Thanksgiving 2009

This year was our first Thanksgiving away from our hometown and the traditions that we are used too but luckily we have family nearby that we were able to celebrate with. Aunt Vicki hosted this year's Thanksgiving dinner and we had a great time. Here are some pictures of our day; they are in the wrong order but you get the idea :)

After we ate dinner, the kids made smores in the fireplace. Yum yum!!

Kenzie with her smore. She almost passed up pumpkin pie so she could have a smore (but we let her have both.)

Gabriel taking his turn at roasting a marshmallow.

Uncle Jerry slicing the pie with his sons Aaron and Sean.

Aydan just had to help Aunt Vicki whip up the whipped cream. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "Makin punkin pie."

Fun on the trampoline before dinner.

Kenzie and her cousin Gabriel.

Aydan and his cousin Christian having fun in the clubhouse.

Christian, Gabriel, Sean, and Kenzie.

Uncle Jerry's homemade pumpkin pie. The pumpkin on top is so neat!

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We really enjoyed our Thanksgiving. Although we might not always think about it, we do have so much to be thankful for. When we moved from Illinois to Texas, we only brought what we could fit in our cars. We left many of our possesions behind and it really made me realize that its not the material things that matter. Having a happy, healthy family means more to me than any possesions I could ever have.

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving and now the Christmas season is upon us! It doesn't seem possible that its that time of year already!

ideas?

I want a new title for this blog.....Any ideas???

Grilling out in November

Have I mentioned how nice the weather has been lately? I'm not trying to rub it in or anything but I just can't get over how different the weather is down here. It was almost 80 degrees out on Saturday and its November! I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be able to use my winter coat!

Saturday evening we loaded our grill, our lawn chairs, and some food and headed over to the park. We thought it would be neat to grill out there and let the kids play.

We brought along some marshmallows too for dessert. Yum!

Kenzie grabbed the camera and said she was taking a picture of Aydan, but this is the picture she took! I think its awesome! She gets the award for "Best Photo."

Roasting some 'mallows. Kenzie said she like them all black. When Aydan tried to do his own, he mashed it around in the coals so we decided maybe he shouldn't make his own! :)

They are so good, but so messy!

Picture of the sunset.

With the time change, it gets dark so much earlier now! There was a nice, cool breeze coming off the water and as the sun went down, it actually got pretty cool out.

Something New

Friday night we got invited to go out to eat with some friends we met from church. Its always nice to get out of the house and spend time with other people our age, although we did have the kids with us. We decided to go to Ichibon's that is right down the road from us. We had never been there but the couple we went with said it was very good. Here are a couple pictures we took, but I posted them in reverse order.

The kids enjoyed some ice cream after their dinner.

The coolest thing about this place was that a chef prepares the food right at your table. They make it very interactive and fun. He put oil on the stovetop and lit it on fire. I think it scared the kids at first, but then they seemed to enjoy it. He did tricks with his knives and made different things out of the food. Its hard to explain; you just have to see it because it was really cool.

In this picture, he had just finished making the fried rice and was handing out everyone's bowls.

The food was so good and it was neat to be able to see it prepared before your eyes. Can't get much fresher than that! It was definately a different experience than we are used to and if it weren't for the friends of ours suggesting it, we probably would have never tried it just because it was different.

Enjoying the fall weather!

It's technically been Fall for about a month and a half, but for the most part, it had felt like summer here still. Finally, though, the past couple of weeks have been wonderful, in the mid 70's, so we have been really enjoying doing this outside. It's been great not to have to run the air conditioner and just have the windows open! Here are some pictures of the kids at the park.

Our Halloween-2009

Halloween was a little different for us this year. I hadn't really tried to come up with costume ideas because I didn't know if we were going to do the trick-or-treat thing this year since we don't know very many people in the neighborhood. I knew our town, Nassau Bay, was having a Halloween festival at the park that night and we planned on going to that. Well, we did decide on taking the kids trick-or-treating so at the last minute we had to come up with costumes. Aydan already had a Darth Vader mask that his cousin had given him, along with a matching shirt so that ended up being his costume. For Kenzie, we really weren't sure what to do, but Danny came up with the idea of her wearing a wetsuit that we found at Goodwill for a few bucks and have her be a surfer girl, which I thought was a pretty unique idea. So, thats what we went with this year.

All dressed up, ready to go.
Showing us her surfer pose. Cowabunga Dude!

We drove around our area, looking for a place to start and at first we didn't see any trick-or-treaters in sight. We were beginning to wonder if they even did trick-or-treating here. Finally, we started seeing people out and so we parked the car and got started. We managed to hit several places and the kids got quite a bit of candy. In the picture above, they are making their way up to knock on someone's door.

At around 7 pm, we went to the park to check out the festival. They had all kinds of things going on. Hay rack rides, hot dogs, nachos, popcorn, haunted house, games, music, cupcakes, and more...all free for everyone! Adults and kids were dressed in costumes. I told Danny next year we will have to all dress up. They had costume contests and dancing contests for different age groups.

Standing in front of a glowing black cat inflatable.

Scary witch

Inflatable headless horseman decoration

This is the entrance to the Haunted House that was set up on the tennis courts. The kids did not go in; it was geared more towards older kids.

Painting a pumpkin.

Just a picture of the crowd and surroundings

Getting ready to go on a hay rack ride.

We had to get a picture of this costume. Some guy was dressed as Dorothy from Wizard of Oz! He walked pretty well in those high heels! His wife, who is not in the picture, was dressed as the Cowardly Lion. There were a lot of creative costumes there.

Our first Halloween in Texas ended up pretty good. I'm still trying to get used to the weather. I'm used to being freezing cold on Halloween but the weather has been great so far.

Ballunar Liftoff Festival 2009

Every year at NASA/Johnson Space Center since 1994, there is a Ballunar Liftoff Festival and ever since we heard about it, we were looking forward to going. Well, it was this Friday-Sunday so we decided to go over on Saturday.

When we got up in the morning, we looked out our bedroom window and we could see hot air balloons rising up. There were several of them flying around the area. Since NASA is only about 2-3 blocks from us, we could also see the skydivers coming down in their parachutes. It was quite a sight to see.

This is what we saw out our balcony.


More balloons in the distance.

We ended up going over to the festival mid-morning, but we ended up missing the balloons at first. They take off from there early morning, land somewhere else, then they don't come back to the air field until later that evening. There was a bunch of other things going on until then though, so we just checked it all out. There was live entertainment on stage, food vendors, craft booths, and rides for the kids.

This is a model airplane that they were flying around. When we first saw it in the air, it looked real. They had model planes along with model helicopters.

All day long they would have a team of skydivers land in the air field. There were 3 teams total and each team took turns going up in the plane, then jumping out. When the plane dropped off one group, it would head back to Ellington Air Field about 10 miles away, and pick up the next group, and thats what they did all day. I couldn't imagine jumping out a plane once, let alone doing it several times in one day!!

Kenzie and Aydan holding puppets from one of the vendors.

Also at the festival, they had a salute to law enforcement and there were some police cars, firetrucks, and ambulances from nearby towns. Here is Kenzie and Aydan in the back of a police truck. The officer said they use it mostly for water rescues.

Here they are in front of a police Hummer.

Sitting in a firetruck.

One of the fireman offered to take a picture of all of us.

Kenzie in front of a fire rescue boat.

After another skydiving performance, Kenzie was helping this skydiver pack up his parachute. She thought that was pretty cool. He said he has had triple by-pass surgery and skydiving doesn't bother him a bit! Yikes, you would have to push me off the plane. I couldn't do it!

This is the entrance to Johnson Space Center. We were until mid-afternoon then went home for a bit because we were all getting pretty tired and wore out. We headed back in the evening when we knew the balloons would be coming back and we could see them landing on our way back.

They landed in a parking lot, then each one was packed up into their truck or van and brought back onto the air field. Here, everyone unloaded their balloons and got them ready to be inflated again.

Here they are starting to get air into them. It took a while before they were all up and ready.

You can kind of see the Energizer Bunny balloon. Its ears are sticking up behind the Curves balloon and you can see its white tail. I think that was the biggest balloon there.

They gather all the balloons at night as part of what they call the Balloon Glow where all the balloons light up at once. It looks pretty cool when they do it.

We took this one from farther away so you could see more of the balloons, but this still doesn't show how many there were. There's a bunch more behind all of these. It is one of the biggest balloon festivals in the world.

We had a good time. I'm glad we went; its not something you get to see everyday.

Check out the post below for pictures from the NASA open house we went to.