Thanksgiving and the "Bubailey Plague"

Friday Nov 18th - Drive down to Idaho; pull in at 5am MST due to closed and icy roads.  We found out that 3 people have been throwing up all that night.

Saturday Nov 19th - Sick people under quarantine, we all visit and are very happy to be with the Baileys

Saturday Nov 19th night till morning - I had bad stomach pains all night, but seemed to be alright in the morning.

Sunday Nov 20th - We all went to church and things still seem to be alright

Sunday Nov 20th to Monday Nov 21st - I had pains all night again, got up in the morning, showered, and just couldn't shake the pains.  Ended up in bed all day Monday feeling nauseated, thereafter had some interesting bathroom experiences at night.

Tuesday Nov 22nd - Feeling weak, but in general much better, went to the temple with the adults in the family and did sealings!  Totally amazing experience.  Thereafter ate at a Chinese Restaurant called "Happy's."  However, Mom, Nick, Marren and I had to rush back to go to rehearsal/work; and Marren and I each had 1 kid throwing up while we were gone.  We get back and it was the 2 moms against the world, as we had the two girls continue to throw-up on us and throw-up in 3 other places of the house that needed to be cleaned up.

When the rest of the party came back, 3 adults and Addie spent the most part of the night in and out of the bathroom or puking in a bowl next to them.

Wednesday Nov 23rd - Lily threw-up twice in the morning, and ended up in bed with her daddy all day, but everyone else seemed alright.  We start prepping for the big Turkey Day.

Thursday Nov 24th - Thanksgiving was totally hectic in the morning with all of us cooking and getting things done.  We were aiming to eat at 1pm because 1 of us had to go to work.  We ended up eating at 1:30-ish without a Turkey but hey, we had 9 superbly yummy pies made by 5 married women! (In case you're curious, we had 1. The Mother of All Apple Pies; 2. strawberry rhubarb; 3. banana cream; 4. chocolate cream; 5. coconut cream; 6. classic pumpkin; 7. classic pecan; 8. french peach pie; 9. pumpkin eggnog pecan pie). We had lots of yummy sides and 2 tasty turkeys that were done a few hours later.  Unfortunately another adult got sick after the meal.... Thursday night, I generally like to honor Turkey Day, but we ended up doing some shopping.  10pm @ Walmart was the most insane place to be in Pocatello, Id that night!  Seriously crowded, seriously scary - we had people break out in fist fights over the Xbox 360 + Kinect bundle, people stealing other people's waffle irons, and a lot of chaos. 

Friday Nov 25th 12am - Another bunch of us headed out to Shopko and everyone was much nicer, much more organzied and we all got what we wanted in 25 min!

Friday Nov 25th 4am - 4 of us crazy ladies got up again and went shopping starting with JCPenny's, then Fred Meyer, then Big Lots - all very successful.  However, between 5am - 6am, we get a call and another one had bite the dust and fallen to this crazy stomach flu!  And some of us were having relapses in a milder form of this crazy thing!  I've decided it's more like a cleansing of your body because everything comes out in all directions.  So, the healthy ones tried to shop for the unhealthy ones and we were shopping all day!  I'm not joking!  I had maybe 2 hours of sleep and was shopping from 10pm the night before till 5pm the next day. 

Saturday Nov 26th - Another 2 came down with the sickness and was throwing up.  But we tried to have fun and salvage the very last bit of our vacation.

Sunday Nov 27th - we drove home with 2 sick children in diapers.  Yes, that says TWO children - it was a precautionary measure.  All in all, only 2 escaped unscathed out of 25 this past week.  Most of us are still experiencing left-over symptoms.  We still loved every minute of being with the Baileys and we will talk about this for years to come I'm sure!

Michael's First Birthday

November 10, 2011 was Michael's first birthday.  Now, you can think that I am a terrible parent because I felt like I was a horrid parent, but I accidentally scheduled a long, overdue girls night with my *FFF gals from high school that night.  Slight oversight.  So, we pushed back celebrating Michaels' birthday till the 14th because there were many scheduling conflicts that entire weekend.  We did it all on Monday, including his well-check appointment.  Michael is now over 21lbs, making it my first baby to be over 20 lbs at 1 year of age.  He is 75-90th % in height (making his daddy really proud who is trying to populate the world with tall Asians).  He received 3 shots on Monday and he was quite brave.
I made him a cute little bear cake.  It was suppose to be a nice brown bear but I couldn't get the frosting color quite right, (it kept reminding me of poop pardon my description).  I started adding in red and green, but that made it even worse! Lily suggested that I add in blue.  That made a really nice forest green color and we went with it.  But I really need to remember to allow time for the colors to settle and seep because we ended up with a black bear after an hour.  Brown, blue, green or black, it was still fun.  That night we played games centered around Michael (passing the ball, etc.) and then had cake.  He was a bit unsure about the cake and was poking at it till Luke got some frosting in his mouth.  He LOVED it!  Happy birthday my sweet, sweet boy! 

Garlic Herb Roast Chicken

I made my first roast chicken last night and it was AWESOME.   It was moist and flavorful; much better than store-bought rotisseries.  The best part was the mouth-watering aroma that filled my home while it was cooking.  The original recipe was from Ina Garten - Perfect Roast Chicken, but I added quite a few of my own adaptations.  So here's the EB version:

Ingredients

• 1 (5 to 6 pound) roasting chicken
• salt
• black pepper
• 1 large bunch fresh thyme
• 2-3 sprigs of fresh rosemary
• 1 lemon, quartered
• 1/2 orange, quartered (or smaller to fit it in)
• 1 head garlic, cut in half crosswise (no need to peel)
• 2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter, melted
• 4-5 Russet or Yukon Potatoes cut into large cubes
• 3 sweet potatoes cut into large cubes
• 4 carrots cut into 2-inch chunks
• 1 bulb of fennel, tops removed, and cut into wedges
• Olive oil
• garlic powder
• Johnny's seasoning salt

Directions

1) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

2) Remove the chicken giblets. Rinse the chicken inside and out. Remove any excess fat and leftover pin feathers and pat the outside dry with paper towel.
3) Liberally salt and pepper (roughly 1.5 TBLSP of salt and 1-2 tsp pepper) the inside of the chicken. 4) Stuff the cavity with the bunch of thyme, rosemary, lemon, orange, and all the garlic.
5) Brush the outside of the chicken with the butter and sprinkle again with salt and pepper.
6) Tie the legs together with kitchen string and tuck the wing tips under the body of the chicken.
7) Place the rest of the ingredients in a roasting pan. Toss with 2 TBLSP olive oil, 1 tsp of garlic powder and 1 tsp Johnny's seasoning salt.
8) Spread around the bottom of the roasting pan and place the chicken on top. (make sure your roasting pan isn't too big or else some of the veggies might burn)
9) Roast the chicken for 1 1/2 hours, or until the juices run clear when you cut between a leg and thigh. 10) Remove the chicken and vegetables to a platter and cover with aluminum foil for about 20 minutes. (this is essential to get the juices to go back into the chicken and make it moist!!) Slice the chicken onto a platter and serve it with the vegetables.

The veggies cooked in the chicken drippings were fantastic.  The drippings from the chicken would make an amazing gravy... but I'm not the gravy maker in the family so I just made a pouch gravy.  I ended up dipping my chicken in the juices and it was terrific.  Luke mentioned that rice on the side would complete the meal and I totally agree.  I was worried about roasting the chicken and veggies at 425 for 1.5 hours, but it really did come out perfect!

Lily's Haircut

 Here is Lily's new "do".  I did it myself, though I really wish I'd known that she wanted it this short because I could have taken her to a nice, fancy salon for free and teach her about donating hair, etc.  It's pretty even for the most part though I might go back in and give her a little bit of layering.

She really loves her new hair cut.  Luke tells me that I need to be a better influence on her because he LOVED her long hair.  I did too... I miss her beautiful hair, but, lucky for me, she inherited my super hair growing genes. I'm sure that her hair will be long again in no time.

Long or short, my Lily is adorable!

Caramel Apple Date

 Luke and I made these earlier this week for an "at home" date.  We were suppose to do it last weekend for our date night but we were both too tired.  We used the recipe for the caramel from one of my most favorite sites (you should know it by now) - http://www.ourbestbites.com/2011/10/gourmet-style-dipped-apples-with-homemade-caramel/  This caramel really is amazing!  Luke and I were both really surprised at how easy it was to make and dip in, and it tasted incredible.  We dipped the caramel apples in chocolate after and had an assortment of toppings - toffee bits, crushed walnuts, almond slices, crushed oreos and coconut flakes.  Then we drizzled the white chocolate on top.  My favorite toppings were the coconuts and the walnuts - definitely a must have although all of it together tasted really good too.  We made 14 total and shared these with our Home-Teaching and Visiting-Teaching families. 

The granny smiths are definitely the way to go.  The red ones were the much more inferior gala apples.  I wish we tried it with Honey Crisps because I think that would've been amazing!

I also wish we had some craisins because I think the red color would make it much more festive. 

Halloween

This Halloween Lily wanted to be Rapunzel.  Her favorite princess is still Aurora, but Rapunzel is a close second. I think Rapunzel won the dress-up contest because her dress is purple (Lily's favorite color) and because she has long hair with flowers in it.  Arya wanted to be Cinderella (her favorite princess) though she did go back and forth between Cinderella and Snow White for a good while.  Luke and I decided that Michael should be Pooh because this kid is constantly eating!!!  Never stops!  We thought it'd be really cool if Luke can be tigger and I, Kanga, but... maybe next year... who knows.
We had our ward annual Trunk or Treat on Saturday along with a chili cook off and lots of fun activities.  Seriously the largest ward activity I have ever been to!!!  There were so many kids and so many activities - face painting, "gross touching," fish pond, cake walk, bean bag toss, doughnut eating, lollipop ghosts, and a few more rooms that we didn't even get to go to!  Then we had our Trunk or Treat and man there was a lot of candy!  The girls made a really good haul this year.  They filled their buckets to the top and then some.  But as usual, we let them pick out 10 pieces of candy and then confiscated the rest.  We in general give out the rest of the candy as rewards for being good for the next few months... and Luke and I get to eat them too. :).
Monday night was business as usual, we had 2 kids come trick or treating this year (our next door neighbors) and that was it.  Better than last year's ZERO.  I actually expected this from our experience last year so I bought the good chocolate candy from Costco for our Trunk or Treat on Sat, so now that's what we have left over. :o)

I think I should do Lily's hair like this every Sunday.



I've decided that he's the cutest Pooh Bear in the world.  Personal opinion.

Pumpkin Carving

 I honestly lost faith and didn't believe that we were going to carve pumpkins this year.  Last weekend was the first weekend that Luke and I had time to spend together with the kids this month, and between going to Craven Farm, making cupcakes and corn bread for our ward's Trunk or Treat party, getting the kids in their costumes, etc., I didn't see it happening.  But, to my great delight we did get to carve this year!!
Thanks to Luke, who found these awesome gourds at the farm that inspired us, he came up with a fun idea for a pumpkin.  Since carving a face wasn't too difficult, we decided we would indeed carve pumpkins this year.  I didn't get a pumpkin of my own because there really wasn't any time, but if I had, I would've done suns from "Tangled."  We got mini pumpkins for the girls and they really are fun little things to carve.  Lily wanted ladybugs and Arya wanted a kitty.  I carved Lily's pumpkin and started Arya's but didn't have time so Luke did most of the kitty one.

I really like how the ladybugs turned out.  I had my doubts till we put a candle in it.

Isn't this totally fabulous?  It started out with the nose gourd and then we found the horns.

Kindergarten Halloween Party

Lily's class had a Halloween party yesterday.  Siblings were invited so Arya and Michael also got to attend.  The parent who organized this was amazing!  There were lots of healthy snacks along with sugar cookie decorating, paper sacks decorating, face painting, cake walk, bingo, lollipop ghost making, and paper activities.  The kids had a GREAT time!