Christmastime!

We are getting so excited for Christmas around here!  And it is certainly getting a little colder, too! ;)  We have been enjoying Christmas music for a few weeks now (sites like Pandora and Last are SO GREAT, they make it so easy to listen to all kinds of Christmas music).  We have already received Christmas packages, too.  I honestly don’t know what we are going to do when our moms disown us or decide that we don’t need packages anymore.. They take such good care of us and send us so many fun things!  Thank you moms, we really appreciate the packages and feel the love that comes with them.

We didn’t waste any time – the day after Thanksgiving we decorated our mini-tree!  At first we were using the bib (that Mom Cornelison sent to Ezra) as a tree skirt.. and it worked SO great – until Ezra came over and needed something to wear while he ate his sweet potato baby food.  We put the reindeer figurine that Mom Dearden sent us a tree-topper!  I think it looks great!

So here it is.  There are only two more weeks of school before break.. I can’t believe that it has come so quickly!  My how the year flies.  Exciting things for sure.  Merry Christmas!

Double Days of Decadence

Liam coined the phrase, but as I beat him to the blog, I get to steal it.  And what a decadent pair of days we had indeed!  Thanksgiving started in the morning when Liam, Jess, and Ezra came over to make us a special breakfast: orange rolls, cuties, and hot chocolate made with nutella. (mmmm.. you have to ask Jessie about that! So good!)  We got to spend Thanksgiving afternoon with family here on the island, Uncle Pat and his crew.  They were so generous to invite us, and we had SUCH a great time.  We enjoyed a full-out Thanksgiving feast ending with pumpkin pie and all.  After lunch, we played foosball, ping-pong, and Rock Band.  We were so glad to be able to spend Thanksgiving with such delightful family!  That night we went back to our place and Jessie made us some appetizers to enjoy (because we were too full to eat a full dinner).  We had bacon-wrapped chestnuts, cream-cheese stuffed olives, and cheese and crackers; then Thomas made some pumpkin bread for us!  And this was only day 1! 

The next day, Liam, Jess, and Ezra came over in the afternoon and we had round two of feasting.  Thomas and I cooked a turkey for the first time, which was exciting.  I couldn’t find the pack of giblets in the turkey and had to ask Thomas to dig around to find them!  It was kind of funny :)  We injected the turkey with sparkling cider and put apple-halves in the cavity of the turkey while it roasted.  It was maybe a little bit too appley, but it was fun to try!  Thomas made some delicious wheat dinner rolls and a sweet potato dish.  Jess brought creamy mashed potatoes, stuffing, and pumpkin pie.  It was a feast all over again!

We found it a wonderful thing to spread the feasting over two days.. you never get too full that way, and get to enjoy everything.  In the past, we have found that the appetizers fill you up so much that there’s not enough room for dinner!  We fixed that problem :)  And then the boys boiled what was left of the turkey and made us all a delicious turkey and dumping soup!  What chefs! 

   

Here are some pics of us hanging out on our second day of decadence.  The top right picture of Thomas is him revving his electric knife to carve the turkey – he means business!  Ezra was really cute, I think that he actually enjoyed posing for the camera for a bit.  I would hold it up and he would smile and coo.  Once, when I turned to take pictures of others, he made a small fuss, but when I turned the camera back to him, he smiled again!  What a cute and goofy boy!  We had a lot of fun just hanging out together and remembering all we have to be thankful for.  We really are so blessed.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Coupons and Ice Cream

Liam, Jess, Ezra, Thomas and I headed down to the mall on Saturday. After an episode of grueling coupon-retrieving (We got free gift cards, for standing in line at the mall.. cool huh? Then we we split up to chase down the man in the pizza suit to get a coupon – and succeeded :) and an intense Jenga showdown over pizza, we stopped by Cold Stone to get some ice cream with yet even more coupons (Thomas got a coupon for a free cup of ice cream for his birthday and Jess had picked out a buy one get one ad from the paper). We had an intense coupon day! And it paid off :)

Here’s the Jenga madness

All fall down! We’re pretty much Jenga masters. (This is such a fun place to eat. It’s Boston style pizza, and while you are waiting, they have a whole bunch of games to play with. We’ve played CandyLand and Scrabble before. Fun times!)

As I said before, after the Jenga and the pizza, we all had enough room for some Cold Stone! In all truth though, when is there not enough room for ice cream? So here we are. I got a real kick out of the candid shot I got of Ezra with his arms out and his lip all puffed like that. I thought it looked like he was trying to make a “tough guy” type of “bring it on” face.. Which is cute because it’s Ezra’s sweet little personality doing it.. So I made Jess copy it so I could put the two pictures together :) I love being on this side of the camera!

ANNNNDDD… there you go! Ezra’s first ice cream experience! We knew it had to happen sooner or later; ice cream runs in Cornelison blood! He actually didn’t seem too phased by his first taste of sugary goodness. Perhaps he was just surprised at the texture and temperature. But I think that I saw a smile for a second there for sure :)

Scuba Diving

Thomas and I went scuba diving for his birthday.  We have been wanting to go diving again for a while, and so we took this opportunity to sign up for some exciting boat dives with our favorite dive shop on the North Shore, Deep Ecology.  While Thomas has been on many boat dives, this was my first, and so it was really exciting!  So we got our gear all together and drove up on Saturday morning… two adventure seekers with the world at our fingertips!  This is us feeling the adventure vibe…

The plan was to dive a shipwreck called Mahi, and then Makaha Caverns, but the waves were ripping too much to do a dive close to shore, so we ended up getting to do two wreck dives on one trip, which I am told is fairly rare.  So we ended up doing Mahi and LCU.  These are some pictures that I took while we were on the dock, of the boat, the boy toy, and the water.  All good stuff!  It was a beautiful day.

Being on the boat was fun, too.  Here’s Thomas and me out on the big blue wet thing before splashing in.  The silhouette is of Thomas after the first dive.  The first dive was really cool, we got to go to about 89 feet and explore around a wreck.  There was a lot of sea life down there; the coolest thing we saw probably was a group of spotted eagle rays.  There were about 5 of them, and they were really big and graceful.  Their heads were shaped different than rays I have seen, which is probably where they get their name.  We saw some medusa spaghetti worms and lots of neat fish.

The second dive was to a sunken Landing Craft Unit, and I really liked being able to look inside the port holes and into the bridge.  There was a turtle inside, who poked out his head from a small hole to check us out before coming out and swimming with us.  We saw some frog fish too, two of them sitting together on top of what looked like handle bars of a bike coming out of the boat.  There was also a sunken sail boat next to the LCU, rocking back and forth in the waves.  Fun stuff to explore!

Here we are at the end of the dives, ready to go back to shore, happy as can be, complete with attractive matching mask lines!  Great Memories!

Reflections

Happy Birthday to my wonderful husband!
He makes me so happy.

*So about the picture: Thomas and I went to the beach this week and I was taking some pictures.. and I have to admit, this was an accident, but I thought that it was so cool! Earlier, I was trying to get some of me in the reflection of his glasses, but this one I was just trying to get a shot of me beside him, with us looking at each other. Well when I first looked at it, I thought that I had completely failed because I cropped myself out of it.. But when I looked closer, I saw that I was in the picture twice.. perfectly framed in each of his lenses, once with me and the camera and the other with our shadows! Sweet!

Cutest Nephew EVER

You might have noticed a pattern here and in recent blogs.. I like taking pictures of Ezra. He's such a cute little guy. Thomas was marveling at the fact that there were more pictures of Ezra on our blog than either he or I! Yup :)
Well, so it goes, I guess. What can you do?
So here he is again. With his wonderful mom, too!
Liam, Jess, and Ezra came to hang out Wednesday night. We had calzones and brownies with ice cream. Twas a lovely evening all around.
And Jess and Ezra were so nice to let me use their faces for some pictures.. We started late with little light, and so the images are really pixelly - and at the end it was so dark I couldn't even get the camera to focus right - but I just love the little faces that Ezra made.. so much that I couldn't pick which one to post. But I know mothers and grandmothers don't mind looking at lots of pictures of cute sons and grandsons - and they are the only people who really read the blog anyway :) - so I figured I'd just post almost all of them!

Our First Pumpkin

Here it is! Our first pumpkin masterpiece! Happy Halloween!