M and BELLA FROU FROU

ps: Thanks for all our lovely models for letting me use your family photos to make it look like I've done a lot of designing already.

Up in the Air

 Chris came home a little after one in the afternoon yesterday and told me he was laid off. I felt it in my bones all morning that it was going to happen but I didn't think it would come a few hours later. The only way I can describe the blow is the moment you first heard about September 11th. Shock. Sadness. Epicness (yeah, its a word) What does this mean? What are we going to do now? Why did this happen? Thinking about Chris being home with me was awesome, and then I would remember why, and my heart would sting. The only thing worse than Chris telling me he was laid off was thinking about him sitting in the chair across from his boss as he read the letter, "your position with University of Phoenix is being eliminated in order to align expenses with revenue projections and organizational goal."

5 years. His work anniversary was the same as our anniversary. It was a roller coaster ride of good and bad times but overall I loved UOP. Chris went to Top Performers 3 times in a row. Paid tuition. Health benefits. 401k contributions. Vacation and sick days... JOB SECURITY! That's always what I said before when I would tick off all the reasons we've stayed with the company so long.

We're staying positive and realistic. This is a great opportunity for us, and Chris has so much experience and talents we know and have faith that we will be just fine. We've already contacted our ward employment specialist and he's a fantastic resource. Even though our move to Colorado was the nail in our UOP coffin I'm so grateful to be living here. Without UOP my dream of living somewhere other than Arizona would never have happened. We have so much to be grateful for. 4 healthy kids. An amazing marriage. A kick-trash-awesome family and friends. The gospel. Facebook. My life is good. My heart and prayers are with the other 700ish laid off employees.

I was planning on blogging about the amazing Thanksgiving we had yesterday but it (blogging) just didn't seem so important anymore. Then today I kept debating should I blog? Should I continue on blogging and not mention this? Why is blogging even on my mind right now anyway?! So I decided to carry on and not to let this weigh me down (as much as I want to eat chocolate cake and watch movies all day).

Anyway, here's a couple pictures from our "We Rocked it like Plymouth Thanksgiving" just to hold you over till I report on the whole thing.

DAY ONE

 

DAY TWO

DAY THREE

 

DAY FOUR

Thank you Molly and Beth for bringing your families to visit us. It was such a blast being with you again. Our basement is always open. Miss you!

At 3:43pm, 7 years ago, I gave birth to my first baby. It was a LOOOONG 13 hour natural labor, with 3 hours of pushing. I was so grateful when she was finally here! We were 90% sure of naming her Cecily but when she came out blond we I thought she wasn't Cecily but a Jocelyn. She's been a joy in our life and makes me laugh every day with her whitty sense of humor (just like her daddy).

I've been a naughty blogger this week. I've been getting the house ready for Thanksgiving visitors, planning and executing a Relief Society Activity, and planning Jocelyn's birthday. We had such a busy weekend with an even busier couple more days as I work on school and clean the house. So I probably won't be blogging till the 29th.

Happy Katerans' Day!

Last year it snowed 10 days after moving here to Colorado. So since the beginning of October we have been waiting for it to snow. We waited, then Halloween came and we were still waiting. We kept checking the 10-day weather forecast and it said it would snow on our anniversary and then it changed to my birthday! I couldn't wait! Then it said it was supposed to snow on Tuesday and I said, nope only on my birthday. Well, 8ish Wednesday night it started to snow and I was just fine with that cause I was hoping it would snow so much I would get a snow day with Chris and the kids. (side story: growing up my mom always told me we had no school because everyone was celebrating my birthday. I always loved that!) Snow Day didn't happen but let me tell you coming downstairs and looking out the window and seeing this....

...my day was already awesome!

I was in a rush getting the kids off to school and Jocelyn told me I needed to check my desk. I had a dozen roses and a couple cards waiting for me. Cecily was ever singing Happy Birthday to me, all sorts of creative versions of the song. At 11:11am Chris sent me a bunch of happy birthday emails.

Chris came home early and we hung out and played in the snow till we went to dinner. 

 Chris told me I had to wear this feather boa and party hat. Chris had given me my present a month before (a trip away to Mesa for a visit). The kids got me pajama pants, slippers, necklace and fuzzy toy thing.

When we got home we had pumpkin pie (tradition started by my mom to give me pumpkin pie instead of cake on my birthday) and called it good.

 Thank you Chris for making my birthday so special! Next year my birthday will be 11 11 11 so we're trying to think of some cool things to do as a family for the awesome date/birthday celebration.