McKenna Family

This year for Thanksgiving Russel was on-call so we invited everyone up to our house.  Jared and Tammie ended up doing dinner with her siblings which was a new things to us.  We usually never have to fight for them since her parents are in New Hampshire.  So while we weren't complete in having everyone with us, Russel's mom joined us as well as the rest of my family and we had a wonderful day.  This year was MUCH better in the food department for me than last year.  I got to eat REAL mashed potatoes (none of that cauliflower yuck) and we tried some new recipes that got rave reviews.  The cornbread stuffing was a major hit with Russel and my gravy rocked the socks off of everyone (that's definitely a keeper recipe).  And we even had an amazing lemon pie on a gluten free crust that was the favorite of many.   Now don't feel too sorry for the rest of the family, there was plenty of glutenized menu items to choose from.  Sadly we weren't too grea...

Happy Birthday to my little Nickster!!  What a great kid Nick is and what a huge heart he has.  Just a couple of endearing things that I noticed about Nick this year.  He is very generous with others and loves to see others happy.  At school they have an auction where they earn school bucks and then they can spend them.  At one of the auctions, there was a boy in his class who got quite teary because he didn't have enough money to buy anything.  Nick decided he would just buy something small and give the rest of his money to this little boy.  It made my day when I heard about this....it's always better to give than to receive. Since my diagnosis with celiac disease, Nick has been very protective of me.  He's always watching what I eat and makes sure it is gluten free.  If I have a drink and he wants a sip, he will make sure that whatever he just ate is gluten free for fear of getting any trace amount of gluten on the straw.   When we wer...

Lots of fun this Halloween.  We had a full selection of characters this year.  We actually lost our pictures from that night (somehow accidentally deleted) so I was able to scrounge up enough to show each child.  Meili was a beautiful bumble bee, although she would tell people she was a butterfly....either way she was absolutely beautiful!!!!  We met earlier in the day with some friends and went to lunch and then took the kids to the local grocery store to do some trick or treating.  They kids loved it. I had this vision of making something fun for dinner so I remembered a few years back making mummy dogs....I thought they were so cute I'd do it again.  It was a crazy day and I hardly time for anything  but I made sure to get those little babies wrapped and baked no matter the price.  Well of course they were cute and I was just so proud I'd managed to get them done and have them ready before the kids left to go trick or treating.  Yay....rig...