Holiday

Scenes from Last Year

by Jessica on January 2, 2013

in Crafts, Food, Holiday

New Year’s unfolded as kind of a two-day at-home extravaganza that started with Neil’s parents arriving on New Year’s Eve Eve (is that right?) for a belated Christmas overnight.

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Puppy Christmas cookies for Matilda and Clive

They brought food gifts, plenty of snacks and we made personal homemade pizzas and stayed up late watching concert DVDs and talking.

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Janice also taught me to crochet, which has been on my “must learn” list forever. I hope to tackle knitting next, but so far, I love keeping my hands busy with this.

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They also brought a few boxes of stuff from Neil’s childhood home for him to sift through. His little childhood books and collections were so adorable, and it was fun getting to see what he was like as a child. He LOVED to write and draw, and he had the same bright orange yo-yo that I had and loved as a kid. Do they even make yo-yo’s anymore?

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He’s definitely keeping a few things — like his beloved micro machines that I had to deep clean all the sand and dirt out of.

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As I mentioned in our New Year’s Eve post, our travel plans had to be cancelled last-minute as Neil was needed to be on-call. To make up for the bummer, I suggested we make all his favorite snacks — little smokies in barbecue sauce, homemade Chex Mix and Deviled eggs.

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He has unique tastes…

We played hours of computer games in our PJ’s and ran downstairs just in time to toast with champagne at midnight. We then continued watching movies under blankets on the couch until nearly 3 AM. It was heaven. I loved having nowhere to be and not having to drive home late at night!

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Coffee and hot chocolate mixed together to keep our old bones awake late into the night…

I’m still working on compiling our goals for 2013. Neil has his, I have mine, we have ours — it’s a crazy list at this point — but I’m grateful and excited, because there are so many awesome things already on the calendar.

Do you like to go out or stay in on New Year’s?

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New Year’s Eve

by Jessica on December 31, 2012

in Food, Holiday, Local Food, restaurants

No superlatives here, just a fun end-of-year meal at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Pho and a super spicy marinated pork with rice.

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Neil’s on-call this evening, so we are sharing a quiet night at home. I’m actually really looking forward to it, as we’ve got games and fun snacks planned, and plenty of new snow to enjoy

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Have a safe and wonderful evening!

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Friday Link-Up

by Jessica on December 28, 2012

in Friday Link-up, Holiday, Weekend

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Family holiday photo outtake. I’m special…

It was so nice to relax and catch up with my Google Reader over the holiday break. It has been the unfortunate victim of my travel and work schedule, and has had the dismal “1000+” sitting next to my “All Entries” for far too long. Having around 500 RSS subscriptions probably doesn’t help, but I just can’t bring myself to un-subscribe from anyone.

Here are some fun links I came across:

Food

DIY

Other Reads

Have any big weekend/New Year’s plans? This weekend we have some client work to do before we jet off to Springfield for New Year’s Eve. Well, scratch that. As I was writing this post, Neil realized he was on-call and we’re now home for New Year’s. Any suggestions on fun ways to make a relatively quiet New Year’s at home special? I definitely think all his favorite foods will be on the menu. What a bummer!

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Happy Holiday

December 27, 2012
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Hello! I hope you had a wonderful holiday, however you celebrated. Is it just us, or did it go way too fast? I feel like I didn’t do half the stuff I normally like to do and everything just felt so rushed. That aside, we had a wonderful holiday with my side of the family [...]

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Thanksgiving 2012

November 27, 2012
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Star Trail photo by Austin We always mean to take more photos of holidays, but always get swept up in the enjoyment of just being present with our family. As being married seems to add more food, family, and tables to our lives, we’ve really try to maximize our plans each holiday. It’s definitely still [...]

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Halloween for Adults

November 1, 2012
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For how last-minute our Halloween seemed to come together, we sure managed to have a lot of fun, and thankfully, more trick or treaters than last year. Last year was kind of a bummer. I think we had a grand total of 10 kids. This year however, I think we got closer to 30. I [...]

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Photo-less Fourth

July 5, 2012
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It wasn’t until we were in the car on the way home that I realized I hadn’t taken any pictures of our 4th of July festivities. We kind of wanted to be low-key this year. Typically we attend barbecues and see a lot of friends, but this year, we kind of wanted to go tame. [...]

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