Thanksgiving Day

After the Turkey Trot, the boys and I drove over to the movie theater to watch Tangled with my family while their turkey cooked and George took over some of the cooking duties at his parent's house.

It was a very cute movie! Lance said he didn't like it, but I saw him laughing having a good time, so maybe he just didn't want to admit he enjoyed a "girly" movie.

When the movie was over, the boys and I rushed to the Glass's house and made it right in time for the prayer on the food. Thanksgiving is a big holiday for the Glass family and their house is always filled to the brim with family and friends. This year was no different. I didn't do an official head-count, but I think there were about 30 people all sitting around the same table. Awesome.

Lance and Callie

You can get a good idea of how much food there really was on the table. Everyone got to take home more than a full dinner of left-overs.

PopPop making sure Jude had enough to eat.

The kids found something else to do while the adults sat around and chatted.

Around 4 p.m., we made our way over to my Mom's house to have a second feast!

The whole gang (minus the photographer, of course)

I guess Jude felt bad for Vera and decided to share his food with her. I love the face she's making here.

After dinner, we relaxed for a bit and the set in on the desserts. I think we had a total of about 10 pies! I made this great apple pie/cheesecake.

 It was really good, but definitely not the best thing on the table.

We ended the night watching some football, Lance and Uncle Stephen enjoyed some Phineas and Ferb on the computer while the rest of us sat around and talked. It had been a nice, busy day.

Turkey Trot!

The morning of Thanksgiving, we upheld our recently started family tradition of participating in our local Turkey Trot. It's a 5k race that the community runs to help raise money for a charity. It was a lot of fun! George had originally signed up to run it, but because of knee problems he gave his spot to Laura so it turned out the entire Allred family got to run together!

This is our "before" picture. We were all really excited. Chad had just finished a Marathon a few weeks earlier, so obviously there was no question as to who would cross the finish line at the head of the Allred pack. I haven't really exercised since before I was pregnant with Jude, so my goal was to make it under 30 minutes.

Our "after" picture. We all did relatively well! Chad finished 2nd in his age group for the whole race and I made it under 30 minutes and met my goal! I thought I did pretty well for not having run consistently in about 2 years. It was a great start to a great day, although I was surprisingly sore. Ah well... I need to start running again!

Thanksiving Prep...

We spent the week of Thanksgiving up in Ashburn with our families. We packed a lot of stuff into that week but one of our absolute favorite things we did was the Thanksgiving prep with both families. It's funny how it takes days to prepare for a meal that will be over in about 30 minutes. Maybe the true joy of Thanksgiving isn't really the eating, but the family time you spend together while baking, mixing, shopping, chopping, brine-ing, rolling, and [insert any other cooking term here]. And for some reason, it always takes place late, late at night. Why is that?

George had the glorious job to brine two turkeys for his family. If you've never brined a turkey before, it's fairly low maintenance after the first few steps. Basically, you make a brine solution and then submerge the turkey in said solution for at least two days, maybe three. If your George, that involved putting each turkey in it's own black trash bag with their unique brine and the attempting to stuff both turkeys (I think they were a total of about 35 lbs) and about 5 gallons of brine into a cooler. It fit with me sitting on the lid. I think the cooler ended up in the freezing garage with flats of soda piled on top to keep the lid down with George trying to keep it cold by wedging a few pieces of ice in the cracks every few hours.

 

After the turkeys had finished the brine, Grandmom tried to get the kids involved with stuffing the birds, but as you can tell from their faces, no one was too keen on putting their hands on the turkey, much less inside. They watched the process for about 3 minutes and then ran off to play...

...so Jen stepped in.

And PopPop. You would not believe how much stuffing Mom can get into those small cavities! Her years of experience were very obvious as I watched her muscle and shove the stuffing inside until the bird was literally bursting at the seams.

My family got into the cooking spirit as well. Late Wednesday night after we had stuffed the birds at George's parent's house, I went over to my mom's house and helped make rolls. Chad had just come into town, Stephen had come the day before, and Amy was there, too! We had a great time!

Mom wanted to double our favorite roll recipe, but we discovered about half-way through that it might be almost impossible to do because of the sheer volume of dough.

Our Bosch lost the fight and Mom and Amy had to kneed the rest of the flour in by hand. The lump of dough was so big, they needed four hands to do it!

Everyone helped roll. It was a neat experience to stand around talking and working together. We had so much dough left over, I made two batches of cinnamon rolls, too!

Yum!

I think I went to bed Wednesday night around 1:30 a.m. Not really a good idea when we had a race to run at 8:30 the next morning!

Dirt

It's getting colder and there is less incentive to play outside, but the boys convinced me one day that it was a great idea to play in front of our building on the overturned stump of a tree that got blown down this past year during a storm. The boys and their friends played on it for more than an hour, digging and making up scenarios that they would then act out. It made bath-time VERY muddy, but it was fun!

 Lance was in heaven... dirt is his favorite thing!

 Jude thought it was pretty great, too.

 Our friends, Killian and Kendall

The whole gang.

He looks like he's in a trench or something here. He LOVED the dirt!

Digging, we're digging...

Trans-Siberian Orchestra!

November 18th, George and I got to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra with George's Dad and Der (George's cousin) in the DC's Verizon Center. It was amazing! The music was great, especially the Christmas segment, and the visuals were intense. What made it even better was we got to enjoy it from an executive box, complete with beverages, snacks, buffalo wings, and our own private stadium seating area! It was a great way to start the Holiday season.

Roanoke, Family, and Friends!

The past couple weeks have been busy ones, filled with family and friends. 

George is finally home from Roanoke! While he was there, the boys and I drove down to visit him on Wednesday afternoon about two weeks ago. Our good friend Emily lives there, so we got to spend the night with her. It was so nice to see George and hang out with Emily. A perfect way to break up a lonely week in Charlottesville.

While in Roanoke, we got to see George's room where he slept. It was in the hospital on a patient floor. In fact, it was a patient room with real patients about 4 doors down the hall! He said it wasn't terrible, the only downside being the pages that went off on the overhead during the night. 

We went out to eat at a great Mexican restaurant in downtown Roanoke and then walked around the mall for a bit. 

 Lance had fun riding the little mall rides...

...while George and Jude enjoyed some ice cream. 

Lance saw this great trampoline and we thought it looked like fun, too. He caught a lot of air as he bounced away! (That's the second floor balcony right there.)

We got "caught" by the people in the booths while we were there and after some intense haggling, we got a great fingernail polishing kit, refills, and lotion for $20. Not too bad, seeing as they were trying to sell it to us for $60. Thanks George!

We spent the night together at Emily's house. After I drove George back to the hospital, the boys and I relaxed in the morning with Emily and her kiddos before driving back to Charlottesville. It was so good to see her!

Jude was sick for a few days, but Lance and I found ways to keep busy. We did an art project I saw online and it turned out really cute. We made fall trees by using the boys' hands as the tree trunks.

 Lance started his tree out, but asked me to finish.

Done!

We've been doing some Christmas shopping, too, and I've been trying to get Lance to tell me what he wants to put on his list. He and Killian looked at the Toys 'R Us catalog for probably close to an hour one afternoon.

Last Wednesday, the boys and I drove up to Northern VA to visit my family. Lance was with his dad for the weekend, but I got to see most of my family. Amy had Veteren's Day off (Thursday) and hung out with us. She and Jason made a great chicken soup that really hit the spot on a chilly evening.

 Jude thought the chicken was fantastic and demolished this whole drumstick!

 Vera is a great dog! Jude loves her and tries to play with her all the time. 

Thursday night, Chad rode the train into DC from NYC so he could interview in Washington on Saturday for an Orthodontic program. It was so nice to see him and spend some time together.

Chad and Mason.

Friday afternoon, Jude and I drove back to Charlottesville to see George and get ready for Emily! She had come up to see some friends and got to spend the night at our house Friday night! We had a great time getting dinner and dessert with her on the Downtown Mall and then chatting with some friends before bed that night. George's parents were also in town to watch Nate perform with the Jazz Ensemble that night. It was a very busy Friday!

Saturday was great. George was finally home for good from Roanoke and we got to spend a leisurely day together. We slept in, took naps, went shopping, walked around the Mall just the two of us (hooray for date night!) and then enjoyed watching "Overboard" after Jude went to bed. It was a great day!

Sunday, we hosted a potluck breakfast-themed dinner for several of our friends. It turned out great! We had a fun time eating tasty fruit, pumpkin pancakes, and fruit smoothies.

Somehow the guys migrated to the kiddie table while they discussed the pros and cons of their various hospital rotations. 

And thus begins another week here in Charlottesville. George has his Family Medicine rotation for the next four weeks. With clinic hours just Monday through Friday and a whole week off for Thanksgiving, it's going to be a vacation!

Happy Halloween!

We got to be together as a family for about 1 hour on Halloween before George had to leave again for Roanoke. Lance had been with his dad the whole weekend and came home around 7:30 p.m. that night. We attempted a family picture around our pumpkin and this is the best we could manage:

Happy Halloween!