Big Green Egg

**Side note: this is the 4th time that I've posted tonight so scroll on down to start from the beginning.**

In the previous post, I explained how we surprised Kent with his present Saturday night. Well, here it is all put together. Kent had to cook on it Sunday afternoon and we had some delicious smoked chicken.

Lucy didn't really like the fact that we were outside and she wasn't...

First Family Christmas

This past Saturday, my immediate family came to our house for our Christmas get together. It was the first of many this week. I have 4 more starting Thursday night. Add in the fact that I am working night shift and trying to sleep and make all of the family Christmases, it's going to be a week of not sleeping! But that's okay, it's not about me! I've gone without sleep before! I started the prep early in the week trying to get some things done in the house. Friday night, I made a home made carrot cake. YUMMO! Then Saturday, everyone was coming around 4 to hang out, open presents then eat. I planned the menu a couple of weeks before hand and finally got everything together. The highlight of the night was watching our 2yr old niece open her presents. She had such a great time! She tore piece by piece of the paper off and had to hand each tiny piece to someone.

After she finished, we all opened our gifts and Kent was totally surprised!!! Both of our families had gone in together to buy him a Big Green Egg. It's a top of the line smoker/grill. If you know my husband, he LOVES to smoke BBQ and put anything on the grill. We own 4 smokers and grills so I was hoping that since he got the top of the line, we might can get rid of a couple. (Wishful thinking.) I had wrapped the nest and accessories for him to open and the egg was in the back of my sisters truck wrapped in a sheet. When he opened the nest, he just kind of looked at me. I asked him if he would like to go outside. He had absolutely no clue!!! Such fun! My sister got some good pics of him opening up the nest and his surprised face.

Then we ate...and ate...and ate. Our menu consisted of coconut shrimp, grilled shrimp, roasted potatoes, green beans, corn salad, and grilled corn on the cob. Plenty of desserts and some caramel apple cider to top off the night. After dinner, Aubrey had to dress up in her Cinderella costume and cast spells on all of us:Such a great night with such a great family!!!

My Christmas Tree

At the request of some fellow coworkers, I took some pics of my Christmas tree. I decorated our unit's tree and I thought it turned out really well. I've gotten so many compliments on it, but it's just not really my style. It's very classic, while my style is quite the opposite. Here's a comparison:

My tree at home:

My two favorite ornaments were a wedding present from my favorite patients-red and green polka dots with our initials in black and white polka dots:

The topper is just an explosion of sparkling snowflakes and dots. This doesn't really show you the true colors, but they are silver, hot pink and green.

I must apologize for the next pic, I totally forgot that I don't know how to rotate it so it's sideways, but it's a good pic of how it looks all lit up.

The rest of my decorations are just bright colors. I got my teal tree skirt from Pier 1 on clearance a couple of years ago and I still love it!

Here's the tree I decorated for work. Very classic, just red and gold.

I thought that the bells would be a different kind of topper and I love the fan of peacock looking feathers coming from behind it.

Crafts & Cupcakes!

The first weekend in December was our 3rd time to be in an arts & crafts show. It was in Huntsville on that Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We did really well and plan to continue to be in the NEACA shows up there. We had some new items that really were a hit and if you need a personalized badge reel, I can hook you up!

Well, Loni's chiropracter had told her that he was probably going to be coming with his wife to the show and asked if we had ever had Gigi's cupcakes. Neither one of us had even heard of them, so he brought us a sampling. OMG!!!!! Can you say heaven in a box!?! He brought us a mint chocolate apple spice, coconut, and regular with pink icing. Can you see how amazing they were?

And do you see how high this icing is?

I might have to make a special trip to Huntsville just for Gigi's!

Happy Belated Thanksgiving

The holiday traveling season has truly began! The fact that we live about 45 min from Kent's family and about 1.5 h away from mine, means that we are just constantly in motion throughout the holiday seasons for all of our get togethers. Kent's mom and I both worked Thanksgiving day. She works days and I work nights. When I asked her what we were going to do, she had decided that we could all just eat a Cracker Barrel that night, then cook one night the next week. We already had plans the Sat afterward for my family's dinner. Kent has never been a big fan of Cracker Barrell (crazy-I know!), so when he found out his mom's plans, he decided that he would just cook everything himself. He mixed up the dressing a couple of weeks ago and froze it so that he would be ahead of the game. His sis made homemade mac and cheese and he fixed the rest. The menu was: fried turkey, smoked ham, black eye peas, green beans, mac & cheese, rolls, dressing. Way too much food for all of us, but it did provide us with plenty of left overs for the rest of the weekend. Here's the happy cook. So proud of all of his creations!

#200

Well, I know that I've been a little MIA these past few weeks, but last weekend was our Christmas arts and crafts show that we were in, so I'm about to be settled back in with my normal broadcasting of my boring life.

This is my 200th post. That's bananas! I really don't have anything exciting planned, just wanted to catch up on all that has been going on these last couple of weeks. Two weekends ago, Kent and I went to the GA vs KY game. I had gotten Kent the tickets for our anniversary. He's a big GA fan and had never been to a game at GA. We've been to a couple of GA vs AU games, just never in Athens. This was also my first time to ever go to Athens. What a great time we had! We got there early and ate at Mellow Mushroom and walked around the shops for a little bit before just sitting in chairs beside our car just talking before we went into the game. The stadium is beautiful! The entire set up is really neat and there is a road that you can walk on that is directly beside the stadium end zone.

We were a little sad before we left since UGA had passed. The mascot is such a vital part of the GA tradition, so they played a little memorial video before the game. The dog house was right below us and had a black wreath on top.

But don't worry, Kent did get to see an English bulldog as we were walking to the game. Of course he had to have his pic made with David Pollock.

And of course I got my history lesson throughout the day on mindless facts about GA. We drove about an hour toward home before we stopped for the night. The next day, we went and ate a The Varsity on our way home. I've seen it on the Travel Channel on the show Hot Dog Paradise. It's very interesting that this small hot dog restaurant can sell and feed to around 10,000 customers a day. We got there right as it was opening so it had not gotten too busy yet. We just had the most popular items-chili dogs.

Even thought GA didn't win, we still had a great time spending the weekend together not at home.