Thankful Thursday - 26

Since I missed Thankful Thursday last week, I'll throw in a couple extras this week!

I am grateful for...

1. Spending Time with Family. This seems general/vague, but I love the frequency we get together with family over the holidays. They are some of my best friends. I wish it could be like this all the time!

2. Hearty Dutch Meals. Stamppot with Rookworst. Enough said? It's a traditional dutch meal of mashed potatoes, carrots and onions topped with beef gravy and rookworst. We always eat ours with cold crunchy pickles too. Worth a try if you haven't had it before! Delicious!

3. A Successful Year. 2015 may not have been exactly what I expected, but how boring would that be if everything went according to plan? GASP! Who am I and what have I done with Renee? Even though things didn't go exactly how I expected this year, it allowed us to buy a house, enjoy our summer to the fullest, take a trip to Orlando, spend relatively frivolously over the holidays and enjoy our time together with our little family.

Still loving our home! Feels surreal even after 4 months.

Have really enjoyed watching Sherlock grow up this year!

So grateful for this trip to Orlando. We will have to go to LA when the HP World opens up there! Another impromptu vacation? Grad trip for Scott?

4. Earthquake Awareness. I slept right through the 4.7 magnitude earthquake the other day, but I hear it was quite the jolt! It seemed to shake everyone up pretty bad (pun intended). Hopefully it will be enough to get us all going on our emergency kits and plans. I know we still have to figure something out in case there is a natural disaster leaving us without power, water, cell reception, etc. Now we have had a little warning of what's to come!

Fun fact(?): The earthquake in Japan in 2011 was a 9.0 magnitude, which is 3,000,000 times stronger than the little one we felt the other day! "The Big One" that is expected at some point will likely be in that range. 


5. Puppies! Sherlock's mom, Ruby, had her second litter last Thursday! While we don't get to bring one of these fluff-balls home, we still will get to visit them once they're 3 weeks old! Can't wait for that.

Ruby with two of her 4 puppies at just a few days old

Little red-headed guinea pigs! Love

We have much to be grateful for. 
I wish everyone a very Happy New Year! Be safe!

The Last of the Christmas Festivities

December 29th was the last Christmas party of the season for me! Until the work party on January 8th, but that's so far after Christmas it hardly seems the same!

Sunday, December 27th was the Gerber Christmas gathering. We had our last church service in the gym, and then moved everything to the new church building and started setting up. From here I headed home to make my cranberry & cream cheese dip for the party. 

Love our Ninja Blender!

At 3pm we all headed out to Opa and Oma's in the SNOW! I was very excited to have snow, especially because it didn't stick around much, or make the roads too slippery.

We had turkey and ham for dinner with all the classic trimmings to go along with it! 

Laura also made a delicious Christmas Sangria!

Apples infused with vodka and wine? Count me in!

All together there were...37 people there! Wow... We were even missing a few members that couldn't make it. In the next few years this number could grow even more as some of us grand-children think about starting families. 

I always find it hard to connect on a deeper level with people at such a big party. I much prefer smaller groups of no more than 8 people typically. I think part of my 2016 goal will be to be more intentional with getting together with extended family members in smaller groups. 

Monday we had David's parents and Aunty Val over for dinner. I forgot to take pictures, but I made canneloni! Always a crowd pleaser!

Tuesday was the De Jong family Christmas gathering. We had a "smaller" group this year (still 20 people), as we were missing over 10 people. As mentioned above, I prefer smaller groups. This was a very enjoyable evening for me. 

This is Henry, the dog Sonya and Anthony are sitting for right now. He's a sweetheart!

We ate delicious food, drank delicious wine, played fun games and had conversations out by the fire.

Amazing cheese plate Sonya put together!

Drinking an Old Fashioned by the fire!

Christmas has been such an amazing time, but so... so busy. December 23-29 we had something going on every evening! 

I think New Years will be a night in for us this year! 

Christmas Parties

Holy cow!
It's been almost a week since I posted anything... AND I missed Thankful Thursday last week!

Such a busy season, I completely forgot about blogging.

Here is a re-cap of the Christmas festivities the past week or so.

Wednesday, December 23 there was a Bible Study reunion/Christmas Party. I haven't seen some of these people in a long time, so it was great to catch up! 

Christmas Eve I took the day off from work. I went to Chiropractor in the morning, and then did some LAST MINUTE shopping during the day. Every Christmas Eve our church has a service filled with carols and celebration. This year was the first one in a few years that I wasn't a part of the worship team. I was asked to play, but I declined as I thought it would be nice to have a year off... I was right!

After the service, every year my family gathers at Mom & Dad's for some appetizers and gifts. We pick names with the 8 of us (including David and Aly) and then my parents get us some gifts as well. Oma De Jong often joins us this evening so we can all play some games and hang out together. 

This is the closest to a nice shot we could get of Sherlock with his antlers on! He kept shaking them off and then running around the house with them in his mouth.

A gift for Sherlock? He's so spoiled!

Scott picked this up for Sherlock from Costco. Something FUN to keep him occupied while we opened our presents and ate our snacks!

Jeff un-wrapping his super secret mystery present. His frying pan oddly wrapped like a stop sign!

Such a lovely evening to spend together!

We made a fancy little "Crazy Dice Game" kit for our grandparents, so after we were done with gifts we broke it out and played a round with Oma!

Christmas morning, David and I opened our presents just with the two of us at home. We both were spoiled this year. 

We had to drag Sherlock out of bed. He has been partied out! Too bad it's only just begun for him!

David was super excited to get his Bose Soundlink Mini II Bluetooth Speaker. He is just setting it up on our table behind the couch and testing out the great sound!

On Christmas Eve David gave me this gift so I could wear it to the church service. Isn't it beautiful?

After we were done our presents and enjoying our morning together, we packed up and went to my parents house for a little bit. They were planning to have brunch with Opa and Oma when they got there, but we were heading over to David's parents house for Christmas brunch so we didn't get to stay long. 

Scott got Settlers of Catan for Christmas from my mom, so a quick game (is there such a thing?) was in order!

At David's parents house, we had waffles for brunch, then cleaned up and all met up in the living room to open gifts! We gave Shelley her meat thermometer present a little earlier on so she could use it for the turkey. Again, we were all spoiled with thoughtful gifts. 

David is showing off Allana's new Deathly Hallows lamp that Kyle made for her. If you don't know what the Deathly Hallows is, you'll need to read Harry Potter!

Dinner time rolled around, and I found myself helping out in the kitchen. I had a blast with the chaos of it all. It's nice to feel useful and help to put delicious food on the table. We had turkey with all the trimmings of a classic Christmas feast!

Turkey!

After dinner we played some Scattergories and enjoyed each other's company!

All these sleepy pups!

Sherlock must have been exhausted. He hardly ever sleeps anywhere but at home! Too many parties!

Off to bed until Boxing Day! On Saturday, David and I slept in a little bit and then tidied up the house. It was a mess from all our wrapping shrapnel and dishes we didn't have the time to do. From here, we dropped Sherlock off at my parent's house for the day and we headed downtown to meet up with the brothers and Aly!

Please don't make me get out of bed again!!

The 6 of us had planned a while ago to try our hands at the EXIT on Broadway. We did the room themed Transylvania. We figured we'd be pretty well off considering how we all work fairly well together, and think differently. 

Adam and Aly seem happy to have failed.

We were right. We were working on the last piece of the last clue to escape from the room. Literally, if we had three more minutes we would have had it! So close!!! We definitely have to try another one in the new year! So much fun!

Sherlock at my parents house. So tired he curled up in Shadow's bed. 

After the EXIT room we picked up some groceries and beer and went to Jeff's place to make some food and hang out some more. 

"What responsible children you've raised! Salad for lunch."
"It warms a mother's heart"

"JUST KIDDING! Supplemented with beer, pizza and perogies! And a whole pack of bacon of course."

Some friendly competition with an old game

We went from Jeff's to Adam's for a bit, as we remembered he has Cards Against Humanity. Oh that game... not for the faint of heart! Haha

Adam and Aly have a Nespresso machine, so he made me a decaf espresso in his new cups! Delicious.

Aly was off to another Christmas party, so we went back to Jeff's place again for some darts and the hockey game! Another very full, but enjoyable day! 

There is more to come with regards to Christmas parties, but I think this is a good summary of the first few days! 

So much to be grateful for this wonderful season. 

Christmas Light Tour

Yesterday was the second annual Christmas Light tour with David's sisters, their cousin and myself. 

Rachel, Allana, Christine and I filled our travel mugs with hot chocolate and hit the road! This year Rachel was in charge of planning our route. We hit some of the same spots as last year and some new ones! 

I feel like setting up lights in an extravagant manner is on the decline. Maybe it's the cost of electricity? Some of the spectacular houses we saw last year didn't have any lights, or very minimal display. Some places even had everything set up, but the lights weren't on! 

Despite this, we did get to see some pretty magnificent displays.

Our first stop was one of my favourites. I wonder how many lights they use? How much is their December electricity bill?!

A lot of the set-ups are very tacky. This one was less tacky. Just fun lights! And all in straight lines - good for someone OCD like me!

Lots of Nativity scenes around.

Photo with the Nutcracker. (Left-Right: Me, Allana, Christine, Rachel)

This little fox reminded me of Sherlock!

This house was rather exciting! They had a hot chocolate stand, music blasting, and so many lights. It was sensory overload! As we were walking around looking at their lights, we almost walked right into a Global News interview. Oops! I wonder if my look of, "Oh crap... camera... act natural... walk away!" made it on the news. 

I love Cookie Monster, so I had to take a photo of the cookie monsters I saw!

Dancing Cookie Monster

Train set with moving gondola and Santa sleigh set up in someone's garage!

Where do they store all this stuff when it's not Christmas?!

We had a tally going of how many Olaf's we saw after we noticed them at the first few houses we went to. We thought it would get a lot higher, but we only ended up with 6 the whole evening! We must have missed some.

Love the Christmas traditions! Maybe next year we can go to the Stanley Park train.