Thanksgiving in Mexico

Thanksgiving is a holiday which I didn’t really think much about before I came to. I mean sure I loved the get together and the turkey but that’s about all it was for me. I hardly remembered the whole story behind it besides that it had to do with pilgrims and Indians. I honestly didn’t even know how much I had taken the holiday for granted until my first Thanksgiving here in Mexico. This post is dedicated to all my ladies who are in their first few years her in Mexico. I actually don’t get sad at Thanksgiving anymore. It’s a fun time with good friends and my family. But this year I had some friends over who are in their first few years here and I was reminded of how hard it was before. I want you all to know I’m sending this blog out as a virtual hug to help you feel a bit better during this time of year which can be very difficult.

Flashback to November 2008, I was determined to still celebrate Thanksgiving and make it as much like home as I could. I had no idea how to make a turkey and hubby was working constantly. I think I ended up making a ham. Since I was fairly new to staying at home and not working all day the dinner and clean up didn’t seem to take as long as I thought it would. So this gave me an incredible amount of time to think. That is never a good thing. We invited the only family we had in town at the time. I wanted us to eat dinner around 6pm so we could have everything cleaned up and tidy for an appropriate bed time. For those of you that have been here form more than a few days may already be laughing. Of course six o clock rolls around and I have my daughter watching the parade over and over again on the computer. Food is cooked, hot and ready to serve. My husband comes in and is so thankful for all I’ve done. I’m feeling pretty good at this point. I mean even though we had mentioned that we would eat at six I had been in Mexico almost 6 months now and I knew they would be a “bit” late. Now its seven o’clock and I was getting a little annoyed. I ask hubby to call his family and find out what’s going on. Oh they say they would be here around eight. What?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? That’s when I gave up on my Thanksgiving being anything like in the states. Isn’t it funny how my expectations totally ruined my day? That happened to me a lot when I first got here. Next I fed Alana and put her to bed and Issac and I hung out until they showed up. Here is where it gets interesting. We heated up the food and sat down to eat, then came the flow of questions. Why do you celebrate Thanksgiving? Why do you eat turkey? When was the first thanksgiving? What happened? Why is the pumpkin pie so important? What’s your favorite part about thanksgiving? I of course mumbled and scrambled my way through explanations as Issac translated for me. But it made me realize how I hadn’t really thought of these things in a very long time.

From that year on I decided we needed to make traditions that help us to remember what Thanksgiving is about. And for me it’s not really about pilgrims and Indians. To me it’s about taking a day (or a month) to be sure and reminds yourself of all that you are thankful for. I know that we need to be thankful all year round and actually we are but how much better to have a day specially set out to celebrate what you’re thankful for with friends and family. The girls learn about Christopher Columbus and all that in October here so I just let them know that the original Thanksgiving was because the immigrants needed help and the people who already were there taught them how to survive and that is what they were celebrating. One of our favorite traditions is our Thankful tree. We make it and put it up at the beginning of November and anyone who visits is asked to write on a leaf what they are thankful for. My girls write a leaf almost every day if I let them. Here is a beginning and now pic of our tree this year. It looks a bit different every year and depends on what materials I have on hand. Last year it was made form newspaper. This year I happened to have large white paper so we used that. It’s a fun way to keep our minds and hearts focused in the right direction during a time when we could start feeling down and alone.

 

My baby is ONE

I have to tell you I am so glad my baby days are over. Lily is so freaking cute that people just melt when they see her. She actually bats her eyes at people at just the right moment. Even as mommy its hard for me to not fall apart when she does it. On the day of her birthday we went with some really good friends of ours to the park and just hung out. It was so much fun.  I'm going to post a couple pics. Then later in the week we had her party at school.  I wanted to put a video on that showed the cake but I cant get it to work. Dang it!!!! It was a cute butterfly cake that I made.  We had a lot of fun at the party. I had the kids make coffee filter butterflies, we broke a butterfly piñata and ate a butterfly cake and butterfly topped cupcakes. Thanks to a care package I received ages ago I was able to throw the cupcake toppers together in no time and thanks to a different care package I was able to make cupcake holders out of parchment paper. Let me just tell you really quick how easy this was. All you have to do is cut 4inch x4 inch squares from the paper, Then find a jar or bottle that fits just right into your 1/4 cup measuring cup. IF you want better looking cups you need to round the corners off your squares. Center one or a few of the papers, (this depends on how much room you have, the bottle I used fit pretty tight and I could only do one at a time)  over the top of your measuring cup. Make sure when you push the bottle into the cup that it is going to be very tight. If the bottle you have is a bit loose in the measuring cup use a lot of pieces of paper. And whoa-la you have cup cake holders. As for making a butterfly cake all you have to do is make a round cake and cut it in four pieces then rotate the pieces until it looks like a butterfly. I used a cupcake for the head and put a pipe cleaner for the antennae.  I had also made really cute butterfly invitations.

Finishing projects

So I have recently gotten a few projects done and I thought Id share.

This was a crochet done by my aunt when Issac and I got married. I have been wanting to frame it as to keep it in better condition and not to get torn up. Recently I realized I wont be buying frames anytime soon so I quickly stitched up a pillow to put it on. And luckily it matches my new couches quite well. I have some of the same material left that I plan to use to make two throw pillows for the couches. This will have to wait until I can buy some stuffing though.

I had quite a bit of left over fabric when I made the curtain for the girls room. Here is the pillow case I made for Alana. She loves it as you can tell. I still have a little more fabric left and if I can get it to fit right I might put a little ruffle on the end. The case came up a little short after the hemming so you can see the pillow a little. This may not seem a big deal but I'm sure eventually it will drive me batty and I will find a way to put a ruffle on it. ;)

This one was the biggest of the projects I had lately. We had recently taken Joslin out of her crib because she learned how to climb over and I didn't want her to fall. the problem was that the bed she was sharing with Alana was very tall. At first to remedy this we placed the back of our old couch up against the side of the bed. The problem was the foot of the bed. Being only a year old she still wakes up and moves about quite a bit at night and I was getting little sleep worrying about it. We decided to put our Sofa Cama or futon up stairs for the girls to sleep on. Its a lot lower to the ground and is plenty comfortable for them. One of the springs is popped out toward the bottom but they are short enough that they are not laying in that area. This made them and me more comfortable and Joslin likes that she can climb into her bed on her own. This also helps me reach them better for kisses at night. ;)
So all of that to say that the tall bed got put into the play room/guest room/TV/living room. I decided to see if I could make it a little more like a day bed or a couch so to speak. With the material left over from the downstairs curtains I made a huge pillow. Halfway through making it I realized it would cost me and arm and a leg to stuff it. Around this same time I had decided to clean out and rearrange the closet. I realized that a lot of the disorganization was coming from all of our blankets and sheets. So I left a fairly large opening in the pillow and places some Velcro that I had from before. So that big pillow is full of our blankets. I still had a small piece left of that fabric and did the same thing and filled it with our sheets and pillow cases. We have a blue sheet set and this is what I put on the bed. I then cut some felt leaves to match the pattern on the other material and sewed it onto two of the blue pillow cases. One actually has a pillow in it and the other has a blanket. All in all it turned out to work well and is very comfortable to sit and watch movies. That was kind of a long post but I was pretty happy with the fact that I was able to save money on the stuffing and also clean out my closet. So far its working well, and we figure that when we need all the blankest most likely we will have someone staying in the bed and wont be using it so much like a couch and wont need the big stuffed pillow.

Homemade

One thing I have loved about being a stay at home mom is that I get to put all my craft ideas to use. In Mexico when they build houses they dont seem to give any thought to the windows and the fact that you may want curtains. This has been a hurdle for every place we have moved into. This new house is no different. I used the curtains I had already made for the large back door and window but nothing even resembling these would work on the front windows. The windows go all the way to the ceiling and in the upstairs bedrooms they go all the way to one wall leaving no room for hanging rods. they also open inward which posed more problems. What we came up with in the end was a thin metal pipe secured toward the ceiling with a hook or nail (or tape in some instances) and I hand made the curtains to be long enough and easy enough to open and close by adding loops to the top. The picture of the curtain in my room is not updated (the black and white one) I have now put shower curtain rings into the top to make it easier to open and close. It actually doesn't look as tacky as it sounds. ;)
In the last photo is a picture of my youngest daughters name. We had one for Alana that was given to us which is very nice. I felt Joslin needed one to. This is made from sheets of thick plastic which came off of a metallic shelf we had gotten for free. I took the sheets off and saved them in case I could use them later. They did come in handy after all. My favorite projects are ones like this one where Im able to find things from around my house, for cheap or free and make them something fun.

4th of July and Kitty Ke

Just wanted to write a short post about the fourth of July. I plan to always keep my girls educated on all things American. So this year Alana watched a cartoon that PBS has put out called the Liberty Kids. It was actually really cute and educational, we watched the first fourth of July episode. At four years old I'm not sure how much of it she really got but she liked the show anyway. I also had her paint a flag which she did very well and later that evening she explained to her papi what the American flag looked like in great detail. It was kinda cold and rainy here so to warm up a little we made some star sugar cookies and ate a lot of them of course with strawberry jelly to make them red. I have to say the best part of our day was going to church last night, this is for another post. I'm feeling post happy today. ;)

Below is a couple pictures of Ke Ke our new addition to the family. I had told my daughter that when we had a house we could get a cat and she started asking for it two days after we moved in. Kids don't let anything slip by. My husband and I both love cats so we were all for it. This cat is amazing with the girls and so far they are doing ok. I have to watch them very close and there is a lot of, "put her down", "dont pull her tail," "Stop that," " leave Ke Ke a lone for a min." going on but that's to be expected. We do take Ke Ke brakes where she gets put on the patio and I dont have to hover for a bit.
Ok I just went and previewed the blog and realize it looks like I was saying that Joslin goes on the patio but that's not what I meant. lol She just happened to be playing outside and the cat inside for this picture. Obviously the cat is the one who gets put on the patio for Ke Ke break time. But this was just to cute and as you can tell the cat actually wanted to get to her. Im not sure whats wrong with this cat but even though Joslin and Alana are not always gentle she loves them.

Crafts

I have been motivated by most resent reader to post some of my craft photos. Im actually very lazy about resizing photos and putting them on here. As if you haven't noticed. So here are the crafts Iv made over the last 6 months or so.

This last picture is actually the most recent. I made this horse tonight actually. My daughter has been riding this broken stick around the last week calling it a horse. So I made it one. The little box its on is a box I decorated for the babies things that are in the living room, and the little book it one that I made to sit in front of the baby. The rest of these are mostly things I made for the baby. The blue towel and the yellow towel are for my 2 year old. The boppy has come in handy. Although it looks not so much like the ones that you buy I love it. Its longer and thinner on the ends and it wraps around her just perfect.

Advent calander

Im just supper excited about this calender that I made so Im gonna put a post up about it and a picture. For each day the box contains a candy, and a card. The card has a bible verse about the Jesus and a couple Christmas type activities. For example reading a Christmas story, watching a Christmas movie, making a Christmas craft, or making a Christmas recipe. I went all the way through December to the new year. And the cards after Christmas are verses about renewal of the spirit and being thankful, and the activities are geared towards starting a new year. Like writing down something you have had trouble giving up like a grievance with someone and burning the paper. And I found some new year crafts to. The picture doesn't have the candy in it yet but I did end up putting it in there. After you empty the box of the day your on you flip it up and at the end of each week is a bible verse to tell the nativity story and a cute picture related to that verse. I did those verses in Spanish. The last picture is one of the crafts we did as one of the activities. Alana loved helping with them. They are Christmas poppers we filled cut pieces of wrapping paper roll (you could use TP rolls) with home made confetti (ripped up paper, that was fun) and some candy. You pull at both ends until the paper rips and out poors the stuff.
I totally love being able to stay at home and think of cool stuff to do with Alana. And Im a crafter so I love having time for my crafts during her nap. Well and I do crafts with her but the intense stuff I have to do with her not around or I end up snapping. :)

Home made Christmas decorations

Im just gonna put the pics up if you have questions on any of them just ask.





This next one I want to explain. I started a tradition when Issac and I got married that we would get a special ornament to represent our year. Although I dont have the last couple years ones here (they are stored at my sisters) Iknow we will have them at sometime. So this one I made you can see that the one strand says papi. The other three are me and Alanas name and some hearts for the new baby thats on the way.



I also have to comment on this next one. I have to say these are my least fav but are a good idea The wholes let the light from the candle come out and it looks nice at night.






This next one is of the prizes Im giving away at our cookie exchange party. I hope they like homemade decorations.

This next one is one of my fav. Its so we can hear Santa when he comes in.

These are the three garlands on my tree. Ribon, popcorn, and peppermint garland.




I think the rest of these needed to be rotated sorry Im getting lazy just turn you head. Actually my hubby and daughter are hungry so I gotta hurry now.


These last two are also some of my fav.