Thanks for Thanksgiving!

rich and i were super lucky to get to go to MN for thanksgiving. thanksgiving is such a great holiday. the woodwards (friends that are like family), my grandma, aunt shirley and the carolans (friends that are like family) came over for the weekend. with this combination of people...it was obviously a blast. we played all day and all night! :) i am so thankful for thanksgiving!

here are all the kidlets acting like zombies in the basement.

abe, rich and mike having a straight up dance off competition. watching them do this was probably the best 3 minutes of the whole weekend. it was cray cray cool!

puma lovin' rich on the ride home.

what is thanksgiving without a way too competitive game of risk? no comment...

i am so thankful for my husband, family and friends. i feel so blessed.

Festival of Lights in Chicago

i LOVE christmas and christmas lights!!! our friends, trevor and melissa, rich and i all went to chicago for the festival of lights. it is when all the christmas lights on the magnificent mile get lit. the festival had concerts and activities during the day, and then at night they had a big parade, and then they lit the lights. gothem city is pretty sweet. it was a super fun trip. we switched cameras with melissa and trevor to see who could get the best pictures of the other couple. i think they did a pretty good job...i hope they like the ones we took. oh and we went into chicago by metra. rich loves public transportation because of his time in germany, and so do i! while we were on the metra, there was a whole bunch of german people all talking and rich eavesdropped the whole ride home. he got pretty excited about being on a train and about hearing german. he might've preferred that to seeing mickey mouse, but maybe not. we will definitely go to the festival again next year! oh but we may look up the train schedule before hand because....we ended up missing the 9:00pm train, and the next train out wasn't until like 11pm, so we all hung out at grand station. it was pretty funny but annoying too. i took pics of us all laying on the floor and posted them below. if christmas wasn't so close, we might've been more annoyed. santa clause is coming to town, so who cares! :)

Happy Birthday To Janelle

i turned 25! i still feel like i am 16 sometimes, but then i see high school kids and realize that i hopefully look and hopefully act older than most teenagers. probably a good thing. i had a great birthday. i love that we have made so many amazing friends here in illinois. i had a birthday dinner at chilis and then ice cream cake (yummy!) and games at my place. it was so much fun because i have such fun people in my life.

rich also took me out on a short birthday adventure for my actual birthday. normally rich is not the biggest fan of shopping, but for my birthday, he took me to the mall and became a shopping champion. it was too cute. i don't think he checked any scores/news/facebook/messages on his phone once, and i have never seen him bring me so many clothes to try on. it almost seemed like shopping with me was his dream come true... ;) despite the fun, the shopping trip did not last too long because rich had tests the next day and had also made dinner reservations at an indian restaurant, so we left without maxing out all our credit cards. it was a great birthday! i love "growing up" with rich. :)