Birthday Weekend

Yikes! It has been two weeks since my last post. Must mean one thing - fall is here and we are B-U-S-Y! I love fall, as it seems everyone does. The foliage is especially lovely here in the mountains, the weather is getting cooler (or trying to at least; I think the other day we got back up to over 80 degrees; I don't know whether to pack up my bikini or oull all of our sweaters out), there are all kinds of yummy pumpkin desserts out there (which I have grown to LOVE over the last couple of years - been missing out my whole life!), and football is well under way (GO DAWGS). Who WOULDN'T love that?? 

To kick off our fall fun, we celebrated Chris' Mom's birthday last weekend. Everyone was kind enough to trek to our place for the weekend, so we had a full house with the parents and my brother and sister-in-law. The guys had planned a hike to Abram's Falls, a trail in beautiful Cade's Cove, which takes about 3 hours. Until you add in all of the traffic backed up for miles on the one lane loop around the Cove all to see a bear cub playing in a tree. Then it takes about 5 hours. Other than that, I think they enjoyed it - or at least pretended to for Chris' sake - he has been trying to drag everyone who visits out there! Here are a couple of photos from the falls (of course manly men don't use real cameras, so these are from their phones = kinda blurry :/):

In the meantime, we girls were hanging around the house waiting for the guys to get home so that we could head to the farm for a good ole' American afternoon of pumpkin pickin', hay rides, and a corn maze. About 2 hours after they should have been home, we gave up and went without them :). Who needs boys anyway??

So we took LOTS of photos with the cutest little girl in the world, picked out pumpkins, and did the hay ride. OH, and we indulged in my personal favorite, funnel cake. Despite missing out on the fun as a family and doing the corn maze, we had a great time. 

She still refuses to look at the camera.

Need I say more? MMM.

 Hay ride time!

I LOVE LOVE LOVE where we live. So pretty all of the time.

 This one was TOO funny not to post!! Poor girl looks traumatized by her introduction to sunflowers LOL.....

Still not sure what to think about that flower.

Then we came home to prepare birthday dinner and topped it off with these AWESOME triffles! 

After consulting a few recipes on Pinterest, I came up with my own:

1/2 Angel Food Cake cut up into cubes

1 Lg Vanilla Pudding mix + milk called for on box

1 Lg container Cool Whip, add 3/4 container to pudding mixture once set

1/4 Cool Whip container for topping

Strawberries, quartered and sprinkled with sugar

Start with a layer of pudding, add bread cubes, top with strawberries. Then do it all over again until you are out of room, then top with pudding and pipe on the Cool Whip topping! I stuck mine in the freezer to set until about 30 minutes before we were ready to eat them.

I don't have a photo to capture this memory, but I would be remiss if I didn't add that we had a FUN night of sometimes not-so-friendly :) competition playing Speed UNO. Some things that we learned:

You cannot play a different color 2 on top of a +2. No matter how many times you ask.

You cannot go out of turn just because you have a Wild Card.

You cannot draw out of turn just because you want to.

If you play two reverse cards at once, play continues going the same direction it was.

We definitely need a play caller telling us whose turn it is.

Just because you lay down THREE Draw Fours at one time on your neighbor, does not mean that you don't love them.

Ok, if you weren't there, that might not be very funny to you, but it was HILARIOUS. If you've never played UNO speed-style, you are missing out!

It was a GREAT weekend with the family! I am glad that they came out to see us and hope that they had just as much fun as we did!

LOTS more to come...