And I'm Back...

We cooked. We ate. It was magical.

Yes, I survived my first Thanksgiving (well, not my first ever, obviously, but the first one where I felt primarily responsible for the yumminess of the majority of the food on the table). No thanks to Gelman's market, which produced one of the saltiest tasting turkeys known to man, it was a relative success. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, apple & sausage stuffing, beans, salad, dinner rolls and about seventeen million types of cranberry sauce. Well, perhaps I exaggerate the number of cranberry sauces by a few million, but if you'd been here (and some of you were), you know that talk of cranberry sauce pretty much dominated the discussion in the days leading up to the meal.

The problem with being a blogger who can't find the time or energy to blog is that your life is lived in bloggable moments. I cannot tell you how many times in the past two weeks that I found myself saying, "This will be great for the blog!", like when my mother in law and I took Ethan to get his hair cut and the woman doing it spiked his coif up with something called, I kid you not, "Short Sexy Hair" gel. "Short Sexy Hair". On my baby.

So know that, although I wasn't actually blogging in the past couple of weeks, I was living my life in little moments that I thought you'd get a kick out of, if I could only get my head out of my proverbial butt and write something. Alas, that did not happen. So here I am again, interwebs, back to blog. I have about 10 topics rattling around in my brain right now, but none of it will make it onto the page tonight, what with the left-over gorging-induced drowsiness I am battling at the current moment. Perhaps I will challenge myself to my own private NaBloPoMo, since I was the anti-NaBloPoMo'er last month.

I have to say though, to those of you on the East Coast, the "Oh, boo-hoo, I miss the cold and snow and ice" that I thought was going to plague me round this time of year has not hit. As a matter of fact, I am currently sitting at my dining room table, short-sleeved, open-windowed, looking across the street at the red and green Christmas lights and twinkling, grazing reindeer decking out my neighbor's front lawn. It's pretty nice to check out the pretty holiday lights without the insides of your nose freezing together.

So until I wake up from my food coma, here are a few pictures.

Here is happy Ethan (with a little bit of "short, sexy hair" still in his hair. This is the genuine smile, unlike....

This is what happens when you make the mistake of asking Ethan to smile for the camera. Not sure when it started, but I so hope he gets over it before the dawning of the school picture days. Does anyone else think of the Friends episode when Chandler and Monica try to have an engagement picture taken? Please, dear lord, don't let my child be Chandler.