November 2009

Well, turns out I didn't take a ton of pictures during November, so this may be a shorter post than it really deserves. First of all, my sister Amber, who is a freshman on the BYU Women's Soccer Team, came out to San Jose with the team to play in the NCAA championship games. We were so excited to find out that some of the tournament games were played at Stanford, which isn't too far from us. Also exciting... Amber was able to write our names down on the player's family and friends list, meaning... we got to watch these amazing games for free! We are all over free activities. We were able to go watch both games that BYU played in and had so much fun. I've never been hugely into soccer until Amber started playing (which has been all her life), but I'm finding more and more that games, especially live games, can be really exciting to watch. Here's a picture of Amber playing around during warm-ups during one of the games.


The weather became pretty cold by the end of the night, so I was glad that I brought my sweatshirt and my lion coat. Yes, my lion coat. I bought it at Ross (yay to Visalia's Ross!) and absolutely love it. The lion-esque fuzzy part does come off and I do that occasionally, but sometimes you just gotta revel in the lionness of the coat. Here's us up in the stands, ready to cheer on the Cougs!


After the game we were excited to find out that we could go eat dinner with the team at the Cheesecake Factory. It took quite awhile to be seated and get our food, what with the whole team, coaches, and family members all getting seats in the same area, but we had a blast. Amber and I reminisced about the good old days growing up and absolutely laughed like crazy. We were so glad to have been able to hang out with her. Love that girl! We were also super excited about watching the soccer games for free. We love good free activities!


For Thanksgiving, we spent the holiday with the Abbotts. Most of the family, minus the North Carolina Abbos, were able to be there and we had such a blast hanging out with everyone. I have to admit that this was my first Thanksgiving not being with my Wadsworth family so I did miss them, but I had a great time celebrating with my new Abbott family and was so glad to start new traditions. One thing that I for sure didn't want to miss during Thanksgiving was some yummy yams. Growing up, we always had yams every year for Thanksgiving. For a good portion of my life I avoided them until I got a bit older and tried them again. They are now my most favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal. I was a bit disappointed to find out that the Abbotts didn't have yams for Thanksgiving, but soon remedied that by offering to make them myself. I was a bit nervous about it because I'd never actually made them myself before, but they ended up tasting pretty good for a first try. And other people actually tried them (some had to be forced) and actually enjoyed them! So I may be able to make them again in future years. Awesome. One fun tradition that the Abbotts have is to get dressed up for the big meal. This was a new one for me because we sometimes ate in what could be called pajamas when we had Thanksgiving with our Cahoon cousins. It ended up being a fun thing to get dressed up. It made the whole experience seem much more classy. So we spent a good portion of the day getting everything prepped and cooked and set up and ready to go. It was fun being able to help out and be part of the whole experience. Abby had us each write down something that we were grateful for on tiny slips of paper. Then during the meal she read them out loud and we had to guess who had written what. Some of them were pretty funny. The food was absolutely amazing. Lots of people helped out and everything turned out soooo well. Not only was the food spectacular, but the tables were so nicely decorated. We ate so much and had tons of fun chatting and hanging out with everyone that day and the rest of the holiday weekend. We definitely had a blast and are looking forward to future Abbott and Wadsworth Thanksgivings to be had.

(disclaimer: if most of the written part of this blog post seems a bit rushed and all over the place, well, it is. I had apparently only typed the first paragraph and then inadvertently logged out of google without realizing it, continued typing up the entire post, went to save it, and got an error message. I opened up the draft version to find that everything except that first paragraph was gone. So aggravating. I tried to recreate the post, but it's hard to get it back to the perfection it was before... or at least the perfection that I will claim it was at before.)