For Will’s birthday we went to a Mexican restaurant, Guadalajara...lots of chips, salsa and quesadillas to go around! I’m not sure what kind of birthday dessert he got but I am sure that I didn’t get any :( Happy Birthday, Will!
Leslie’s Birthday Party was low-key and very fun! A few people met and had dinner at a local restaurant that has a great outdoor atmosphere. Afterwards, several of us girls packed up our blankets and beverages for an outdoor movie at Discovery Green. I had never been there but decided that it is one of the coolest (and free!) things we have here in the city! Showing on the blow-up screen was Shall We Dance? Have you ever observed people after watching a dance movie? I think it is so funny to see everyone get up and dance out to the ending credits! (Myself included)I was born to shop. And I LOVE pretty things. Unfortunately my shrinking wallet does not allow me to do much shopping right now but that still doesn’t stop me from window shopping. My ‘Want’ list has grown so much that, if Santa had a ‘Longest List’ Contest, it would be definitely be a contender.
I found this chair in World Market. I love that store :) I decided that when I move into my own place and if I have need for a new chair in my new place this will be the one! It goes with my current furniture theme and colors, textures and styles. A true winner!Moving on to not so pretty things-may I welcome you into our home and introduce you to our kitchen floor!? A few weeks ago (during Will’s party, actually) my mom text me saying ‘Don’t try to walk through the kitchen in the dark when you get home tonight’ accompanied with a picture of what resembled our kitchen floor. Mom and Dad were home, thankfully, when the ceramic tiles started snapping and flying 3 feet into the air. Who knows what type of investigation we would have had had they not been there. The aftermath looked like what I would imagine your kitchen floor would look like if you took a jackhammer to it in search of Atlantis. Or buried treasure. Or a letter to Juliet. The possibilities are endless. Anyways, because we are amidst the holiday season and times are BuSY, the Tetris-like plywood cut-out will have to suffice until the new year! For those of you who obtain a more engineering brain my dad would be happy to discuss with you his theories and education opinion as to what really happened; the explanation involves various atmospheric pressures, compressions, and other variables. All of these words sound familiar and I would tell you what they mean but I don’t like to show-off :) Ha!
So, from the counter-level and up we had a Happy Turkey-(less) Thanksgiving! Every member of our family LOVES our Grandmother’s Chicken-and-Dressing so much that the turkey is often left uneaten. So this year my mom decided to forget the turkey all together by not even putting one on the menu! Instead, 2 pans of dressing joined us for dinner and let’s just stay they didn’t linger too long through the holidays. 
Our spread probably looks pretty small compared to most peoples’. But we are a small family (all 5 of us were here!) and this was PLENTY for us to eat on for several days. Not surprisingly, the dressing was one of the first things to be finished off!The whole family laughed at me (myself included) when we sat down at the table to eat and I told my brother and sister “It’s nice to have ya’ll home with us for the holidays” Ha! I said this with all sincerity, too. I have felt like the mini-mommy this year.
Sisters out for another friend’s birthday! A bunch of friends got together for yet another birthday party! It was fun to celebrate Simon’s, ahem, 21st birthday with him :) 2-stepping; not my forte!
My church has this fabulous event/outreach ministry during the Christmas Season called Angels of Light. It is an entire operation that takes many months to prepare for, the participation of every Sunday School class, and hundreds of volunteers. Every night for the week after Thanksgiving, about 1000 local people and families are bussed in from around the city for an evening of food, Gospel presentation, and people to love on them. Every family is handed a bag of groceries when they taken back to their homes and each child receives a wrapped Christmas present.
As you can imagine this takes months to prepare for: collection of food, clothes, wrapped children’s gifts, etc. Every Sunday School class is responsible for collecting and wrapping toys for specific a specific age and gender and 2 work days/nights. Our class had a work night doing grocery distribution. It was such a blessing. As our pastor said, we did not have the glamorous job of the operation, not even a visible one for that matter. But it counted just the same and I can imagine the parents’ faces when they were handed that bag of food as they stepped off the bus. For some reason I am tearing up right now just thinking about it. I am so blessed!Being around all of these buses reminded several of us of the week(s) we spent this summer with 1000 high school kids!
This part of the operation looks much like what I would imagine Santa’s Prep-Room must look like. You can’t really tell by the picture, but there were 1000s of toys wrapped and stacked in all of the pews and more being wrapped at the work bench!
As always, it is so much more fun to work and serve alongside friends and brothers and sisters in Christ! I don’t remember it being as cold as we make it look, but living in south of I-10 we don’t get much use out of our long-sleeve winter-wear.
And for the record, I DID shave during the month of November. My blog title is dedicated to ‘male-parts’ cancer awareness. If you want more information on this subject, Google it :) While in undergrad, one of our campus organizations designed a T-shirt to raise awareness for No Shave November. I thought the design was super cute, ahem, manly, and simple (that is manly, right...simple?!). According to the scripture reference it’s Biblical, too!Leviticus 19:27: “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.”
