November is here and almost Gone!

November has been a very busy month - we traveled to the City where my husband had a surgery on his eyes - that was an adventure last week - but at least we had great weather and ended up in an awesome hotel. Let's see - the month has just totally blown by and here we already are at the end of it. We decided to stay here for Thanksgiving - we've just been running around too much lately, and the thought of a a 7-8 hour drive back and forth and then running to everyone's houses for dinner just exhausted us in the thinking about it stage. My husband's work has been very busy, and he's had several nights that he's had to work which has thrown all of us off. So - we stayed home and cooked our dinner and had it that night. It wasn't too fancy - we did the traditional. We did Emeril's brined turkey recipe that we like - but our bird was huge and took a LONG time to cook. We did pumpkin, lemon meringue, banana cream and a pecan pie. The pecan was great but turned out like a caramel soup with set pecans on top. I have yet to find a good recipe which works here - maybe it is the altitude? (It's nice to have a scapegoat):) We did yamples (yams and apples - one of our favorites), cheesy beans (another favorite), potatoes and gravy, and rolls. We forwent the stuffing and the salad as I would be the only one to eat the salad, and it was already way too much food. We also put together a spinach appetizer dip which we munched on before hand. We topped the dinner off with grape juice grown in our own backyard. We hadn't tried it - so it was kind of fun. It was okay - not as amazing as we'd hoped, but it was from our yard (and they told us you couldn't grow grapes here - altitude again) - we mixed it with sprite - which used to be my favorite part of Thanksgiving with Grandma and Grandpa J. After dinner we played some games and later came back for the pies. Our eldest said it was the best day ever, cause we let her have a piece of all four pies. Albeit they were teensy, she couldn't finish them all - but she thought it was pretty cool as did our youngest. On Friday, we just hung around, played games, did laundry, had a family foosball tourney, and did a little ping pong as well. The girls found a box and decorated it and have played about 150 different games with it. The rest of the day (no wonder it was a blur) was spent Christmas shopping. (I got a large majority of our shopping done a couple of weeks ago when my husband was home during the day after working during the night.) The girls loved to shop for each other, and then trade parents and shop for the other parent as well - it was a LONG shopping trip, but most of it is now done!
Today, we did a major house clean - I finally paid some attention to my plants - they've been severely neglected for the past 1 1/2 years. I finally repotted some of them and trimmed them and finally threw out some really dead ones. It is nice to get things back into order. We moved some furniture so that we can get out the Christmas stuff tomorrow and start setting it up. That was originally today's goal, but we got it prepped and after Church we'll go at it. Instead of the Christmas stuff, we went and saw the Bee movie. I don't believe we'll be purchasing it - but it was okay and the girls enjoyed it.
Hopefully that sums up our lives for the past couple of weeks. I've been off from Seminary for this week, and been able to catch up with staying up late and messing around at night and sleep in. Very Nice!