Our First Christmas

We celebrated our Christmas together on Sunday, December 13. We initially planned to exchange our gifts before heading home, for the ease of having a few less things to travel with, but with the donation of a "Christmas dinner" from DTS, we decided to make a day of it. It was really pretty awesome - David came home on Saturday with a huge box of goodies, including a 14 lb frozen turkey, a huge apple pie (the good kind from Costco!), stuffing mix, potatoes, carrots, bell peppers, rolls, canned green beans, corn & cranberry sauce. About the only things I had to get were gravy, an onion, sparkling cider & a bag for the turkey! This was my first turkey, and initially I was pretty intimidated, but it turned out to be very easy!

We spent the afternoon finishing up with the wrapping of gifts, putting the topper on our little tree & munching on goodies while watching the only Chargers game that has been aired in Dallas this season (and they won!) - if you didn't know, David is a Chargers fan =) After the game, we ate a late Christmas dinner, cleaned up (as per McIntosh tradition), then opened gifts & watched "A Christmas Story" (A Thornhill favorite). David got me the new Harry Potter movie (yay!) & completed my collection of Harry Potter DVDs. I got David a long-overdue disc golf bag with disc, Iron Man & some Starbucks "Christmas Blend" coffee.

It was a very good day =)

We headed home to LA on the morning of December 23. After aimlessly driving around the airport's remote parking lot until 6am, we had fears of missing our 7am flight when we couldn't find a single parking space. Thankfully we found another lot that wasn't much more expensive, but told us exactly where to park, picked us up at our car & even gave us free water. There was no waiting time at the airport & we made our flight with time to spare. We headed to In-N-Out almost immediately after landing (I say almost because it took so long to get there with traffic, welcome home!)

The rest of our time with my folks was mostly spent with Christmas preparations - wrapping gifts, last minute shopping, cleaning & cooking. We did make some time for a dinner out and a few rounds of ping pong! Christmas Eve was spent at home with dinner, a phone call to my Uncle Jim in North Dakota & exchanging gifts with my parents & my Grandma Lockwood. Christmas morning we opened our stockings from Santa & spent the afternoon with my Dad's side of the family (my grandma, aunt, uncle, & 2 cousins with their kiddos). My three little cousins are getting to very fun ages (2, 3 & 5), which makes Christmas a little chaotic, but much more fun, especially when opening gifts =) It was really good to catch up a little and see everyone. And very exciting to hear the announcement of a new little one coming in August from my cousin Heidi!!!


We arrived in time for dinner in SD on Christmas Day & spent the evening opening gifts & playing the "nut prize" game (the Thornhills buy a new game every Christmas & the process of searching for the nut in your bowl of tapioca pudding determines who gets to open it up). David's family is very creative with gifts. His Dad worked for months to give us (& Brett) an album full of all their home videos he had edited & converted to DVD! Brett gave me a jar filled with a note to read every day for the next year & made David a personalized Monopoly board - "The David Thornhill Edition." It includes spaces like the places he's worked, lived & gone to school - so awesome!!

The rest of our time was mostly spent relaxing - we played games, watched a few movies, took another trip to In-N-Out & had a game night with family friends the DeVries (Shawn was David's best man). We headed back up to LA yesterday morning & met my parents for lunch before heading back to Dallas. We crawled into bed last night around midnight, exhausted from our full trip to CA and back, already missing the family we just left, but happy to be home. I am hoping they will visit soon!

Christmas is coming...

We had our first snow on December 2 =) So it was rain/snow for one hour while I was driving to work & I have no documentation to prove it...but it was still snow; still awesome!

We tried "real" Dr. Pepper from Dublin, TX & it didn't taste especially better to us (in fact I think we prefer our modern, non-pure sugar cane Dr. P), as many people here had claimed it would. But the bottles made for fun decorations in our kitchen!

We have been listening to Christmas music daily since Thanksgiving & it is good =) I am learning O Holy Night on the piano, one of my favs.

I made an ornament for our 3in Christmas tree (it's real!) that we picked out from home depot the weekend after Thanksgiving. After we (Lindsay really..) decided that we needed a tree, it struck us that we had no decorations to put on it! So we will start building our collection together this year & take advantage of after Christmas sales!

We went to dinner & a movie @ the Galleria, where they have a little ice skating rink in the center of the food court area year round & a HUGE Christmas tree for the holidays - so awesome!

It was 27 degrees when I got in my car this morning to go to work. I now know not to clean my windshield with a quick quirt of water & my wipers...instant ice. Such a California girl. It feels like winter here, and as cold as it is, I still like it.

David & I have been doing Christmas devotions each day (or most days) & it is so neat how something so simple has helped me take time to daily to get excited about Christmas & how good God is. And I'm learning to use the familiar Christmas things (our Christmas tree, getting excited about seeing family, shopping for gifts) as reminders of the gift we already received in the birth & death of Christ, instead of letting them distract me from the things essential.

Did I say it was cold here?

Time to play in the leaves

Getting off work at 3pm with a few hours of sunlight left is a dream come true for me, especially on such a gorgeous day. I couldn't help but get my husband, my scarf & our frisbee and head to the lake as fast as possible, to savor the last bits of the day. We ran around in the leaves, played some frisbee, found a swingset (it's hard for me to resist a swing) & watched the sun set over the water (while fighting off the nagging mosquitoes). I can't think of a better way to spend the afternoon before thanksgiving. As a wise boss once said, my heart is full. So much to be thankful for.

Visit from Brett

Brett came out to Dallas to visit us over the Veteran's Day weekend. It was great to see her & spend some time showing her around Dallas. We took her to our farmers market, where she helped us pick out a plant for our apartment. Disc golfing was definitely on the list of things to do, but between the water obstacles from all the rain we had in October & the bugs, we didn't quite make it through a whole round. We watched movies, played games (Brett & I beat David at trivial pursuit - almost twice!), made rice crispie treats and ate good BBQ food.

We also finally made it out to Fort Worth for an afternoon & learned that a cattle drive is basically ten longhorns walking leisurely down the street - but they were cute =) After spending some time in the historic Stockyards & a drive through downtown, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the Nature Center, where we saw a town of prairie dogs, a buffalo, took some pictures and just enjoyed the gorgeous day outside.

All in all, we had a great time with our sister & were reminded how much we love & miss our family. Thanks for taking the time to come & see us Brett!

Halloween

So I (David) volunteered to write the next blog entry. In case you haven't noticed, I haven't been contributing much so far. About a week later, I'm finally getting around to it (while watching the Phillies try to survive game 6)

Carving Pumpkins:

I don't remember ever carving pumpkins before. It's possible that we did and I just don't remember. But I'm going to go ahead and call this my first time. Lindsay, on the other hand, is a seasoned pro.


The first step (I learned) was getting a pumpkin. Now, getting a pumpkin from a pumpkin patch maximizes the pumpkin picking experience. A close second is the farmers market. Last on the list is the supermarket a block from your apartment. The cost of the actual pumpkins, of course, is inversely proportional to the experience absorbed on the trip. We went the route of going to farmers market, looking around at pumpkins, buying non-pumpkin produce, returning to the supermarket, and buying pumpkins at half the price. I think our way was best.

Prior to this experience, I was under the impression that carving pumpkins works the same way that I envision sculptures being created, namely, hacking away at it until you step back and voila! a masterpiece, or for someone with my artistic ability, a mutilated mess. But we used an easier method: searching the internet for pumpkin templates, printing one out, taping said template onto pumpkin, and using that to carve the image. I think they turned out pretty well actually. I'll let you judge for yourself though. If not, at least we had fun doing it.

Kudos to the first person who can guess what the pumpkins are supposed to be.


Trunk-or-Treat:

On halloween night we went to Trunk or Treat, Grace's halloween alternative where kids can get candy from people's decorated car trunks, play games, get balloon animals, faces painted, etc. You get the idea. It's just like the fall festival/harvest festival/whatever-it-was-called you grew up with. Linds and I had volunteered to help out wherever. We got assigned tug-of-war. Despite being located at the far end of the event and needing equal teams to be fun, our game was actually more popular than I thought it would be (thanks to some of our regulars). All in all, we had a good time hosting, and I think people had a good time getting dragged (drug?) through the grass.

And in case you're interested, I went as a tennis pro and Lindsay looked cute in her fall colors. (She would have done a costume, but I had been saying all along that I didn't want to dress up and only changed my mind 5 minutes before we left, which did not give her enough time to come up with something. My fault.)

Summary:


Halloween is much better when you get to spend it with the woman you love. =)

ps - I (Lindsay) made pumpkin seeds for the first time and they were delicious! Firsts for both of us I guess.

Dallas Farmers Market

We ventured out to our farmers market for the first time this afternoon & will probably be back every Saturday from here on out! Apparently it is open 8 to 6, 362 days a year; I had no idea. Besides being beautiful, the market has produce that is very inexpensive & as fresh as it comes - we can certainly attest to this, as free samples were plentiful. Literally they are standing there with a whole pineapple cutting off slices as you walk by - pineapples, papaya, grapefruit, tomatoes, watermelon, yum...get all your produce needs just walking around. Needless to say, we found a treasure in downtown Dallas - yay for new things.

And something about fresh (affordable!) produce just makes me VERY happy =)