Thoughts on a Friday

• When the lady from church/playgroups says "I love Ruthie. She definitely knows exactly what she wants." does that translate to "Your child is a DEMON?!" Sometimes I wonder.
• I knew Ruth has been climbing a lot lately, but I didn't realize how much until I was blow drying my hair this morning (usually she goes downstairs and does something like empty the tupperware drawer) and  I heard a crash. She was sitting on top of the kitchen table, bowl and spoon in hand, with a tipped over box of Fruit Loops everywhere. Nice. 
• Quadrupling a batch of ham and cheese soup makes for a lot of dicing of vegetables. It gets REALLY long when you are holding a baby, and almost 30 weeks pregnant, the entire time you are stirring 4 cups of milk to thicken. My arm will never be the same. (Which reminds me that while at my mom's house yesterday I decided that if I am going to be an amazing chocolate-candy chef at Christmas time like my mom, I am going to have to start working out. I begged pregnant, and made my little brother finish beating the chocolate centers.)
• Tripling a batch of sugar cookies takes a LOT of butter. So much so, that I'm going to have to have Sterling move our 40 pounds of chicken in the freezer and see if we even have any left underneath. I hope so.
• I love Macey's. They asked me if I wanted paper or plastic today and I almost went to say plastic, when I realized I wanted to wrap some things in brown paper bags. And since I said that to the lady, she put five or so extra bags inside one of mine. So nice.
• I really really hate having a runny nose. I feel like I've spent a good portion of my day just blowing my nose and wiping Ruthie's. Not so nice.
• On the upside, all these cookies and soup means we're going to a SMASHING Rasmussen party tomorrow, and I am ready for that. (Except not really...Sterling and I are supposed to be singing. Which means I should know the alto part. We'll get on that tonight....haha)
• I feel like making banana bread but my kitchen looks like a disaster zone and I don't know if I'd have enough clean bowls at the moment to actually make it. Maybe on Sunday. 
• Oh! I made nanimo bars with my mom yesterday and they turned out AWESOME!!! But did you know that they have a secret Canadian ingredient? GR! Now I'm going to have a baking/shopping list when we go to Canada just so I can make my husband's favorite Christmas treat. (I guess I could blame that on my parents, for being Canadian and having Canadian recipes...but then, they are divine, so I guess its ok) Although, I probably can just convince my brother to bring it down with them when they visit. 
• Also, I am currently sitting here sucking on glass candy...a thoroughly Rasmussen Christmas treat, and it feels OH. SO. GOOD. I love Christmas!

A little bit o' Thanksgiving (for a minute)

Ok, like I said, I rarely picked up my camera over the Thanksgiving holidays. And as it turns out, the people who did, had NO IDEA how to use my camera. Poor mom was trying to catch this action, and yelling at me the whole time to tell her how to make it not dark. As you can see, I helped finally...but only in time for the last picture. Haahaa.

These pictures are from the night we left all the older grandkids in charge of the littles and went bowling and to dinner just with the adults. It was a great night. We came home to this game(Little Megan being Simon):

Maloree, Kali, Ashlee, Cassidy, Anders, Nash, (? on the floor?) Lynnaea

Brynne, Kiersten, Devaney.....the same kids

I added this picture mostly because of Cassidy's awesome leg-pose. Her poses (and Brynne's) were definitely something to behold.

And like my sister Megan said on her blog, we are very thankful to have Wyatt, the Pied Piper, in our family. I think the final Simon Says was to give Wyatt a hug. Or possibly attack him at will? Oh...and I glimpse some stellar mustard pants in the back!