Author: Tricia

What do you suppose happens when on a totally innocent whim, the lady of the house puts an ordinary bag of tortilla chips:

into the microwave to warm them up before serving them to her family??

What happens at House of Horne is that you get Chips (and Bag!) Flambee (shout out to our good buddy Dave!)

Here is what it looks like after you stamp out the impressive-looking flames and douse the still-glowing embers:

Unfortunately, I cannot properly share with you the incredible smell that is created from such an occurrence happening in your very own microwave. You will just have to take my word for it: it is hideous!

Next time I’d like warm chips with our fajita supper, I will carefully place all chips into a microwave safe bowl before heating.

‘Nuff said.

Tonight after supper our family gathered ’round the kitchen table to begin our annual reading of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. If you haven’t read it, you must…it’s a wonderful tale that will warm your heart as you contemplate Christmas. We are going to see the play this coming week at the DCT, so we have only a few days in which to finish it.

This year I thought it would be fun to string popcorn and cranberries for the tree while we read our book, and while I figured I’d do the bulk of the stringing, I hoped the kids would be old enough to at least enjoy helping a bit. But I wasn’t sure they could handle the corn and berries without crushing them in an effort to string them into garland.  I shouldn’t have worried….

In the time it took Jay to read two chapters, I think I strung maybe a foot’s total length of popcorn and cranberries. The rest of the time I was kept busy cutting and finishing the ends of the children’s strings, and threading new needles for them to start new garland. Even little Josiah, who asked very matter-of-factly where his needle and thread were so he could string too, carefully threaded popcorn and berries along with his big siblings, and produced a very pretty little garland of his own.

I hope we can spend another evening or two stringing garland while we finish the story…but we made a great start tonight and managed 18 3/4 feet of popcorn and berries!

We enjoyed a quiet holiday yesterday. Earlier plans called for us to travel to St. Louis to be with Jay’s brother’s family this year, but several factors led to our staying here instead.  As my sister-in-law recently landed a wonderful new full time job that will begin in just a few days, we’d like to think we made the Thanksgiving weekend simpler and more relaxing for her by not descending upon her household with our large and noisy brood! But it would have been great to see all of them….

Jay’s folks (the Grammy and the Grandy as they are affectionately referred to over here) joined us for a fun and lowkey day. I would like to toot my own horn(e?) just a teensey bit and say that I worked very purposefully to not spend the entire day in the kitchen as I am often wont to do on a holiday, by sheer nature of the beast, er…..feast!!.  Abigail and I made three pies on Wednesday, and I baked our pumpkin bread for next morning’s breakfast that evening.  Jay also mixed up my Grandma Brunone’s celebrated shrimp dip the day before, so even our appetizer/lunch was all set. I still might have gone to bed later than I should have, given I stayed up past 1am feverishly working to hang over 60 little sparkly crystals on our new chandelier that Jay had just installed for me, so it’d be all spiffy for the Thanksgiving meal. But I digress…..

We chose prime rib for our main course instead of the more traditional bird, to simplify the sides for our dinner…if you ever make prime rib, you should try this recipe, it’s fabulous. It’s even more fabulous if you actually follow the directions and take the roast out of the oven at 120 degrees as directed, instead of making the incorrect judgement that it couldn’t possibly be finished cooking to medium rare already, and leaving it in to cook too long as I did! (The flavor was still excellent, even if the inside was a bit darker than we preferred, but next time I’ll follow the recipe more religiously!)

Our day was relaxing and fun; there was playing with and on grandparents:

Time spent outside in gorgeous, sunny weather:

Shrimp dip!

An impressive and competitive game of scrabble:

An impromptu nap by the littlest guy who was “just so tired of waiting to eat pumpkin pie with whipp-ed cream”….

The feast!

After dinner cuddles and snuggles:

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good.
His love endures forever.

~Psalm 136:1

Alrighty, folks! I admitted to you a couple posts back that I am a self-proclaimed procrastinator. Despite being immensely freeing to admit this truth to the bloggy world, this declaration also explains why I am just today finally posting Halloween pictures of my little Star Wars children.  Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, it seems appropriate to finish up the last of the Halloween chitter chatter, if not the last of the Halloween candy (four large ziplok bags of which sadly still fill my pantry and often drop out on my feet when I open the door – sigh).

Thanks to Jay’s new job at Epsilon (oh, what a blessing to have income again, folks, after such a long time without!) the children enjoyed not one but two evenings of candy-gathering!!

Epsilon’s many different groups get together and decorate their particular areas of the office in a theme for the kids to come walk-through as they pile tremendous amounts of sweets into their Halloween bags. I wish I had thought to take my camera so I had pictures of some of the creative set-ups to share with you! There was a Dr. Suess-land, Pajama Party, Super Heroes, Circus Time, and many others.

The employees got further into the spirit of it all by dressing up to coordinate with their “sets” and the costumes were really great.

Our kids spent over an hour trick-r-treating with sweet family friends (here is the group of 8 kiddos all decked out):

and it was a really great time.

On Saturday the kids donned their Star Wars apparel again, and prepared for a night out around the ‘hood. We enjoyed seeing some of our smallest neighbors first:

Our sweet-as-anything Mrs. Jean from next door decked out in her Halloween best:

and then we posed for a few pictures:

The fearsome Darth Vader:

Gorgeous blue-eyed Jedi Luke Skywalker:

Pretty Princess Leia:

And of course the cutest “Baby Yoda” as the other kids called him…I took about a thousand photos of this munchkin:

Following in his big brothers’ footsteps, Yoda insisted on staying in character all. night. long. Which meant he ran from house to house all night hunched over Yoda-style (this slowed things down just a bit for the other kids) just like:

I think we can safely say that Halloween is now officially over…May the Force be with you all!