Thanksgiving

We hosted our first big Thanksgiving dinner this year. I had a blast planning, cleaning, cooking, prepping, and eating too! We got to use our wedding china for the first time, and we tried to keep up the tradition of lots of family recipes, with all the trimmings! Here's the whole gang and all the food!

Here's some of the prep. Aren't cranberries amazing? I've never cooked with fresh ones before, always dried. And they were beautiful! So fun to listen to them pop as I made the sauce.

Wes BBQed the turkey, completed with injections of butter and spices. Mmm!

Browned to perfection!

Grandma Betty helped me make (or rather, did most of the work) making clover leaf rolls, which were inspired by an amazing dinner at Donna & John's. Our rolls were good, but I must say, John's were better.

I had lots more help from David, Heather, Wes' parents, my grandparents, and more! I wish I had a picture of Heather's beautiful pies! They were amazing!

And finally...the leftovers. I guess I over estimated for my first big dinner, but hey, no cooking for a week!

It was lots of fun and I hope to do it again. Happy Thanksgiving!

A few more weeks and a new haircut

The Baby'z Gotz Beats

The Big 3-0

So for Wes' Big 3-0, we wanted to do the most childish thing we could think of. Chuck E. Cheese! But we thought maybe we'd scare the kids...and the pizza probably isn't really that great. So we did Chuck E. Cheese for adults = Dave & Busters. We did dinner and games with friends. Lighting was bad at dinner to get good pics of everyone, and I crashed shortly after the games began, so not much documentation there. But we did get some good shots of the fabulous birthday cake.

Here's the cake story. I love baking, esp birthday cakes, and esp for Wes! But since I've been so sick and tired all the time, I didn't have energy for it this year. Which was a major bummer, given that it was the 3-0 and all. So we opted for a Costco cake. Wes picked the dinosaur pattern and his favorite toppings and fillings. Then we thought maybe we could encourage a cake wreck to be made if we made some special requests*. So we added a little comment to the dinosoaur request that it have flames coming out of it's mouth.

Unfortunately, Costco probably mass produces their cakes, so we did not get any flames. See below.

But Wes was inspired to get his flames on there, so we picked up some gel icing to make our own. Then Wes got the idea to let everyone decorate the cake. So we set the cake out at the table during dinner, and let the guests have at it.

Here's Wes putting the inaugural flames on it.

And here's the final result! I highlighted a few of my favorites in case you can't tell what they are. Sorry to those I didn't mention! Everyone did a wonderful job!

And here's Wes blowing out his massive amount of real flames generated from 30, yes exactly 30!, candles.

And finally, what is a birthday without eating a piece of cake with your name on it?

Happy 30th Birthday Wes!

**Note those of you who don't know what a cake wreck is, you must ABSOLUTELY check out this site.

Sunil & Inka's visit

Sunil and Inka came to visit, and we had a great reunion with some awesome small group friends!

A lovely dinner...

And celebrated 3 babies coming...

And 3 excited daddies!

First Trimester Tummy

Well the first trimester has kicked my butt. To say the least. I'm officially in the second now, so I'm praying things will get easier. I feel some relief, but I'm not out of the woods just yet. But, I must say, the fact that I'm blogging is quite remarkable! I forgot some of the things I like to do :).

So here are some tummy shots. It's a bit weird to watch yourself get bigger. But cool too! Not much going on in the first few weeks, but I think it's getting faster now.

First Ultrasound

7 weeks, 5 days.