Thanksgiving 2011

This year we spent Thanksgiving at Granny and Pa's home. It so nice to have it there since they live only two houses down from us! :)

It was a wonderful day, and we all were stuffed to the gills! Even Nolan ate up the mashed potatoes, stuffing and green bean casserole on my plate!

Here's some photos from the day!

One of two desert tables!

Nolan trying to get to the goodies on desert table 2.

My new nephew Aiden. He's just three weeks old here and a little over 6 pounds!

Here's Nolan getting ready to drive Papa Joe's car. He was waving goodbye to us!

Here's the family! This is the photo I took to make sure the timer of the camera was working. Yep, it worked! I love all the things people are doing!

Here's the keeper!

Here's the Bakan/Lee family! If you think the two guys look a lot a like. You're right! Their twins. Todd's in gray and Derek's in the burnt orange.

Here's my family!

Here's Nolan playing in the kitchen with his Thanksgiving vest. Super cute.

This is the first time Payton and Nolan really played together!

No they aren't kissing! Nolan likes to head bump people. It's his way of saying goodbye or I like you!

Happy Turkey Day

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Turkey Day!!! This is one of my favorite holidays and I have so many family members to share the day with! We have so much to be thankful for!

Here's some pictures from last year's dinner at my sister-in-law's sister-in-law's house! (Yes, I meant to type sister in law's twice). Although I wasn't due for having a baby until December 17th, I was so huge that I was convinced that I would have the baby during Thanksgiving week....didn't happen though.

Sorry the pictures aren't edited and sorry they are terrible, but everything tasted good that day. And taste is what matters!

Small table that was setup to put extra food on that didn't fit on the buffet.

My niece Payton chowing down on mashed taters!

Here's Derek and an enormously huge pregnant lady. How was I ever that big? I should have popped.

Barb's cute cupcakes!

Barb's cute fall leaf cookies!

You are probably are wondering what I contributed to the Thanksgiving meal last year.  About 25 pounds of sweet potatoes baked with maple syrup and brown sugar. My pregnancy mind kicked in and I made so much sweet potato, I thought we would never be through it!

Yum, yum, yum! Double Dark Chocolate Pomegranate Cookies.

Made these today from Dana over at Made! I ate them up and forgot to take a picture. Sorry! You'll just have to go see Dana's pictures.

Note: The first batch of these I over mixed, which broke up the pomegranate seeds and gave the cookies a woody taste. So don't over mix! The second batch was heavenly!

Fall Family Photo Bloopers

Okay, I thought I would share some blooper photos from our little fall family photo shoot. I only edited a couple of them, thought I would just throw the others up the way they are, for time's sake.

Oh, and each one has a title. They aren't humorous at all...just saying.

"Hold on. Is my mascara running?"

"Look at that non-interesting object!"

This pointing trick never worked once on getting Nolan's fingers out of his mouth, but Derek kept doing it through the shoot.

"Mom keeps smiling while baby loses his cool."

"Baby loses pants. Mom pulls them back up."

"Mom tries to fix baby's shirt. Ruins photo."

This could have been a nice one if I weren't doing what I'm doing.

"Baby grabs mom's hair."

"Baby still holds onto mom's hair. Dad leaves baby and mom to settle hair pulling."

Like I said, not funny at all. I mean that seriously, too. I didn't write those and think: 'Boy, those sure are clever."

Turkey Day Vest

Nolan's Thanksgiving outfit is now complete! Complete, that is, with a turkey on his vest!

I think it turned out so cute and wanted to share! Nolan will definitely be saying, "gobble, gobble," in this:

I will post my Turkey pattern later as our scanner is not cooperating.

Good Deal And Something To Hide

Last November, when I was hugely pregnant, Derek had knee surgery and a week off of work. He was supposed to use a little of that time to install closet doors on the baby's room, but it never happened.

Fast forward a year. It's November again, and I'm still waiting on those doors. I kind of just got fed up waiting and decided to take action myself. I thought if I could just find the perfect shower curtain, I could put it up on a rod, and the closet would be masked. I knew the hardest thing would find the perfect curtain.

Tuesday Morning had a sale where the clearance was an extra 50%! I love those sales. And guess what I found! The first place I look is the shower curtain area and behold, I found a striped white, black and blue curtain that looked perfect. The price was a good deal, too, at $7!

I bought it, raced home, and held the curtain to Nolan's blue wall. A perfect match! Woohoo!!!!! I pulled out the rod I bought the week before, installed it and put up the curtain. This made me one happy momma!

Here it is:

I love a good deal!

Bonus Picture: Nolan loves to go behind the curtain! He goes back there, giggles and stands perfectly still until you ask, "Where's Nolan?" Then more giggling ensues and a little happy boy emerges! Here he is on his way out from behind the curtain!

I have more pictures of the room to share but also want to finish some projects before I reveal it. I'm so happy with his room. For me, by far, decorating a child's room is so much more enjoyable then any other room in the house! 

Fall Family Photos

It Thanksgiving card time for us here! We've sent out cards the four years we have been married, starting with our dogs dressed as pilgrims and native americans (have to find that picture to show you all sometime), and then with just D and I the last two years. But this year, we are sending out a family pic!

Our first official family photos have been taken! We actually had my brother take the pictures with our Nikon D5000, this saved money and made it easy for us to have it done on my husband's lunch break Friday.

My brother isn't a pro, he's only taken a photography class in high school, but these pictures will do!

Here we are before our barn!

I painted the bench a glossy red. It was much better than the purply gray color it's previous owner had it. Love ya, Pa!

This was the winning photo for our Thanksgiving cards. We chose it because Nolan's fingers weren't in his mouth.

Here's some of Nolan:

So these were the keeper shots. Maybe sometime I will share the bloopers!

just do it...

You see, I set this blog up over a year and a half ago (really, it's closer to two years now) and I have finally found the time, or perhaps the nerve, to actually post here. Course a lot has occured from the time I set this up...I had a baby boy named Nolan Weston who absorbs the majority of my time. Also, until a month ago, I was working still and combined with baby, there was little time for anything else. Now, I am a full time stay at home mom!!! A dream come true and I feel able to finally get on here and share. Not that I expect followers or anything like that - I mean, it's just me writing about nothing fancy - but I wanted a place to record things. I am a blog junkie. I find things all the time that are so neat but then have no place to share them...so HandFresh affords me a place to share things that interest me. I'm sure my husband will enjoy not being bombarded with daily emails of all kinds of pictures, projects and ideas I've come upon. Actually, since the baby, he's had a huge reprieve of such emails. Now I just have ideas and then forget all about them because I have no place to share...

With so many changes in my life in the past year, I finally feel ready to share and not worried about having a silly post. It may be a little random here, as I tend to be a little random myself. So here we go...