Thanksgiving Dinner Preperations

I love Thanksgiving dinner.  A few years ago, I started doing the cooking and now I seem to do it every year.  I don’t especially like spending three days cooking for a meal that lasts maybe thirty minutes tops but I love having leftovers for the week and a half after Thanksgiving Day.

I’ve used a few recipes over the years but for the last three or four, I’ve stuck with the same basic menu because it’s got something for everybody and everything for me.  Our feast consists of the following:

• sausage stuffed mushrooms
• deviled eggs
• French-cut green beans with almonds and fried onions
• ranch mashed potatoes with bacon
• baked sweet potatoes stuffed with marshmallow and pecan strudel
• savory mushroom stuffing
• regular stuffing
• potato crescent rolls
• German chocolate pie
• pecan pie
• pumpkin pie

Hannah vs. The Outbreak Monkey

Over the past month or so, everybody in the family has been battling one form of illness or another.  It all started with everyone suffering from bad stomach cramping.  It then evolved into a mutant virus that might be confused with the stomach flu.

Emma was the first to begin exhibiting flu-like symptoms.  She ended up missing two days of school and, even now, is still not functioning at 100%.  Holly also got hit by this bug causing her to miss three days of work.  I think that she is now finally over it after a week of suffering.  I’ve been experiencing some symptoms including stomach discomfort and a fever but, so far, I’ve managed to avoid too much downtime. Alex has been able to avoid the majority of the contagions very effectively.  Hannah, on the other hand, has not.

Halloween 2008: The Aftermath

So Halloween this year was pretty good.  We started our festivities early in the week with some pumpkin carving.  We had five huge pumpkins but a lack of time so only three of them ended up getting carved.  Holly decided that it would be fun to do Shrek and I unleashed my inner geek (what’s new?) and did Mario of Super Mario Bros. fame.  Emma decided to do an original creation which turned out pretty good.  Like every other year, there were lots of dads commenting on how cool our pumpkins were as their kids took our candy.

This year will be known in my mind as the year of the recycled costume idea.  Emma decided that she wanted to be a devil, Alex wanted to be a tiger, and Hannah wanted to be a clown.  Whether it is dumb luck or just coincidence, we have each of these costumes in the appropriate sizes in our costume box.  Everybody was happy and we saved money.  You can’t ask for more than that - especially if said costumes yield free candy.

Remember Halloween?

If you were to walk into any store these days, you would probably think that the next holiday to be celebrated was Christmas.  Contrary to retailer belief though, we actually have two holidays, including one pretty major one, between now and Christmas.

In just a few short weeks, we will celebrate the end of the harvest by stuffing our faces.  This holiday is know as Hallowe’en or, if you’re not into traditional spellings, Halloween.  Ironically, we will not be partaking of the fruits of said harvest but will be gorging ourselves on sugary confections originating in Hershey, Pennsylvania and McLean, Virginia (home of M&M’s).

On Saturday, our ward held their annual trunk or treat. This is a safe environment where neighborhood kids can run around a parking lot and get candy from people sitting in and around their vehicles.  Normally, I try to encourage my kids to not take candy from people that are sitting in their car but for this, I made an exception.  We have about 4.3 million kids living within our ward boundaries so, as you can probably imagine, there were a lot of kids running around in costumes.

The Pinks Of Their Eyes

This morning, Alex woke up screaming.  Holly went in to see what the problem was and found him standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed.  Holly asked him what was wrong and he told her that he couldn’t open his eyes.  She asked if they were glued shut and he said that they were.  He also said that Emma did it.  (Emma can be so mean. )  She took him into the bathroom and cleaned the excessive amounts of eye boogers out so that he could once again see.

It was at this point that Holly was convinced that she, Alex, Emma, Chelsea, and maybe Hannah all have pink eye.  She took the kids to the doctor where her thoughts were confirmed.  Chelsea got lucky and just has allergies.  For now.

Burp Bops

On Saturday, I noticed that Emma was wearing one of the nastiest pairs of flip flops that I have ever seen.  They were old, filthy, worn out, and to top it off, about two sizes too small for her feet.  I can’t have my kids looking like they do their clothes shopping in the dumpster so we stopped by Old Navy to pick her up a new pair.

Since Old Navy has them at two for $5 or one at $3.50, I bought Alex a new pair as well.  But what about Hannah?  Yeah, I got her a pair too.  Since I was buying three pairs, I might as well pick up a fourth so I got myself a pair as well.  Yay!  New flip flops for all!  (Holly got a new pair a couple of months ago so she opted to not get any.)

The Zohner Super Family Funtime

This past week we had our stake Lagoon day.  Since we had free entrance tickets and the ability to go on a few rides, we decided to take the kids and go have some fun.

I love amusement parks.  It used to be that I could ride roller coasters all day long.  As I have aged, I’ve learned just how much fun traveling at high speeds in an open car along a steel track can be.  That being said, Lagoon just doesn’t excite me like it used to.  The kids, on the other hand, are thrilled at the prospect of going to Lagoon even if it’s only for a few hours.

Our Trip: A Retrospective Part III

When we last left our heroes, day two of the road trip had concluded. Everybody was in bed on a Friday night except for Jeremiah who was watching Battlestar Galactica.

And now, the conclusion of The Zohner Family Road Trip.

On Saturday morning, we headed back into Zions National Park. This time though, we didn’t stop to board any shuttles. Instead, we stayed in the van and drove through along the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway. The highlight of this road, besides the amazing views, is a 1.1 mile long tunnel that was built during the first half of the last century. Because it was built in a time when cars were smaller, it’s very narrow. This fact can make it scary to drive, especially because it’s so dark, but we had a charter bus being escorted in front of us so there was no oncoming traffic. The kids thought that the tunnel was amazing and kept asking if there would be anymore tunnels along our route.

Our Trip: A Retrospective Part II

Here is part two of my post about our trip.  We last saw our heroes at their hotel, sleeping snugly in some beds with cheap mattresses…

Friday morning arrived and we went to play with some animals near our hotel. There was some sort of small deer and an alpaca that the kids were able to pet and feed grass to. Also, I discovered that alpacas like to have the area between their ears scratched. It makes them close their eyes and move their ears in a circle.

We spent most of the day Friday enjoying the beauty of Zions. We started at the visitors center where we took the shuttle to the Zion Human History Museum. It was here that we watched a film about Zions and it’s history. The film was really interesting and gave us an idea of the park features that we wanted to be sure to see.

Our Trip: A Retrospective Part I

Since Holly finished up her first year of nursing school on Wednesday, she thought that it would be fun to go on a little vacation during her week and a half break. You see, she starts her RN year next week and wanted to do more than just sit at home doing nothing during her time off. I agreed with her and so the planning began.

Since neither of us had ever been to Zions National Park or Bryce Canyon National Park, we decided that we should take a road trip through Utah and enjoy some of the beautiful scenery that this state has to offer. We booked our hotels and I told my boss I was leaving for a few days, then we loaded up the van and started driving.