Birthday Cake, Turkey, and a Heck of a Time at My Class Reunion

A little “behind the scenes” for ya: I always upload my pictures to the blog first and then tell the stories. Selecting and uploading the pictures usually takes less than five minutes. Today it took almost 30 minutes because I just uploaded 38 pictures.

Friends, we may be here a while. 🙂

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week were three of the best days I’ve had in a long time, and the common denominator of all three days is that they were spent with awesome people.

On Wednesday we celebrated Hadley’s birthday with my side of the family.

On Thursday we enjoyed Thanksgiving Day with 16 people gathered around my parent’s dining room table.

And on Friday we partied like it was 2006 at my 10 year high school reunion.

Let’s back up. 🙂

Wednesday was my big day to do the entertaining. Since there was so many people in town for the week, everybody picked certain meals, activities, or days to “head” so that a load of chaos didn’t fall on my mom. I picked out Wednesday to be the day I’d cover food and entertainment since my family was interested in having a cake for Hadley’s belated birthday anyway.

My best friend Amberlee and her little family joined the fun as well!

I spent the afternoon making six homemade pizzas (our family recipe is here!), and all but two slices were devoured within the hour. I also made a holiday sangria that went down the hatch just fine as well. 🙂 Finally, I ordered this cake from the brand new Edgar’s Bakery that just opened in Huntsville. So delicious! I remember eating at Edgar’s in Birmingham when Jamie’s parents used to live there, and their desserts were always my favorite!

Singing to Hadley was so much fun. She’s had kind of an embarrassing number of birthday celebrations this month, so by this point she knew every word of Happy Birthday and sang right along with everyone else.

At one point during the night I looked over and spotted my parents down on the floor with the girls, and it was one of those moments that made my heart really happy.

On Thanksgiving morning my sister and I did our own little Turkey Trot run together before coming home to get ready for the day. Hadley and I snuggled for a bit and watched the parade before she got distracted and ran to the next person who would play with her. 🙂

On a whim, I gave Sadie some diced up sweet potatoes, corn, and turkey during our Thanksgiving dinner. To say she loved it would be an understatement. My sister then decided to give my niece some corn, and she loved it too! These girls are great eaters!

My dad joked about how it might be a little challenging to get everybody together for a family picture since everybody was running around in different directions all day, but thankfully we were able to run out to their backyard for about 10 minutes to take a few pics when the opportunity opened up.

My girls wore these precious outfits that were made and gifted by my best friend Amberlee. She started her own monogramming and appliqué business via Etsy this past summer, so if you’re looking for something (anything!) custom-stitched, she’s your girl!

Sadie was happy to spend three whole days with her Uncle David (my handsome brother).

We’ve missed a couple of Thanksgivings together since we’ve been married, and there’s a good chance he’ll miss next year too, so I tried to be intentional about soaking up having my whole little family of four together. The Army is a weird world sometimes, but it does a heck of a good job at reminding me to soak up the little moments that we get to spend together.

At the end of the night, we played a round of for a few laughs. 🙂

Though this was honestly a really wonderful holiday, not all of them have been this way. More often than not, several family members are missing from the table for one reason or another, somebody is working, somebody is deployed… I’ve had plenty of holidays that didn’t quite feel very “blog worthy”, and I can recall several where I looked at others’ “highlight reels” and felt a little down. Just wanted to throw that out there in case you had a bummer holiday this year. Holidays just seem to go in ebbs and flows. This was a happy year for us, and every year that’s “good” I always find myself praying extra hard that everyone is alive and healthy the following year as well. I find as an adult that I’m simply extra thankful for good, old fashioned family time.

On a happy note… let’s get on with the show. 🙂

Friday was AWESOME is every sense of the word. Our high school 10 year reunion was that night, so a few of my girlfriends and I used it as an excuse to spend some extra time together, just like the old days.

Around lunchtime, five of us met up to get a mani/pedi just for fun. We went our separate ways for a few hours before meeting back up for appetizers and drinks at the Monaco Lounge at Bridgestreet.

I loved having my best friend Ashley over at my parents so that we could get ready together.

We were all big fans of our high school principal, and I don’t think anybody was shocked when he and his sweet wife showed up to hang with us for a bit. 🙂

The reunion was held at Campus 805, an old middle school building that was recently converted into a huge event venue and brewery. I liked the location for this type of thing a lot!

Almost all of my closest friends were there, and we all just had a ball being together in this kind of environment. Jamie has missed a ton of my social events throughout our relationship because of his job in the Army, so we were both thrilled that he was able to be there to hang with all of my friends and their spouses. It’s easy for him to see why I love these people so much; he really enjoys them too!

Remember how I set up my sister with my random friend from english class? Well… they got married. 🙂 So Jennifer got to come play at our reunion too!

I was kind of a wreck leaving Sadie for nearly eight hours since she has such a hard time taking a bottle, but my parents frequently sent messages like this one that the girls were fine and happy. 🙂

We left Sunday at 4 a.m. to head back to Kansas, and the trip back was pretty uneventful until we got about 45 minutes away from home. Sadie was spewing her baby food everywhere in between rounds of screaming her head off, Hadley was covered in Cheetos, and Ted decided to take a crap on the floor of the car (even though he’d just gone to the bathroom one hour prior). We pulled off the interstate at a winery (of all places) to clean up Teddy’s mess and somewhat clean up the girls as well. Sadie decided to go #2 right as we were getting back on the interstate, but we decided to hold our breaths and hightail it home. I think we belly-laughed out of delirium that entire last half hour.

These are the stories we’ll tell forever, they say.

These are the stories we’ll remember and laugh about when our girls are grown, they say.

Never a dull moment. 🙂