Sunday, November 25, 2012

Chase's School Picture

Here is Chase's Kindergarten picture!  Please respect copyright.


Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We sure did!

Wednesday I had my Thanksgiving with my kids, since they were at their dad's Thursday.  Chase got to be an integral part of making Thanksgiving dinner this year.  We dropped Chloe off at daycare Wednesday morning and he got to fight the grocery store crowds with me to get everything we needed for our dinner.  He wanted pumpkin roll so he got to help me make it!


I had never made it before and it did NOT turn out well.  The cake refused to come out of the pan, and no matter how long I put it in the oven for, it just wouldn't "get done!"  We had to scrap it.  As I was scraping it into the trash can, cussing under my breath, I said, "Chase, maybe we should make pumpkin cheesecake instead" (my specialty!) and he said, "No, Mom....  Pumpkin roll."  Great.  So I turned it into a teaching moment and said, "OK, let's try again!  We don't give up when we fail!"  As soon as we started the second batch I realized what we did wrong the first time: We put 3 cups of sugar in it when the recipe only called for 1.  Oops.  That'll do it!

So the second batch turned out just fine, but I walked away looking a bit overtaken by the fight.  The pumpkin roll fought dirty with the powdered sugar.  Not nice.


While I cleaned up our mess Chase made the Thanksgiving turkey:


OK, we did have real turkey (I didn't make a whole one or anything, but Chase insisted we had to have turkey on Thanksgiving so I did what I could!).  We were also blessed with Katie's homemade mac & cheese and her fabulous cornbread casserole (OMG!  So good)!

Then on Thursday Katie and I made another Thanksgiving dinner just for us: Lasagna, garlic bread and salad.  That night we went to the movies and saw the new James Bond flick.  It was so good we literally held our bladders for the last hour and a half of it because we didn't want to miss anything!  Afterwards we drove by Target to make fun of all the people in line at 7:30pm and decided to take our picture in front of Bed Bath and Beyond and pretend we were first in line (just because we're dorks like that):


Then we went home, got into our PJ's and watched another movie while we enjoyed our Thanksgiving dessert....  Cheesecake Factory cheesecake!  Oh MY....  To die for.

Friday we decided to spend the afternoon in Austin for a "little" shopping and dinner.  We may not have been first in line for anything, but we were definitely the last:


It was such a great holiday break, and so needed after the wild and crazy life I have had lately!  Now it's time to start the countdown....

30 DAYS TIL CHRISTMAS!!!!

Sunday, November 11, 2012

TX A&M Student Research Symposium

I was asked to present my Masters research at the Texas A&M Student Research Symposium in Galveston this weekend.


Well, I somehow managed to win an award! Another student and I won "Top 1%" of all the Masters level research there. I was blown away!  It felt great to see that hard work pay off!


Saturday, November 3, 2012

Blog Catch-Up Day!

I have had an incredibly insane semester so far, and my blog posts have fallen by the wayside. I have a ton of other things I should be doing tonight, but I have chosen to update my blog instead. To keep the posts in chronological order I have back-dated them to fit where they are supposed to fit. So you don't have to sift through all my old posts to find them, here is an easy list of links for you! Here are all the posts I published tonight.  Some of these don't look like links because for some reason the color isn't showing up, but I promise they are!  Just float your cursor over them and they'll "come to life!"
 

"Touch a Truck" Event in Austin


Today we went to the "Touch a Truck" event benefiting the Austin Children's Shelter. It was such a simple concept, and the kids LOVED it. There were lots of different vehicles the kids could climb all over and explore. In addition to a motor home, a tank, dump trucks, moving trucks, a UPS truck, a motorcycle and (my personal favorite) FOOD trucks, there was also a school bus:


 ...and an ambulance:


...a fire truck:


...a couple tractors:

 
...and a police car.  Chase first hauled his sister off to the slammer:


...and then decided to join her (the sad face was his idea):


The police officer there came up to me while I was taking pictures and said, "Your daughter looks too comfortable back there!"  Uh oh!

There are more photos in our Photo Album if you're interested!

  

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