The Arredondo Family: Noteworthy November

OK I'm really reaching with these post titles, eh? And actually that may be misleading, November wasn't necessarily noteworthy. However it could be a lot more exciting than Awesome October, once again, I'll let you be the judge..

Ethan started taking piano lessons at the end of September or early October, this video is from his 3rd or 4th lesson. He likes piano, after his second lesson he said, "This is actually really fun." I guess he was skeptical that piano could be fun. He likes the lessons but he hates practicing, gotta figure out a way to make practice fun too.

The kids school had a turkey trot, and it happened to be about 42 degrees that morning. Even though we were freezing, we had fun! Ethan got 7th place. It was a fun and cold way to start our morning.

My very kind and talented friend, Janalyn took our family pictures, she's so nice! Alex and I didn't like the same picture so we did a re-do, poor Janalyn...We're so high maintenance, plus we had a couple technical difficulties, like my giant deformed looking hand that looked like it was attached to Abby's side! You know weird things like that.

The kids had a "Thankful Thursday" night at the school, they made a tree and a turkey respectively.

Ethan's tree's leaves say things he's grateful for, things like: Dad, Mom, Family, Friends, Teachers, Food, Sisters, Church, Aunts, Toys and Papa and Grammie

Abby's turkey feathers say things like: Her teacher, Family, Friends, Her Blanket, Thanksgiving.

We're grateful for them!

During Thanksgiving week we decided to hit Santa's Wonderland... What fun! I really love this place, probably because I just love Christmas lights, and boy do they have Christmas lights! But they also have a hay ride, a petting zoo, a kid size train, fire pits to roast a hot dog or make a s'more. They have funnel cakes, BBQ, turkey legs, hot chocolate, fajitas..They have live bands, and fake snow (some sort of bubble concoction), of course the Giant Texas flag all in lights and Santa and reindeer. It really is a wonderland!

This is when it first starting "snowing".

Rudolph!!!!

Good thing she watched Dora the Explorer (or is it Diego?) so much, she knows how to read a map!

Back rub train while waiting in line for the hay ride.

Speaking of Trains, how cute is this caboose?

Hayride!

I have a million more pictures of Santa's Wonderland, but I'll stop here. You can thank me later..

This year I (yes me, myself and I) made all the fixin's for Thanksgiving dinner (my sister in law, Ashley, also made a bunch of Thanksgiving fixin's that were totally delicious!) to take to (my dear MIL), Linda's, since she was nice enough to host it at her house. We had a wonderful and yummy Thanksgiving day! I brined the turkey this year, never done that before, and man oh man was it good? It was delicious! I know! I'm as shocked as you are...Even my dark meat loving husband thought the white meat was really good too! Yay! Here's a picture of the bird, so you can see just how delicious it was..

The brine

So now that I look at the bird, it doesn't look as nearly as delicious as I thought it did! Ha! But trust me it was amazing (I can say that because I give full credit to the recipe for the brine and roasting tips from Our Best Bites-it had very little to do with me)!
We have lots to be thankful for this year (and every year really), we're very blessed and feel really grateful for those blessings!

We also hit the Renaissance Festival the last weekend in November, thanks to my friend, Janalyn who went on a cruise and couldn't use her tickets, so we got to..

I will say it was not my favorite thing, I think I had different expectations of what it would be like. I hadn't been in so long it was hard to remember what it was like and know what to spend our time on and what to not..So I don't think we used our time there effectively. I also didn't realize the seriousness to which many people take the festival, and by serious I mean serious. The kids had fun and got their faces painted, Abby got the bangle scarf thing and Ethan got a wood sword. Alex got a gyro. And I got a headache. ;)