A Weekend in the Life...

Some weekends, Dan and I are the epitome of the "boring married couple" stereotype, because we sit around, do nothing, and go to bed at 10:00pm on Friday and Saturday night. But this weekend was different, and it was so much fun!

Friday, I went shopping for Thanksgiving. My mom, stepdad, sister, and grandma are all coming down and we get to host Thanksgiving for them and a few friends! I planned out a shopping list and went grocery shopping for most of it. Dan and I then went to Target and filled a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child. It's a great Christmas charity that sends shoeboxes full of gifts to children around the world who otherwise wouldn't get presents. We filled our shoebox for a four year old boy, so we picked out some awesome stuff: Hotwheels, crayons, a stuffed hippo, and then of course a Spiderman toothbrush! We stuffed the box full, and all we have to do is turn it in to church and they take care of the rest. If you click on the link, you can see where you can participate if you're interested.

We also watched another episode in the John Adams HBO miniseries while enjoying a bottle of Blackstone Merlot, one of our favorite inexpensive wines. (We picked that up at Target too at the same time as our shoebox items, and laughed about what the cashier was thinking about us).

On Saturday, Dan and Sammie settled in on the couch for a day of relaxing with college football. Unfortunately, I had homework and studying to do. I worked on that for a little bit until I got a call from my friend Melanie, asking if I wanted to bake cookies with her and a couple other friends. Um, of course! I shut my books and ended up filling my afternoon with Christmas music and cookie baking. We made cocoa fudge cookies, pfefferneuse, french lace cookies, and of course, sugar cookies.*


After several hours of baking, I went back home, cleaned up, and we went out to a local Mexican restaurant with some other friends for dinner before seeing the play Eurydice, a Baylor theater production. I have to say, I loved the play. We all did. It was maybe my favorite non-musical I've ever seen. So if you ever get the chance to check this one out, I'd highly recommend it.

When the play was over, Dan and I invited everyone back to our apartment to hang out. We all sat around eating, drinking, and talking until late. It was great quality time with friends, even though they did tell us that Sammie appears to be getting a little chubby!**

Sunday, the final day of the weekend, started out normal with going to church. Afterwards, though, we went out to lunch with our pastor and got to really talk with him for about two hours. It was great. We talked about jobs, marriage, and life in general. He had a lot of helpful advice and I also really enjoyed listening to him talk to Dan. Our pastor has thought so highly of Dan ever since they worked together in Mexico, and I loved hearing him say over and over how great of a communicator Dan is, how much integrity he has, how intelligent he is...his only complaint was that Dan sells himself short at times! We both left feeling so blessed to have gotten involved at a church with such a great pastor.

The rest of the afternoon, I actually did have to do the homework that I'd put off the day before. :( Yuck! Dan watched football - and won this round of fantasy football! All in all, a great weekend.

*The cocoa fudge cookies are the ones I was in charge of, so that's the actual recipe for them. The others were family recipes that I don't have copies of, so I tried to find recipes online that looked similar. But I can highly recommend that recipe for cocoa fudge cookies - they were delicious!

**Sammie was so sad that she didn't even eat breakfast the next morning! Her self-esteem is shot!