Friday: Chase, Siena and I went to Busch Gardens with our friends Andrea and Mia. When you buy a one day ticket to Busch Gardens, like we did last May, you get to go back the rest of the year for free! So Andrea and I wanted to get one more use out of our passes before December 31st! It was the perfect day to go because it was a little chilly (63!) and cloudy, so there were no crowds or lines. Chase and Mia loved riding all of the rides together! We also saw lots of animals and even got to watch a Christmas show during lunch!
That night I put Siena to bed and left Eric and Chase for their "boys night" while I went to a neighbor's house for some Holiday Bunco! I'm on a winning streak with Bunco and I came home with $10! Woo hoo! I'm excited for Tacky Christmas Sweater Bunco next week!
Saturday: We all woke up early, our babysitter came over at 7:15am, and Eric & I drove about a mile to the starting line for the 1st annual Jingle Bell Run in our neighborhood! It was a chip-timed cross country race, on a course I'm pretty familiar with by now. We met some other friends of mine there and we were all dressed ridiculously similar in our green shirts and candy cane stripe socks with little tassels hanging off the back! Plus some jingle bells of course. I've been having some crazy back and knee problems lately so I haven't been running much at all, but for some reason I felt great that morning and managed to come in 5th place and set a PR (personal record) for that course! Nice! The only downside to the race was that somewhere around the halfway point there was a swarm of bees stinging everyone that ran by! I got stung in the leg, Eric made it out unscathed, and some friends of mine were stung 4 or 5 times! Crazy.
Immediately afterwards we rushed home to shower and then hopped in the car to drive to a birthday party at the Red Barn Petting Farm. We'd been to a party there before and it was so much fun! Chase loves all of the antique playground toys, the hay ride, and feeding all of the animals... cows, chickens, llamas, turkeys, goats, and peacocks!
Then we went home for a much needed nap for all 4 of us. Later that night we went out to eat at Chili's (for FREE since Eric won a golf tournament with some co-workers and received a gift certificate in his prize pack) and to Publix to buy supplies for Cookie Sunday...
Sunday: Cookie Sunday!!! We woke up, and Chase and I got started on some Candy Cane Cookies while Eric went out for a long ride on his new road bike. Then we went to church, lunch at Moe's (since we pretty much have to go there once a week!), and back home for nap time. I decided to spend my free time reading the Sunday paper, while Eric watched the Bucs game and followed our Fantasy Football tournament on the computer (I beat him in the playoffs today)!
When Chase woke up from nap we kicked it into high gear on the cookie-and-candy-making effort! This is what we made:
-Candy Cane Cookies
-Peanut Butter Cookies with Hershey's kisses
-Paradise Candy
-Sausage Cheese Balls
-Buckeyes
-Mint Thins
-Some white chocolate-covered mix stuff (need a name for it!) with M&M's, pretzels, Chex and Cheerios
Cookies Sunday is not really an official holiday... yet. I just really needed to start baking for a cookie exchange that I had this morning!
While Eric was cooking up a batch, I decided to feed Siena her first real meal! I know I said I was going to wait until she was 6 months old, but I just felt like she was ready. I certainly wasn't anxious to do it, like I was with Chase, because I know how much work it is now. But Siena just seemed so HUNGRY all the time and while I'm confident in my body's ability to produce enough milk for her (because I believe that breastfeeding, like everything, is at least 50% mental)... I just felt like it was time for her to move to the next stage. So I gave her about a tablespoon of organic brown rice cereal mixed with breastmilk and a quarter of a mashed banana. She loved it!
After we destroyed the kitchen, we went outside for some fresh air, bike riding, and to hang some lights on the back of our house! A few years ago Eric and I decided to be good citizens and buy LED Christmas lights. But every year I always hated how our house looked, because the lights are so BLUE! Plus it just doesn't look right to me and it turned out that no one else was really buying the LED's... we seemed like the only crazy ones. On top of it all, the new lights didn't really perform as promised. They're supposed to last forever (and they should based on how much they cost!) but parts of our strands always seemed to burn out. So this year I caved and bought lots of traditional white lights for outside (see above) and we put the LED's in the back, so you can see them across the pond.
By the way, no, pigs didn't start flying and it hasn't snowed here in Tampa! I just felt like adding some snow to the picture for fun!
To finish out our weekend, we ordered pizza and salad for dinner since our kitchen was such a mess! Then we went for a night walk around the neighborhood to check out all of the Christmas lights! Chase loves all of the rainbow lights and blow-up Santa's... I think he's a little disappointed with ours!
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