Sausage Time

We put off our annual New Year’s Day celebration with the McMurrys until Saturday, invited the Cummings and spent the entire day making 160 pounds of sausage! I am really glad that we will be enjoying this stuff for a while! That’s a whole lot of work!!! :)

I got to try out my new knife set I got for Christmas and boy is it SHARP!!! I cut myself twice before we even got started just cutting up the meat… I got blood everywhere! As if the kitchen wasn’t bloody enough already. ;)

They looked pretty good the next day! 

But we had a lot of fun visiting and working and at the end we had Italian, breakfast, potato, cajun, and ground pork to take home.

It grinds better a bit frozen

 

the guys cut it all into chunks while the ladies figured out the shopping list for ingredients

We even put the cajun into casings for the grill! Mmmmmm!

By 10:30pm we were all exhausted and the kitchen was a mess! But thanks to a container of Lysol cleaning wipes and an hour’s worth of work, the kitchen was sparkling clean!

Now that’s a good way to start off the new year!

New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Eve means party at church! Playing games, eating snacks, and fireworks are all part of the fun!

For the most part, it’s grown-ups and board games downstairs and youth group and video games upstairs. But this year, some of the youth joined us old folks… :)

 

 

 

This year, we also got to spend the evening with the Graber kids! :)

  This was their very favorite game! Lily loved it (and the snacks)!!!

We ended 2014 and welcomed in 2015 with an epic 15-minute fireworks show in the parking lot! Thanks so much to all the kids for cleaning up the BIG mess in the morning!

Already looking forward to all that 2015 has in store…

Astoria After Christmas

We’ve tried a few times to take Mark to Astoria and it never seems to work out. But this time it did! We ran to the coast in hopes to buy Andy’s birthday present and have lunch at Rogue. The weather was pretty nice and Mark had never been, so we popped up to the Astoria Column first…

 

It’s quite a hike up all those stairs but the view is totally worth it!

Unfortunately, they were out of the books we wanted but we did pick up a new Keurig… :)

And we did have lunch at Rogue…

Christmas Day

Now that the boys are grown, Christmas mornings are much more relaxed. Everyone gets up not too early, we have some hot cocoa and then we mosey on down and do stockings and then open gifts before our baked French toast breakfast.

Not a great selfie, but I really like Will in this one! LOL 

Not a ton of gifts this year, but when you get really good ones you don’t care. :)

lock pick set

fell in love with stemless wine glasses in Hawaii with Shawn & Karen

 

I finally got a study Bible!!! Now Will can have his back!

quill pen and journal

An Office gift set for the biggest fan ever!

Mark came back for Christmas Day and after a leisurely afternoon we went to my parents’ for dinner…

  Someone got caught playing with presents under the Christmas tree… :)

Scandinavian Christmas Eve

This year’s theme for Christmas Eve was Scandinavia. The food was pretty tasty (expect for the fish flavored paste in tubes) and Theresa even decorated her gifts to match the theme!

  From top to bottom: Burning Love (potatoes with bacon, mushrooms, cheese & onion), Swedish fish, fish pastes & rye crackers, beet & potato salad, lefse, fruit soup, drinks, salmon sandwich cake (we had other things, too)

After eating we opened gifts…

We played some games while we ate desserts…

  Then it was off to Candlelight Service!

(not technically taken on Christmas Eve… LOL)

We got home, cleaned up and relaxed… Whew!

   Then off to bed so Santa could come…