A 19 year old in the house!

December 14th is a day of celebration in our house.  That was the day we became parents with the birth of our first daughter, Kemie.  We actually began a day early with the midnight premiere of The Hobbit, Desolation of Smaug.  Victoria dressed up as an elf but we were disappointed that they didn't do trivia and a costume contest like last year.  Of course, we didn't go to the 3D at the Imax either so I guess that was why.

 

 After we finally woke up the next morning and had a very late breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs and biscuits along with apples and peanut butter dip, we gave Kemie gifts.  I think she was still tired !

The first gift from 3 of her sisters was appropriate both in being a pillow and with the mustaches!

 

There was also a pair of mustache glasses.  Very cute!  The lovely scarf she has on was a gift from her grandmother who recently learned to crochet.

 

Next she opened her gift from Mike and I.  I had originally ordered a Hobbit Cookbook but didn't realize it was a preorder and isn't going to be printed until sometime next year.  I cancelled the order and am suppose to get a refund but they said they would still send me a copy of the book so we will see.  Anyway, I scrambled for another gift and thankfully, she had recently mentioned she would like a pair of noise reducing headphones.

I think she liked them!

The last gift was from her little sister who asked if she could give part of her Christmas gift to her as a birthday present.  What she had wrote on the outside of the bag didn't earn her brownie points with her other sisters.

Are you detecting a theme with her gifts?  These are stands to hold her phone or iPod.  They also have magnets.

We then made our way to downtown St. Augustine for dinner and a scavenger hunt.  We broke off into 2 teams and looked for the following items.

1.    Green/white Candy Cane

2.    Santa Claus

3.    Mrs. Claus

4.    Baby Jesus

5.    Purple light

6.    Gold Wrapped gift

7.    Jingle bell

8.    Christmas bell

9.    multi colored christmas wreath

10. Elf

11. Santa hat

12. Reindeer

13. Train around the tree

14. Snow

15. Snowman (different place than snow is found)

16. Angel

17. Camel

18. moustache (extra points for different shapes or unusualness)

19. nutcracker

20. blue stocking

21. gingerbread house

22. decorated Christmas cookie

23. cardinal

24. fireplace (extra point for fire going)

25. connected Mary & Joseph

 No real winner although the other team said they had found about 22 of the items.  We found about 19 of them.  Here are 2 of my team's favorites.

We finished with dinner at The Floridian which was somewhere new to us.  The food was good but it was a little chilly as we were sitting outside.  They had heaters which did help.  I had the N Waffles with BBQ chicken and really enjoyed it.  We also ordered the Cheese Board which had some wonderful local cheeses on it.  The cheese was definitely aged well!  I won't post the picture I took there because my mother is already not happy that I posted it on Facebook.  I blame my old eyes for not being able to see that she wasn't smiling!  All in all it was a great celebration of my oldest turning nineteen. 

Our Thai Food adventure

I really have been trying to get the blog updated.  We have been having internet problems, no, actually we just have lousy internet service that was just worse than usual, so uploading the pictures was really difficult.  Anyway, I finally got them up so here you go.

G is part of a World Geography class at her co-op and each month, we will be studying a different country.  We moms decided to do 1 from each continent except Antarctica.  The first month was Asia and the country that was chosen was Thailand.  I didn't know much about Thailand so mom received an education also.  We learned that the 3 popular foods were jasmine rice, fish along with other seafood and chilies.  They also use many of the tropical fruits like coconut, pineapple and mangoes.

We decided to try a Thai menu for dinner one evening.  One of the problems, though, is only a few in our family have taste buds that really enjoy spicy foods so I decided to make the meal in order to control the hotness level.  We found a recipe for Chicken Satay along with a Peanut sauce.   We also made some Jasmine rice.  

G had the job of threading the chicken onto the skewers.  She worked hard and had fun.

Abigail made some egg rolls for us.  Not really Thai but definitely Asian.  Success was had in not making things too spicy!!

Kemie and Hannah gave a try at wrapping bananas

which Kemie then fried for dessert.  I made some chocolate sauce to go with it.

 

We enjoyed it with fresh pineapple.  Yummy!!  

I didn't get a picture of the chicken and rice but couldn't miss out on this dessert!

  

There was also a recipe for a chicken and coconut soup that I wanted to try so we made that the following week.  It was delicious!!!  I did add a little more red pepper this time so it had some kick but adding rice to it made it doable.  That and a glass of milk!  I will definitely be making this again.