Thanksgiving, etc.

These pictures were all taken by Nick at the Huntington Gardens, and are some of my favorite all time pictures, along with the last one, which probably is my all time favorite. Once we find our cord for our camera, we'll put up new pictures.

So we had a completely new Thanksgiving experience this year, which was quite exciting. We spent our first Thanksgiving, third holiday total, at Tom and Cici’s house. Nick and Paul were there as were Cici’s Dad and Step mom, and her second cousins. We got there early to do some cooking, because Shelley could not have Thanksgiving without Greenbean Casserole, her Home-made noodles, and Party potatoes. So we finished cooking up all of that, and helped Cici with her other dishes as well. There was quite a lot of food, and it was all delicious. Ella had a great time hanging out with everyone, and Tom had to assume the role of Cat hunter for the evening. He managed to produce Chessie once, which made Ella quite happy, and he also showed her the Chessie talking things on his computer, which she liked a lot http://www.reallivetalkingcat.com/

Other than that we’ve both been working hard, and that was kind of our fun thing for the last few weeks. The other night we were going to go bowling with Troy and Christie, and so we had Ella stay home with Grandma. She went berserk when we left, because we haven’t done that in a while, and by the time we finally made it to the bowling alley and were ready to go, Christie got a call from her Mom saying that Cody was burning up, so they had to leave, ending the whole bowling thing. But Shelley and I had some good pizza at a little place that had an arcade machine, and we played Pac-man and Space Invaders and Frogger, which was excellent.

I've been watching Scrubs a ton, both because Shelley got me season 2 on dvd and because it's on from 7 to 9 here every day, 4 shows straight, so I can normally catch one if we have nothing else going on. I also got an excellent new christmas music CD that I've been listening too all the time, and found the radio station out here that has just christmas music. I love christmas music. It's probably the best thing about the time leading up to christmas, or maybe it's the christmas movies, hard to say. Tell you what, we'll do the first Traveling Pyles survey, what's better Christmas music or Movies, and what's your favorite. At the moment I say music, and my favorite is Jack Johnson doing Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer, with an extra verse at the end where Rudolph totally sticks it to the other reindeer for making fun of him. I've also found that I kinda miss that snow, but I'll hopefully get a bit of that when we go back to Illinois. This last tuesday we were all sick, so we didn't go to the library, and I watched a bunch of tv, but the week before last we went to their story time, which was really fun. The children's librarian read a few books, and they sang songs and played games, and then made a mobile at the end. She really liked it and we're going to go to it this coming tuesday again. We're also planning on going to see Enchanted at the El Capitan theatre in Hollywood, because besides looking like an excellent movie, they built a 24000 square foot Disney Princess land just for the movie, and we know Ella will love it.

Cali update

1. Ella being crazy in her birthday dress.

2. our carved pumpkins.

3. Ella, Cody and Camille getting ready to go trick or treating.

4. Ella with Nick and Paul in a little garden house.

It’s been a bit crazy here for the past few weeks. We’ve been doing lots of demo stuff and everything is a mess. Halloween was fun, we carved pumpkins for the 1^st time with Ella and she liked it a lot. I asked her if she wanted to scoop out the pumpkin guts, and she said “no, but maybe next time I will want to.” So we made one that was a cat, one a mouse with candy corn, and another that was a traditional face. She like seeing them lit up a lot. She dressed up as Uniqua from the Backyardigans, and had fun trick-or-treating with her cousin Cody, and his cousin’s Camille and Connor.

We’ve got a new thing where we go to the library every Tuesday morning. Ella absolutely loves it, and gets a6 books and a couple movies every time. And this last Tuesday we went to Huntington Gardens with Nick and Paul. It was a really good time. They have a huge conservatory with all sorts of interactive things to look at, and then they had a huge children’s garden with all sorts of fountains and things to play with. After we walked through the Jungle and Desert gardens we stopped at the gift shop. We wanted to get Ella something, and she decided on a flower pressing kit, not quite understanding when we told her it would take a long time. We pressed some flowers today, and they'll be ready in a couple weeks, but a few hours after we put them in, she flipped because we couldn't look at them. Maybe not the best thing to have gotten, but she liked putting the flowers in, and I'm sure she'll like getting them out. We went to Panda Inn in Pasadena for dinner after the gardens. Nick and Paul got Sweet and Pungent Shrimp, which for some reason Ella wanted to try. It turned out she liked it, as long as Shelley scraped off the flavoring. She ate about 6 of them, I tried one and it was disgusting. But at least she tried something new and liked it.

New pictures are up on our google page