Thanksgiving, Birthday, and Other Stuff

This post is so overdue, and really should be several posts, so I'll try to be concise (yeah right.).








Thanksgiving



We spent most of Thanksgiving with my fantastic in-laws. The whole family was together, which was great.












Of course the weather was pleasant enough to spend lots of time outside.








Dallin hamming it up.

For weeks, Emily had anticipated playing Duck, Duck, Goose with everyone. It was pretty funny watching the grown-ups play.

Emily and Dallin got to help decorate the tree, the thing Emily said she enjoyed most of the whole weekend.

Unfortunately, Emily's pants tend to sag a little and her undies usually go down with them. Hence, the bum crack. But a cute bum crack at that.

We got a family photo one morning. This is everyone waiting to get started.

Grandma and Aunt Stacy kindly helped the kids decorate a gingerbread house.

I think Dallin ate more candy than he actually put on the house.

Emily loved the gumballs that came with it.

Danny and I were not present for this whole thing of decorating the house. Apparently, this is what grandmas let the grandkids do when their parents are gone. What you don't get to see is the whole string of action photos taken before this one that show Dallin climbing up on the table, crawling toward that bowl of candy, and plopping himself down to have complete reign over it. All the while Grandma's in the background laughing instead of intervening. Nice one, Grandma! We caught you on this one! :) Oh well. What's a grandma if she doesn't spoil the grandkids?

Participating in the Dixon tradition of toffee dipping. Here's the double assebly line where everyone has one of the following jobs: throwing the bare toffee into the bowl of chocolate, covering the bare toffee with chocolate then throwing it into the bowl of nuts, covering the chocolate-covered toffee with nuts and placing it on the cookie sheet. I was doing none of those jobs, just eating the bare toffee. Besides the toffee, we (I use the term "we" loosely as I was a minimal participant) made all sorts of other goodies like fondants, fudge, turtles, and almond joys. Yes, my mother-in-law is an accomplished chef and loves to make anything and everthing. Luckily, I'm the benefactor in much of what she makes.

Dallin and Uncle Ben. Dallin's job was throwing the toffee into the bowl of chocolate.

As was Emily's job.

Dallin and Aunt Emily hanging out.

Birthday

I celebrated my 29th birthday on the 30th. To celebrate, all of us Dixons went out for breakfast at Crackers (yum!!) on Saturday morning and then Danny and I went to Cheesecake Factory (yum yum!!) with some of my siblings and their spouses that night. Sunday was my actual birthday so we had cake at the Dixons and opened gifts that evening. I got some money (some of which I've already on some shoes), some new clothes and earrings, my old violin repaired, and my own copy of These Is My Words, my favorite book. Not bad, eh?

Dallin withGreat-grandpa and Great-granny Dixon.

Other Stuff

This past week or so was spent in Mesa while Danny was in Boston for work. We stayed some days at my in-laws' and some days with my mom while she tended my brother's kids. I was able to get some good Christmas shopping done and it was fun to stay up late talking with my mom before bed.

My kids got to take part in another Dixon Christmas tradition: Bratzle-making. Bratzles are flat, little, Swiss cookies you cook in a special iron (similar to a waffle iron) that imprints the cookies with pretty designs. They are oh so delicious and the kids had a good time helping.

This, unfortunatley, is not a good representation of either Danny or the following little incident. So, the last morning we were in Mesa, I got out of the shower annoyed with myself for not having turned on the bathroom fan (the mirrors were extremely fogged up). Dressed only in my garments at that point, I turn on the fan and when I do, it makes a weird buzzing noise for it's first couple rotations. I didn't think to much of it, other than the fan had never done that before. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I see something fall from the fan, a thin, brown something - like a stick, and I hear a couple of little thuds. When I peered over to the space between the toilet and the tub, there on the floor was a lizard! It was just the one of the regular lizards we see all the time her in AZ, about 4 or 5 inches long. I'm not scared of lizards per se, but I certainly wasn't going to try to get one that big, so I called Danny in to do it. It didn't move much, but it was alive (Personally, I suspect it brain damage after falling from that high, ricocheting off the toilet, and landing on tile floor). We let it go in the backyard and eventually it ran away. So, that was a pretty surprising thing that we all laughed about.