This Week in Photos...

Monday night was the Flag Football banquet... Finally! It kept being put off. The season ended well over a month ago. At any rate, I volunteered to order pizzas (42 of them) and to procure some of the coaches' gifts. I also made a little season scrapbook for Tess's coaches.

Tuesday was my office Thanksgiving feast. I brought a turkey breast which I roasted in the wee hours of the morning. Generally, I sign up to bring some sweet dessert item. But by the time the sheet made it to my cube, there was no one signed up to bring a "main course" and several in the sweet dessert section. So I brought turkey. It's good to step outside the comfort zone every now and then...


No photos of Wednesday... at least not in my camera. :o)

Thursday was, of course, Thanksgiving. I got up bright and early and started making pies. We still miss the double oven situation we had in our Groton, NY house. It came in super handy on holidays...

Anyway, I baked a chocolate pecan and a pumpkin pie that morning so the oven would be available for turkey roasting. It turned out the turkey was still frozen and needed a good sink-soaking before it could be roasted. In the end, this only delayed our feast by a couple hours.

I discovered I had extra sweet potatoes after making Pam's yummy sweet potato casserole. So I whipped up another pie crust using Sandy's recipe from the best pie bakers in Berlin, NY and tossed a sweet potato pie into the oven.

All food came out scrumptious and we filled our thankful bellies.

On Friday, Tess, Alicia, & I went to Play It Again Sports in Anchorage where Santa found a nice snowboard package. Shhhh... don't tell Tess. If she's good, she'll find it under the pre-lit artificial fir tree on Christmas morning.

Then we went across the street to the Bear Tooth dinner theatre to watch a matinee of Hairspray. Good movie. We had our standard Bear Tooth fare of cheese quesadillas. And this time we reserved a booth in order to better contain our toddler. It worked out well.
We passed off Alicia to her daddy and Tess and I went to see the Nutcracker at the Anchorage Center for the Performing Arts. We had good seats and the ballet was wonderful. From where we were sitting in the mezzanine we could see the orchestra in their pit as well. It was a beautiful show and made me realize how much I missed going to the theatre.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving has been Gingerbread Day at our house for the past 7 years. This year, I made a Christmas carousel. It's not quite done yet. I still need to pick up a few more Christmas candies at the store after church this morning. I need to finish the roof and decorate the "yard" area. I'll try to remember to post a photo of the finished product here on the blog.


This photo is Alicia's perspective... :o)

I'll be making a gingerbread train with Alicia's 2-year-old class tomorrow (Monday). I'm going to bake up the gingerbread pieces this afternoon and make some icing so they can just decorate and help me put it together.

Both the carousel and the train will be entered into the Eagle River Gingerbread Contest for next weekend and on display at the First National Bank through the holiday season.