Tis the Season for Christmas Decorations

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around these parts!  That's what's keeping me going on this rainy Monday morning.  I have been pretending that it's super cold because it looks really wintry outside, and if the temperature would drop a degree or 30, it would be snowing.  A girl can dream, right?

My weekend looked a lot like this:

1. Puppy naps are my favorite!  I am gone so much during the week right now that I don't mind laying around for an hour or 2 with sleeping puppies on me.
2. The Christmas boxes came down this weekend and now our house looks like a Christmas wonderland!
3.  The fruits of my labor....our beautiful tree!  (more pics of the rest of the house coming tomorrow!)
4. Hollow wondering what the H3!! I put on his head. (it was a doggie Santa hat for the record)
5. Our new memory foam mattress pad came in this weekend, and it was packed neatly in this box that was half the size of Hawk!  BTW it worked wonders and our bed is super fluffy again!
6. Ice Cream Sundae's in front of the tree.  This happened several times this weekend, and will probably happen several more times this week.
7. Fishies at Bass Pro.
8. Attempt number 2 at dressing the boys up.  They look thrilled, don't they?!

As you can see Christmas was officially kicked off at our house this weekend.  Eric was out of town on a duck hunting trip so I pulled everything out of the attic and got to decorating.  I would like to document that I cleaned the house on Friday night at 10pm, AFTER my basketball game.  I am pretty sure that will never happen again, so I wanted to make sure that I mentioned that. =)  My reason?  I didn't want to have to get up Saturday morning and clean the house before I decorated.  I wanted to get up and go right into decorating, which is exactly what I did.  The boxes came down Saturday morning, Christmas movies started on tv, and I didn't finish until halftime of the SEC Championship game, only stopping to walk the puppies and run to the grocery store.

Side note:  Who else is blown away by the fact that a football team from the state of Alabama could bring home a 5th consecutive National Championship?! I don't care who you root for, that is amazing!  And people not from Alabama wonder why we make such a big deal about college football teams in this state...because we can!

Sunday Eric got home right after I came home from church, and we decided to venture out in the rain to Bass Pro. We did a little Christmas shopping and had a date night dinner at Islamorada in the store. We got home at a decent hour and I attempted to work on a few small Christmas projects while we watched Hangover 3. Those movies are definitely full of guy humor.  I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but he was laughing out loud the entire movie like a little kid.  My evening ended with a spider attack....yes you read that right.  I was in the kitchen wrapping a gift on the counter when a HUGE black spider caught my eye crawling across the floor.  I hate to admit it but I screamed. Usually things like that will scare me, but I freak out silently, compose myself, and take care of it myself.  For whatever reason, I screamed this time and Eric came running out of the bedroom with a knife.  Needless to say he was not too happy when he discovered my scream was for a spider. At least I know that he will come to my rescue if I do scream!  And for the record he did kill the spider for me.

I will leave you pictures of the boys because I can, and becuse they crack me up.

Left: I felt bad because I was gone all day on Friday so I let the boys each have a tennis ball in the house Friday night.  They loved it!
Right:  Our first attempt to dress the boys up this year.  They were a little less than thrilled.  I was going to try to get a picture of all three of them together, but that was not happening.

  Have a great week!

Dear December, Where the Heck did you Go?

While most of the country is covered in snow and dealing with frigid temperatures, we (Lower Alabama) are trying to figure out where winter went.  This is what my dashboard looked like yesterday....

After you get over the ridiculous amount of dust on my dashboard -yikes!-you will notice that the outside temperature is 77.  77 degrees in December! I know we live down South but this is ridiculous!  Especially considering that Mom and Dad are only 5 hours NW of here and are having an ice storm today.  I told the boys last night and they looked at me like this:

Ok not really, but don't they look adorable?  My name is Betsy and I like to make weird noises so my dogs will look at me like this.  I can't help it.  It's just so stinking cute!

We are officially under 3 weeks until Christmas and I am wondering how the heck I am going to accomplish everything I need to between now and then.  The good news is that I have 85% of my Christmas shopping done, and I have ideas for everything I have left to purchase.  I have done good bit of shopping online this year, which is new for me, but given my lack of free time it's been so convenient.

Speaking of Christmas, I am Christmas-a-fying our house this weekend!  Thankfully our tree is not longer in this state:

It is currently upright, untied, and in it's stand...but that's it.  All of my Thanksgiving decorations are still out, and if it weren't for a few Christmas M and M's in my candy dish on the table, there'd be nothing else up.

Tonight is game night for me, so it's gonna be a long one.  We're 1-2 right now, which is not too bad.  We beat the team we should have beat, and I believe that if we'd been fresh against the team we had out second loss of the season against, the game would have been closer than 15 points.  We're playing our closest rival tonight at home (the schools are 10 mins apart) so wish us luck!  

Apple Sausage Pita Pizzas

Every year around this time Costco puts out a cookbook.  I usually end up with one because I am at Costco, A LOT.  This year I almost missed mine.  As Mom and I were having out receipt checked the other day on our way out the lady awkwardly handed me my receipt on a book.  Since my hands were completely full (because we refused to get a cart so we wouldn't buy as much) I barely grasped the paper with my fingers.  After we walked out Mom said, "um did you not want the cookbook?"  Oops.  Although I am not sure how on earth the lady thought I could grab a book given my inability to grab just the receipt.  Luckily we were right outside the door and Mom ran back inside to grab one for each of us.  I am sooooo glad she did.  She flipped through it on the way home and we found at least 10 recipes that we wanted to try immediately.  We found one in particular that we had nearly everything for already and decided that we'd make for breakfast before they headed out of town on Sunday.  Those plans fell through unfortunately, but I still had the stuff, so you better believe I made it for dinner!  I don't remember the actual name of the recipe so for all practical purposes we're going to call them Apple Sausage Pita Pizzas.

adapted from the 2013 Enjoy Cooking the Costco Way Cookbook

What You Need:  

3 Tbsp butter

1 small onion, thinly sliced

1 medium apple thinly sliced (I used a HoneyCrisp Apple because they're the best)

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 Tbsp brown sugar

6 pre-cooked sausage links, cut into 1/4 inch pieces (Eric and I decided you could use ground sausage as well)

1 bunch of green onions, chopped 

4 pita pockets

1 cup shredded Gouda cheese

How to Make It:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. Saute onion in butter on medium heat until soft (8-10 minutes). Add apple slices, brown sugar, and cinnamon and saute until a glaze forms and apples are soft (4-6 mins). Add sausage pieces and cook until heated through.

3. Place pitas on a baking stone/baking sheet.  Sprinkle green onions on pitas.  Spoon 1/4 of the onion/apple/sausage mixture on each pita and spread it evenly across the pita.  Sprinkle 1/4 cup of shredded Gouda on each pita.

4. Bake for 8-10 minutes and serve immediately.

I can even begin to tell you how delicious these were.  They were really light, but FULL of flavor.  And to be honest you really can beat caramelized onions and Gouda cheese.  They're like a party in your mouth.

Notes:
The original recipe called for spinach leaves instead of the green onions as the first layer on the pitas.  I didn't have spinach leaves, so I went with green onions, but I am sure the spinach leave would have been great, too!

You can add/subtract anything to the sausage mixture.  Eric is not a huge cooked apple fan so I mixed everything together except for the apple slices and spooned what I needed for his pitas. Then I added the apples, cooked them until they were soft and made my pitas.

Our Extended Weekend of Thanks

5:30 came waaaaay to early this morning.  The only time I got up that early the past 5 days was on Friday and it was so Mom and I could go shopping, so of course I popped right out of bed.

I took Wednesday off to get things ready for the weekend.  Eric was up early frying turkeys to deliver to the guys at the stores.  He fried 6 before 10AM.  Shortly after he left, Mom and Dad rolled into town and we started on some of the sides we could pre-make for Thursday. It was then I realized I had not thought about making dinner, so we opted for dinner and a movie.....Catching Fire to be exact!  It was soooooooo good!  Seriously the shortest 2.5 hour movie I have ever seen!

1.  Catching Fire!
2. Love my SIL!
3. Eric and I on Iron Bowl Day.
4.  Mom and I with her new BFF (Hollow).
5. Some of my favorites!
6. Hawk got to go on his first ducking hunting trip of the year on Thanksgiving and it wore him out!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my parents and Eric's family that included an obscene amount of food.  Never underestimate Southern women when it comes to food.  We hosted Thanksgiving at our house so I had the necessities covered (hash brown casserole, stuffing-regular and oyster, green bean casserole, rolls, sweet potatoes, broccoli salad, etc) and asked his Mom and Grandma to bring a couple of dishes.  They did that x5.  In addition to the 2 turkeys I had Eric fry, they brought a turkey AND and ham, plus casserole, plus dressing (that we requested), plus gravy, plus Mac and Cheese, plus collard greens, plus desserts. I am pretty sure you could have filled up 2 plates with a small scoop of nothing but sides if you wanted to try them all.  Let's just say we've been eating leftovers for 4 days and my fridge is still completely full.

1. Our beautiful centerpiece from my grandparents! with the cutest little photo-bomber ever in the background!
2. Our turkeys in their whirlpool bath.  Eric forgot to defrost the turkeys, so we attempted a quick thaw-out method on Thursday morning.  Luckily Eric's grandma came to the rescue with 2 non-frozen turkeys.
3.  Porch fnuction #492,340: Thanksgiving dinner table!
4. The fry-master at work.
5. This was leftover plate #1. All of my subsequent leftover plates have looked almost identical.
6. Beautiful fried birds!
7 and 8. Our Thanksgiving spread!  The cold dishes and desserts were outside because we ran out of counter space. 

Mom and I made the decision a few weeks ago that we would NOT participate in Thanksgiving Day shopping.  I think it's ridiculous to take people away from their families on Thanksgiving, I don't care how much you plan on paying them as compensation.  However, Friday morning was a different story.  Our original plan was to head out at 5AM, but my alarm decided to go off silently and I didn't wake up til 5:45AM, but we were on our way around 6:30 and had a VERY successful day of shopping! After we powered through for nearly 8 hours of shopping (never stepping foot in a Walmart...booyah!) which included our traditional Chik-fil-a and Sonic stops we headed home and crashed.

Saturday was the Iron Bowl, which turned out to be one of the most exciting football games ever.  Seriously.  And I am not just saying that because I live in the state of Alabama.  The game literally came down to the last second, and what happened at the end was insane.  We had Alabama and Auburn fans at our house which meant there was a ton of whooping and hollering and lots of disbelief on both sides.  In case you missed it, here's the last play of the game with the Auburn radio call.

It was just a tad bit exciting.  If you want some entertainment, Google "iron bowl 2013 reactions" and watch videos of Auburn fans losing their minds. This was the reaction at our house.

They say pictures are worth 1,000 words.  I think my favorite is the bottom right where our two AU friends are hugging it out while AJ McCarron and his GF and hugging on tv...LOL.

Mom and Dad headed back early Sunday morning and we took the day off.  I sent Eric to get a Christmas tree since he was heading that direction to go hunting, and this is it's current state:

My goal is to have it up by the end of the week, and decorated by the end of the weekend.  Wish me luck!