Modesto Thanksgiving

Saturday and Sunday we went to Modesto to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Kerr family. Gayle and I had a festive baking party Saturday morning; I frosted cookies while she baked pies.

Sunday we had Thanksgiving dinner with everyone. This is just the dessert, drink, and appetizer table!  

Everything was delicious and it was nice to have the days spread out so we could thoroughly enjoy celebrating Thanksgiving with both families.

Christmas Tree Hunt

Friday after Thanksgiving we had our traditional Christmas tree hunt. Our first stop was Home Depot, where the Nickells, Trevinos, and Joshua and I got trees.

You always must smell the trees as part of the experience; Christmas trees smell so good!

Isaac held two trees up so Emery could choose her first Christmas tree.

Next, we crossed the street and found a tree for Dad and Mom at the Christmas tree lot.

Joshua carried our tree up to our apartment.

Even with all the boxes around, having our Christmas tree up makes everything more cozy and festive, plus it smells great!

Visalia Thanksgiving

We started Thanksgiving day off running the Race Against Hunger 5K in downtown Visalia. Heather, Jonah, Michelle, Joshua, and I were part of the run while the rest of the family participated in the walk. It was fun to have everyone out there together.

The runners after the race.

The walkers after finishing.

And the whole group together; we are now an even dozen, six boys and six girls!

Our first 5K together.

After showering and eating breakfast for a second time (the first one was more of a pre-race snack), we spent a little time organizing and I baked an apple pie. It was quite an adventure because we didn't have very much of our kitchen stuff there yet, so I was missing things like the liquid measuring cup and measuring spoons. The pie had wheat flour in the topping and freshly ground salt and nutmeg because that's what we had. Thankfully, I had decided to use a store bought crust so I didn't have any crust challenges. I finally got the pie put together and in the oven. Almost as soon as the oven got hot, the smoke detector started going off and Joshua had to unplug it. Then the oven cooked very hot and the pie started to burn on top before it had baked half the time called for. I quickly pulled it out saying I needed foil, which of course we didn't have. Thankfully, there was some left in the van from our trip, so we hurried out there and grabbed it so I could finish baking the pie. In the end, it was delicious.

After the baking adventure, we headed out to Dad and Mom's house where we loaded up the trailer and van with more of our stuff, then helped prepare Thanksgiving dinner. We had special guests this year, Garrett and  his friend, Nathan, joined us from southern California. It was quite the feast.

Moving

We finally found an apartment and were able to sign the lease and start moving in Tuesday evening of Thanksgiving week. I would not recommend moving over Thanksgiving week, it was pretty hectic and we are still surrounded by boxes, but we are so excited to be living in our first little place.

Here is our first meal together in the apartment. One of the ladies from church gave us this beautiful table because she wasn't using it anymore; we were surprised and grateful.

Dad was planning to bring the trailer to Visalia Friday morning to go Christmas tree hunting, so on Thanksgiving we loaded up the furniture from my old room at my parents' house and a number of boxes. Then everyone helped unload Friday morning before we found trees.

My first canning project was green tomato relish with green tomatoes from Mom's garden. 

I'm not quite sure what I think of the relish. The recipe called for five large onions and I only put in four, but it's still quite oniony. 

Birthday Pottery

Micah turned six last week and Joshua and I took him to paint pottery for his birthday present.

We arrived at the store twelve minutes before they opened, so we took Micah to a bakery next door and had a treat while we waited. A cookie before lunch!!

They had recently had a birthday party, so we got to sit at the table by the banner.

Micah picked out a turkey to paint and we painted an ice cream dish.

Although the lady working there drove us a bit nuts at the beginning by hovering over us (she actually told Micah how to paint his turkey at one point!), we enjoyed the opportunity to spend some time with just Micah and I think he had fun on his special excursion.