Thanksgiving 2011

Dec
09

Posted by: Maggie

We had an interesting Thanksgiving this year. We hadn’t done Thanksgiving with Josh’s family for several years so I decided that this year we would skip my family’s and join Josh’s. Which was great, except that Josh’s Dad is into completely effortless Thanksgivings, which means restaurant Thanksgiving.

This year he chose Claim Jumper. The food and service were fine. Not great, just fine. The vegetarian option was a baked potato with veggies, which is not Thanksgivingy at all. But it was okay. We did seem to be rushed in and out, however, which was a little annoying. Each course came out quickly with hardly enough time to finish the one before it. We were in-and-out in a little over an hour. All in all it was just fine, but didn’t at all feel like Thanksgiving.

To me Thanksgiving is about spending a whole day with the family eating snacks and appetizers, cooking dinner, setting the table, and putting up with my siblings watching football. Before I started dating Josh I had never actually heard of anyone having Thanksgiving at a restaurant. I mean, I knew that a lot of restaurants offered a Thanksgiving meal, but I had never head of anyone actually doing it. Now that I’ve done it, I know that it’s about as bizarre and non-Thanksgiving as I expected. We won’t be doing that again.

Luckily, my family is great about holidays and always making sure we all get to celebrate. So after Restaurant Thanksgiving we headed to my Dad’s to join him, my step-mom and siblings for dessert and football. AND I am ever so grateful for my amazing Mother who held her Thanksgiving on Sunday, which was a real Thanksgiving with appetizers and lots of vegetarian-friendly side dishes! I even convinced her to purchase a Heritage Turkey (read about Heritage Turkeys here) for the meat-eaters. Although much more expensive it was apparently delicious, so she’s ordered another for Christmas.

For some reason I only took food photos. I blame pregnancy exhaustion.

The food was delicious! Especially the dessert. My mom made bread pudding with butterscotch sauce, that was oh so good! And I made some homemade cinnamon ice cream to go with it. It was super good and pretty quick and easy to make!

Hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving too!

More Pumpkin Fun – Underwood Family Farms

Oct
24

Posted by: Maggie

It was cooler that week, which helped as we attempted another pumpkin patch visit. It also helped that we went at sunset rather than the middle of the day.

A client had just booked a pumpkin patch shoot for the following weekend and I always try to scout a new location ahead of time at the time of day I plan to shoot. We had also heard great things about Underwood Family Farm’s Harvest Festival so we went to check it out.

Because we went on a weekday, most of the festival activities weren’t happening. But we still enjoyed wandering the corn maze, checking out the pumpkins and visiting the farm animals.

Spiders and Pumpkins

Oct
18

Posted by: Maggie

I love any kind of celebration, especially holidays. So I always start celebrating as early as possible. This year, we started our Autumn and Halloween celebrating on the very first day of October with a trip to the Spider Pavilion at the Natural History Museum.

I was less nervous going in than I was last year. As I mentioned in last year’s post, I have a real insect phobia, I get nervous, my heart starts to race, and my palms sweat when I look at a picture of an insect. I was okay last year, so I wasn’t worried about being able to handle being in a greenhouse with spiders loose everywhere this year. And I did just fine. I mean, I was a little nervous, but not really scared.

The next day we headed over to our local pumpkin patch, Lombardi Ranch, to pick out our pumpkins.

It was about 100 degrees out so we didn’t stay long. We just grabbed a quick pony ride, picked out our pumpkins and that was it. But don’t worry we got some more pumpkin patch fun in another time. I’ll post that trip next week!