A great weekend!

So, we had a really really nice weekend with Hannah and my parents here for Thanksgiving. I was shocked, once again, to realize how tall Hannah is getting. Here is a photo just to give you some perspective:

Your kids aren't supposed to get that much taller than you, are they?

We, of course, spent Thursday having the big Thanksgiving dinner. I love to cook and thoroughly enjoyed the chance to dust off all my holiday recipes and specialty gadgets.

We were even brave enough to attempt a family picture. This was the best we got:



And I tried something completely new this year -- we made a gingerbread house. And, no, it wasn't from a kit. It was quite the interesting process and I have lots of ideas on how to make it go smoother next year. The dough rolling was quite the process (there was just a little cussing involved -- luckily, only Hannah was participating in that part). The directions said to roll the dough out on parchment paper. Do you know how hard that is? The paper just slides around on the counter (and, yes, I could have taped it down, but I was also trying to turn it every couple of strokes). And then once I got the pieces cut out I couldn't transfer them to the cookie sheet without stretching them out. I finally discovered that I could cut them out on the parchment paper and then just transfer the parchment paper to the cookie sheet. It went much smoother from that point. The assembly was much much easier than I thought it would be. And, of course, the kids loved the decorating part best. Here are a few shots of the process and the final product:

(This is Ross being dramatic about the noise the mixer makes.)

As usual, the weekend with Hannah went entirely too fast. I'm glad that we'll be seeing her again in just three short weeks to celebrate Christmas. I can't wait (though I am totally not ready for the trip -- lots to do)!