Thanksgiving Pictures That I Promised

I don't want to edit these right now, so just imagine that the white-balance is corrected.

December!

Now it's time to catch up on this month...

Siena: still adoring preschool and all her friends there. They just had their Christmas party, which was a blast! They played games, gave gifts, played their food, and watched 'How The Grinch Stole Christmas'... best preschool group to do this with!

She's also discovered a new favorite game: pull off all the couch cushions and pile them in the middle of the floor. This new mound is then used for either a cave, or a bed, or a trampoline. The fun never ends!... (neither will my nagging for her to clean it up afterward.) She is showing extreme interest in writing, now that her friend Hayden has demonstrated how people write their names (this kid is only 2 and can write his name!) Siena is a pro at a few letters, but mostly gets side-tracked and starts drawing princesses. Actually, she surprised me with a new drawing yesterday: Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. So Sweet!
Her favorite songs to sing at Christmastime are "Away in a Manger", "The Nativity Song", "Jingle Bells", and "Frosty the Snowman". We are lucky to have a growing collection of Christmas books, so that really has helped her understand the season this year. She got to go choose out a gift for Qiana which really made her happy and as we were wrapping it, I think she started catching on to why we give gifts. However, with all the excitement she had to open her gifts, we had to make a paper chain counting down the days until we got to open the gifts. It's actually worked better than I had expected it would. :^)

Qiana: Qiana, Qiana, Qiana.... What do you say about this little munchkin? She has definitely demonstrated that she has a mind of her own. This is such a good thing, as well as a test of my patience, on occasion. We've made HUGE improvements in the public arena; for example, she used to scream her lungs out when I left her at the gym daycare. Today, she screamed when I went to pick her up. Improvement! She used to cry incessantly at bedtime; now she just needs about 2 minutes of whimpering and she's good for the night. Improvement! She still does scream at the top of her lungs and at the decibel range of a heavy metal concert, but I have high hopes that that too will work its way out of her system. She's such an angel when she's happy, though. Very happy... just very volatile. Juan and I love her to pieces and know that it's just the karma that we deserve from our own childhoods. ;^) Qiana is speaking more and more and uses her imagination on a deeper level than we were aware of. She's already cooking and eating (yes, eating... a lot!) in their play kitchen and sings to herself whenever she hears music. Not only does she sing, but she shakes her booty at the first note of a song. (It must be the Latin blood in her.)

Okay, well that's the update.

Catch up: Thanksgiving... continued.

So, picking up where we left off...









































We went to NYC, had a great time. First, we went to Times Square and ate at Alpha. Great place, I highly recommend it. Afterwards, we walked down 5th Ave, stopped at F.A.O. Schwartz, and finished the Rockefeller Center and Times Square again. Long day!

The next morning we went to Battery Park, Ground Zero (temporary) Memorial, Canal Street for the obligatory purse perusal, and ate at the famous Lombardi's for the city's historical Margherita pizza. One word- authentic. Believe me, I've tried the classic pizza in Italy before, and this compares quite well.

That pretty much summed up our time there since we all had either a bus or a plane to catch. We said our goodbyes and headed in opposite directions after lots of hugs and 'Thank You's'.

Always such a pleasure having family come to visit....

Why no posts?

The reason I have been absent from the blog is because I really have tried to take the stress out of Christmas. Yes, it was starting to wear on my nerves. Thanks to President Uchtdorf's Christmas Devotional message, I feel justified in taking a break from blogging right now.

Read his message here.

Thanksgiving and the Post/Pre-Holiday Activities

Thanksgiving was spent differently this year for our family. We were WITH family! Juan and his friends are getting really good at finding amazing deals online and when his friend, Kurt, found out that you could get $300 off a trip to NYC, Juan came up with a plan.

The deal only worked through Expedia Canada and you had to book both a flight and hotel. So he found cheap flights and booked rooms in a hostel, applied the code for the discounts, and wound up with tickets for his family to come out here at $58 per person, round-trip. Deal of the century!

Thanksgiving morning, he went to pick them up in The Big Apple. The went to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and after they got home, we had a Mexican-inspired feast!

Before eating, we told the story of the pilgrims and the native Americans, complete with costumes from preschool.

The Adamsons were kind enough to lend all their beautiful hosting supplies (plates, chargers, goblets, tablecloths, placemats and napkins! I love having friends with nice stuff.)


The entire menu spun from this month's issue of Sunset Magazine. We served:

Pumpkin Taco Appetizers
Cranberry, Apple, Orange Relish
Chile and Spice Grilled Turkey with Mole Gravy
(...And another turkey to feed the crowd, using Alex's Thanksgiving Turkey Brine.)
Chorizo Apple Stuffing
Grilled Rosemary Sweet Potatoes
Roasted Chile Cornbread
Fall Salad with Nuts, Pomegranates and Goat Cheese
Roasted Chile-Lime Broccolini
Spritzers of Ginger Ale and Grenadine
Mexican Chocolate Cakes with Vanilla Ice Cream
Long Beach Lime Pies
...and a delicious addition of Pumpkin Flan that Juan made.

We were stuffed!















The next day, instead of doing any Black Friday shopping, we slept in, then went to eat Vietnamese food in South Philly. Afterward, we went to the Italian Market to browse, bought some cheese at DiBruno Bros., and went to the Hispanic Heritage Festival for the Stake, which turned out to be pretty different from what we had imagined it would be. It was a good day.

Saturday, we went to see the sights of Philadelphia, including the Masonic Temple, Reading Terminal Market, Chinatown (where we ate delicious hand-drawn noodles,) Love Park, The Christmas Village at City Hall, and the Comcast Building Holiday Spectacular. To finish the day, we drove out to King of Prussia so the girls could do some shopping. (As you can probably imagine, our feet were so sore by the end of the night.) I'm sad that we didn't get a chance to go to Liberty Bell for Sandra, but we'll probably get a chance to do that when they come out for Juan's graduation in May. (We have a bazillion pictures of the rest of the trip, but those may have to wait for their own post, because I want to just PUBLISH this already!)




Sunday was a normal day, besides the baptism we all attended after church. It was definitely a day of rest... and leftovers.

We needed a day to recuperate, especially since Monday we were on our way to New York City again. More on that to come....