Thanksgiving Recap

I know, I know. Everyone's blogging about their Christmases by now, but I thought I would throw you a curveball and tell you all about our Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving Extravaganza 2.0!

We had such a great Thanksgiving this year celebrating with friends! Our Pasadena friends Lauren and Andrew, Robin (we missed you Ben!), and Darcy & Adam, all came down for the day on Thursday for food and fun!

We almost doubled our guest-list this year from last year, so I was a little intimidated at first that it would be lots of work, but it actually ended up being so much easier as everyone handled a couple of dishes.

Andrew provided us with a wonderful turkey, made with love!


The boys taking a break from slaving in the kitchen for some football action:


As usual, the food was abundant and tasty!


The whole crew!!

After dinner, we all were feeling the turkey lethargy, so we crashed while watching Goonies but I think only the boys were entertained enough to stay awake!

We closed out our night with a friendly round of Loaded Questions. It was a great day of food, friends, and fun.

Our Thanksgiving weekend is always relaxing as we both get to be home for several days in a row! What a treat! We were so excited because the Holladays were home from NY so, in honor, we all got together for a much-anticipated Settlers tournament.



I don't mean to brag, but I did go home with a Lord of Catan title in my pocket.

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Oh, and Merry Christmas too!

California Visitors!

We were so excited to have our first non-family California visitors this month! The Hesters were super sweet to come all the way out to see us for a long weekend. Unfortunately, we don't have that many pictures as we had a very low-key weekend with not much to show but it was exactly what we needed after a busy few weeks! We love the Hesters and loved just getting to sit and catch-up and hang out rather than being so rushed as we usually are when we see them in Nashville.

As with most visitors, we made trips to the Spectrum, In 'N Out, Sprinkles, Golden Spoon in addition to multiple rounds of Settlers. We also had an LA day of Pink's hotdogs, Amoeba records, and vintage shopping in Melrose. Our day also included our first trip to Pinkberry!

We've heard lots about it (both good and bad opinions) so we really enjoyed trying it ourselves! For those of you who don't know, it's frozen yogurt. No, not Golden Spoon/TCBY Frozen Yogurt, but yogurt that's frozen. You can choose between original and green tea yogurt and then top it with your choice of candy, fruit, cereal, etc. My verdict was definitely positive! I don't think it will be a total obsession (like Sprinkles) but I definitely will be frequenting it again soon, especially since we're getting one at the Spectrum soon!


Thanks so much to Ryan, Jordan, and Baby Hester for coming to visit us!

Birthday Recap

Wow! I'm alive, I promise! It's been such a crazy few weeks with finishing up our Christmas work, trying to get out of town, finishing up my job (have I mentioned that I quit my job? that's probably another blog), Christmas shopping, etc! Whew - I'm tired just thinking about it all! One of the things that I've most been looking forward to is getting back to blogging! Yay!

So there's lots to re-cap from over the past couple of months . . . I'll try to keep it brief so we can catch back up to real-life and what's going on now!

In November, we celebrated my birthday! It came and went pretty quickly in the midst of everything else going on, but we did take a night off to celebrate with some friends. This year we did a combo party with Kyle since his birthday is the day after mine. It's fun to share birthdays!


We had a fun night of celebrating at BJ's (can't go wrong with pizza!) and it was great to see friends and have a great night out!

Colbie Caillat

I've been listening to Colbie Caillat today and she makes me happy.

READ THIS BLOG CAREFULLY

Ok, friends.  When we've done this in the past it's created some mass confusion and rumors so PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY before jumping to conclusions.

We have exciting family updates from two new girls.  So, to review, the hot pink B is for our blogging friends (I'm sad to report no increase in this).  And the Asian baby symbol is for girls who currently have a child or are pregnant (e.g.  if they have a child already and have the baby symbol - this doesn't mean they are pregnant!!!).

First, debuting in June, is Baby Hester - yay for Ryan and Jordan - we're super excited!  And, as promised, the vertical child-stacking has begun as the Hinsons jump out to the lead with 2!

We're so excited for all of you guys!

In other news, I've still been missing you guys.  I actually dreamed that I had time for blogging one night - it was awesome.  I do think I'm starting to be able to see the light at the end of the working tunnel.  You know it's bad when I haven't even blogged about Thanksgiving, California visitors, Nashville trips, so much!  I'm hoping to catch you all up soon.  I'm still updating photoblog as much as possible - I have some really fun shots of some little ones to post hopefully later today so check back!