Family

I came home from work tonight to candles in the windows.  It’s been on my mile-long to-do list for a while now, to put those up, but it hasn’t managed to percolate to the top yet.  I do so love seeing those in houses this time of year.  I was so shocked to see them there that I almost drove right past our house!

What a sweet surprise my family gave me tonight!

I feel a bit better today, so we went outside to enjoy the nice fall day.  The camera had to come too:

My brother is getting married at the end of this month, and we had a shower for his lovely bride today.  I ended up getting her some cookie making things, and Anna was hilarious – she saw the paper label on the cookie sheets with pictures of cookies on it and was frantically signing “cookie” and trying to get to the “cookies” under the plastic…and then I was accused of torturing my baby because I wasn’t giving her any cookies.  Note that there were none out and we were not at our own house…not sure where I was supposed to get the cookies from to give her??

But I even won one of the shower games – a bridal jumble puzzle with 20+ words.  Some of the words were really hard!

My parents called me this morning to let me know that my great grandmother passed away last night.  She turned 100 last fall.

I remember going to her house and she always had homemade cookies in the freezer.  And she made us pizza fritta – only we called them belly bombers because it was so easy to eat too many pieces – with powdered sugar dusted on top.  She and my great grandpa had what seemed like an enormous garden to me as a child, but I think was really a smallish kitchen garden, with tomatoes and basil and peppers.

I’m really glad she got to meet the girls, and they got to meet her…

We went to the Strong Museum today with Mary, Lou and the kids.  Carrie had a blast showing her cousins around the museum, and the adults all had fun in the new arcade game exhibit.  For the record, I really suck at arcade games, but I played Tetris, Q-bert and some multi-player racing game that Denis totally beat me at.

Then we met the rest of Denis’ family at Champps – considering we had 8 kids in our party of 16, it went amazingly well.  And the mile high ice cream pie was an enormous hit among all the kids, including Anna!

Now off to decorate some cake…

Nana and Poppy were up for a visit this weekend and left this morning.  The girls had such a good time while they were here.  Carrie and Nana were pretty much inseparable.  Luckily, we’ll see them again in a few weeks for Anna’s birthday party!