Family pictures

It was great having so much of my family together this past week for Thanksgiving. I was with four of my six sisters, which is pretty good since we all live so far apart. It was especially fun to see my nieces and nephews play together since they don't get to be around each other very often. It was a good opportunity to try out my new camera, as well. It takes nice pictures, although there's still a lot that I need to learn about it.

My mom with seven of 16 grandchildren:

Here pictures of three of Kristin's four boys, Ethan (5), Jared (almost 3) and Aaron (9 months):

Thanksgiving #2

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Since all of my family was away celebrating the holiday in other places, my mom, my youngest sister Chandra and I decided to have a low-key Thanksgiving with two of our friends. First, we have invited our friend Nathan. He's currently going to school in St. Louis and doesn't have any family close by, so he has spent the past two Thanksgivings with us.

Second, we invited our friend Larry. I first got acquainted with Larry in 2004 after I was well enough to come home to live after my accident. Larry worked for the company that supplied all of my medical equipment like my wheelchair, bed, etc. I've known Larry ever since and he's just a phone call away when I need my wheelchair adjusted, my bed look at or anything like that. When we invited Larry over for dinner he offered to fry a turkey and we eagerly agreed because we'd never had fried turkey before.

We had a great time eating and talking and I'm so glad that we had friends join us yesterday or our Thanksgiving would've felt a bit lonely. Here are some pictures of Larry frying our turkey:

Here are some other pictures from the day.
Classic Heather -- cold and covered with a blanket!:

Nate spent the night so that we could have a movie night. It was hard for us to settle on a movie, but we finally decided to watch Australia. At two hours and 45 minutes, it's a rather long movie, but it's one that I like, even though a lot of people think it's boring!

I feel so lucky to have been able to have two Thanksgivings this year. Celebrating holidays with family and friends is the best!

Thanksgiving #1

Yesterday I had Thanksgiving with my family. We decided to have our Thanksgiving dinner two days early because three of my sisters (Annette, Kristin and Laura) that were in town for the week of Thanksgiving are actually all going to be gone at their in-laws house's on the actual day of Thanksgiving this year.

Anyway, we had so much fun cooking, eating and hanging out together. It was fun to see seven of my 16 nieces and nephews together and they had a lot of fun playing and getting to know each other a little bit better.

Here's a picture of us sitting down to the dinner table:

Here are three pictures of our pies. The first is some sort of holiday pie with cranberries, the second is a caramel pecan pie and the third is a triple chocolate pumpkin pie:

Here is a great picture of all of us from yesterday: Here's two pictures of my sister Annette and me. We both laughed at the first one because we blinked at the same time! This picture is of Annette's daughter, Rebecah, and Kristin's son, Aaron, both of whom were born in January.

My favorite names

A few posts back I wrote about motherhood and some of the things that make me a little sad since I'm not a mother. One of the things about not being a mother is not being able to name a child. Baby names is one of my favorite topics to talk about with people (especially my sisters) because it's fun to see what names they like, etc. I tend to like traditional names as opposed to ones that are super trendy or strange, but I know that what's trendy and/or strange to one person might not be strange to another. That being said, here's a list of some of my favorite names for girls and boys.

• Kirstin/Kirsten: (pronounced Keer-stin) This has been one of my favorite girl names for a long time because I think it's so pretty.
• Kate: I've also loved this name since I was a little girl. I remember watching the TV show Growing Pains and this was the name of Mike Seaver's girlfriend. (This is also the name of one of my nieces.)
• Kristin: I know this is very close to Kristin, but I think it's a really pretty name, and it also happens to be the name of one of my sisters. (And it must be spelled with "in" and not "en!")
• Rachel: I also have a niece with this name.
• Alicia: I like this for a middle name, especially since this is my dear friend Lacee's middle name.
• Julia/Julie
• Leah
• Teresa
• Grace

• Ben: Not Benjamin
• Sam: Not Samuel
• Adam: Although I love this name I would never use it because I've had two boyfriends named Adam, and I know I would never live it down!
• Nathan: I had a crush on a boy named Nathan when I was in middle school and I've liked it ever since!
• Christian: I really like this name, but I would probably never use it for fear that kids would deem it a "sissy" name and tease because of it.
• Aidan: I've liked this name ever since I saw the movie The Ring (2002). I'd never heard it before at that time, but it definitely became very popular around that time, and now everyone is extremely familiar with that name.
• Joshua
• John/Jonathan
• Anderson
• James
• Russell
• Brenden
• Andrew
• Jackson (Jack)

Celebrating my 7th!

This past Friday I had a get together with some of my friends and family to celebrate the seventh anniversary of my accident. It's really important to me to celebrate my "second birthday" because I'm so grateful to be alive! I probably should have died in my car accident since the trauma was so severe, but the Lord had a different plan for me and I survived!

My sister Kristin made two different kinds of cheesecake -- a white chocolate raspberry cheesecake and a dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake so we could have a side-by-side comparison. Both of them were so amazing, but I think I preferred the dark chocolate raspberry. Here's a picture of Kristin doctoring up the cheesecakes and a picture of the cheesecakes side-by-side:

It was so fun visiting with my friends and I had a great time. Here are some pictures of my get-together:

Turkeys

My sister Kristin has been working hard to make the holidays fun for her boys by coming up with special holiday crafts and treats. Now that it's Thanksgiving time, we've been talking turkey. Last Saturday Kristin made turkey hats with her and she made turkey cupcakes for our dessert that night. Here are some pictures from our pre-Thanksgiving festivities: Kristin also made special cupcakes for Halloween and I don't think I've ever posted pictures of them, so here's what they looked like:

Family outing

Last Friday my mom and I went on a family outing with my sister Kristin and her family. We went out to lunch at Pizza Hut and then we went to The Butterfly House. I went to The Butterfly House for the first time last month with my mom, my sister Kristin and my nephew Kaleb. It was a lot of fun and we decided to go again since we knew that Kristin's other boys would enjoy it as well. A butterfly landed right on my forehead and stayed there for about 20 seconds. This was exciting because it was just long enough for my sister to snap a few pictures with my new camera.

Here are some pictures from our lunch at Pizza Hut:
Pictures from The Butterfly House: Pictures from the indoor carousel: Pictures of Kristin's family at Faust Park -- they're such a good-looking bunch!: