Thanksgiving Trip(s)

 This year for Thanksgiving we were fortunate enough to visit with both of our families.  Even though we had just a short trip to Colorado Springs for a couple of days and another short trip in Utah, it was nice to just be with the family and hang out.  Here are a couple of highlights from our tip... 

The weather in Colorado Springs was 65 degrees when we were there!  We attempted to take Liam and Cooper to the park, but we made it only about 5 min before Cooper had a break down over a sliver and Liam peed his pants.  I'm sure that when I am a parent I will think to ask kids if they have gone potty before we head out.

 Colby impressed me by trying squid.  Sick!

I got some early b-day presents from the fam.  As you can see Copper and Liam are super interested.

Thanksgiving feast #1 with the McDermott clan.  Thanks so much Taryn for hosting us!

The kiddo table.  I love how Liam is just hanging out like it's the cool thing to be at the kids table.

On our trip we got to visit with all the little nieces.

Grandpa with baby Harper.

 Jake with Baby Marli

Hangin out with Linds and Lucy.  Lucy is not really much of a baby anymore.

The way that Lucy was so intent on her coloring at the restaurant made me think that she is destined to be an artist like her mama.

If you can't tell, the onsie says: "I Love Uncle Jake."

Thanksgiving feast #2 with the Wilding clan.

Thanks again everyone for everything when we came to visit!  We love to be able to visit with family!

October

It's been awhile since I have posted anything on the blog.  October has been a busy month.  I was lucky enough to meet up with Jake's family in NYC for a couple of days.  Unfortunately, Jake couldn't come with us...darn Midterms.  I missed him dearly, but I also had a wonderful time.  I loved everything we did, but I must say that I was blown away by Lion King on Broadway.  It brought me back to my African Dancing days at Weber.  Good times.  The rest of the pics are some odds and ends of what we have been up to in October.

Here we are on the commuter train on our way to the Blaze.  The Blaze was an awesome event, which I believe is in the town of Salem outside of New York, with tons of lit carved pumpkins.  My camera couldn't do everything justice, so I didn't take any and therefore don't have any of my own pictures to document it, but just believe me when I say that it was really cool.

The famous chocolate cake sundae from Serendipity.  I was skeptical if this would be good.  Often times I find that the more you get of something at a restaurant, the worse it tastes, but that was NOT the case in this instance.  It was amazing.

Our walk across the Brooklyn bridge.  This was definitely cool.

The 911 monument. 

After seeing Lion King, us poor girls were a little tired and due to the fact that each of us were wearing heels, we didn't exactly like the idea of walking through the city to visit Carnegie deli, so we enjoyed a pleasant ride in a bike cart pulled along by this guy.

We are SO happy not be walking.

Tom didn't quite make it through all of this corned beef, but I was still pretty impressed.

So, after New York, the rest of the month was pretty low-key.  People in Buffalo seem to really love inflated lawn displays.  This is the most extravagant one I have seen yet.  The pictures really don't do it justice. 

...and here we are carving our pumpkins...

Jake is such a man that he is OK wearing pink cupcakes.

The finished product.  The one on the left is supposed to be a "Jake" pumpkin.

Happy Late Halloween everyone!  Hopefully, I'll get to posting our Thanksgiving before the end of December.

The Great Pumpkin Race

So, Jake and I have been a little down in the dumps lately because we came to the realization that we are just not active people anymore, so in order to overcome our little problem, Jake signed us up to run a 5K this Saturday.  I have become pretty soft, so when I woke up Saturday morning to wind and rain I was a little worried, but we pushed through and prevailed!

New Apartment!

Our apartment isn't exactly new anymore as we have been moved in for a couple of months now, it's just taken this long before we have been settled in enough that I could blog about it.  So, without further ado...here are 4 of the rooms!  The other 3 rooms are still too messy to take pictures of, but we will have those to a point that we can post them in a couple of months.

Introducing our new old table that we bought from Reimagine, my favorite furniture store in Buffalo and our Craig's list hutch find. 

The first day we got the hutch in the house I set it up with our dishes-a lot of which have been gifts from Jake. As I was congratulating myself on my handwork, I realized just how lucky I am to have a husband that let's me be so girly with my decorating style. 

 

New Glasses!

So, Jake's been Jones'n some new glasses for the past few months with good reason as he hadn't had his prescription updated for the past few years.  I can't decide which Jake I like best:

Urban, Thrifty, Grunge Jake

or

Sophisticated Jake

Truth to be told, I like Jake no mater what glasses he's wearing.

It's Time

So, I thought that it was time that I move on from my last sad blog post and prove that Jake and I have been up to stuff.  The week before Labor Day was rough for us...probably because it was be beginning of school and work is dang busy since we've had another employee quit lately, so I planned a little camping adventure for us over Labor Day weekend to Allegany State Park.  Sadly...this is the only picture we got while we were there even though the park itself is beautiful.

If you are curious about what the heck this is, I'll tell you.  It's a pic of the abandoned mini golf course at the state park.  It was too creepy to pass up.  Buffalo is full of oddities that I will one day document in full.

I'm Sad

So, I'm sad, real sad.  It's been busy and stressful lately for both Jake and I and to top it off Jake's computer had a freak out and.  He was able to send it in and get it fixed-no charge, but the sad thing is is that all of our pictures from our first 2 years as a married couple were stored on the computer's hard drive.  We have talked in the past many times about how it would be a good idea to save all of our pictures to CD's...just in case, but more often than not, I don't take proactive against disaster until I have already learned my lesson.  Lesson learned...

Overdo Post-Trip to Utah

So, I am so behind in my posting.  By looking at my post it appears like we didn't have a summer at all.  Summer went by so fast and now that Jake is back is school it sure feels like it!  However, we DID have a summer and we went to Utah for part of it.  Here is what the Utah trip consisted of:

The Utah Mountains.  Man, I miss those.

 

An early morning race.  Cole and Mandi look about as excited as I felt that morning.

 Two parades

 

 Miss Mckena Time

Miss Lucy time

 Fancy Food, thanks to our gracious hosts, Scott and Lindsey

And more good food with the people we love.

It's always a treat to be with family again..excuse the pun, I couldn't resist. There was a boating trip and a trip with my fam to my aunt and uncle's cabin in there too...I'm not quite sure why we don't have pictures of those.

*Warning* This is going to be a long post

So...the summer just seems to have past us by.  There has been so much going on that I really haven't taken the time to update the blog about it, but now Jake is at a Super Saturday and I am alone on a Saturday night, so...it's time.  Rather than give a play by play of our summer pre Utah trip I will tell the story in pictures and some captions...starting...NOW!

We kicked off the summer by pulling our grill out...for a day.

 Mandi happened to be in Niagara Falls for a night as part of a school project.

 My sweet husband knows how much I love colored glass, so he surprised me with a trip to the Corning Glass Museum. 

 There was some cool stuff made of glass there...

 AND I got to make my own glass, which really just consisted of blowing into a tube, but it was still super cool.

 We went on a day trip to Bennet Beach in South Buffalo, which consisted of sitting on the sand with a ton of other people and watching this guy... It was a great time.

 Went to the Greek fest, which consisted of navigating through this crowd of people to get our hands on some really great food.

 On a Friday night when we had absolutely no plans we went to a Buffalo Bills game.  It turned out to be the right thing to do because we were handed some free extra tickets and it happened to be Star Wars night.  Oh yeah!

 We went to the Allentown Art Festival again this summer.  It consisted of navigating through this crowd to look at some local art...

And to watch this guy...

 And to see this...

 And this...

And to attempt some artistic shots of the back alleyways of Buffalo.  I have to say that the city is growing on me more and more all the time.

More to come of our trip to Utah