Thanksgiving and Christmas 2015 and things in between

Before I post anything else I thought I would catch up about the holidays.

Thanksgiving:

I hosted it at our house this year.  I had a ton of recipes I wanted to try and finally narrowed it down to the menu.  I was super excited to use the China and 'good stuff.'  My parents, Brian's parents and Matt and Lindsay were in Austin to celebrate with us!  My good friend, Allison, was also able to come over!

Breakfast was cinnamon roll turkeys.  Good start, right?

See, so lovely.  Aren't we the cutest family?  The turkey was brined and ready to go into the new roaster we just bought the day before.  I also had a brand new thermometer to make sure the turkey was cooked perfectly.

It was almost go time.  I was taking a skillet over to the counter when it dropped onto my toe.  I tried to get my foot out of the way and unfortunately I didn't quite get it out of the skillet's path of destruction.

So my Dad took me to the ER.

All stitched up and ready to go back for Thanksgiving dinner.  We are getting out of the car and Izzy says 'I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that we haven't eaten the turkey yet. (It's like 8:00pm). The bad news is that the turkey was raw.'   Remember that fancy meat thermometer?  Well, it was meant to be used in a regular oven so that the cord would hit the insulation on the oven door and prevent erroneously high readings.  There isn't any insulation in a roasting pan.  We didn't realize that the cord was conducting heat and giving us high readings.  Brian kept turning the temperature down and we ended up with an undercooked turkey.  Shit happens.  I didn't have to do dishes, so there was that.

We celebrated Vivian's birthday with a cake.

Isabel had her gymnastics showcase and it was adorable.  She did awesome.

Christmas 2015:

Between the holiday parties and teacher gifts I was spent.  I was seriously rethinking why I agreed to do this shit.

One of the gift basket of the teacher 'favorites' I made.

We also did the Johnson City lights and the Trail of Lights:

Then we left for Houston:

Logan spent at least half of the time there doing this.