And a very merry Christmas to all...

...and to all an incredibly short Christmas summary in the form of very few phone pictures. We're pretty tired around here. But for all of the best reasons. Except for a lingering cough for our poor sick baby; that is not one of the best reasons. Sigh. Almost there. I'm extremely grateful for all of my helpers over the last week and really miss them. Love you, family.

Presents are pretty cool, Dad

We bought chocolate chips with the intent to bake goodies...but so far they've only served as a toy for the baby.

Story time with Auntie Manda!! Please also observe the proximity of the cat to this situation and chalk it up to a Christmas miracle.

Christmas is exhausting, y'all. Also, I'm totally about to outgrow my space egg swing. Yeeps.

Thankful

Come Thanksgiving you used to find me taking pictures of pies. Now I pretty much just take pictures of my baby (it can't be helped, his adorableness attracts the camera!), so I really don't have any Thanksgiving shots to share with you that don't feature Holden in some form or fashion. Oh, but rest assured there were pies. This time only three for the six (and a half) of us, an extremely reasonable ratio.

As we scarfed down turkey and cornbread dressing and allll the other good stuff last Thursday, I paused for a moment and felt especially thankful for my amazing parents this year. I'm also really thankful for pie, but having a baby is kinda a big deal...and while coconut cream pie would have helped, I don't really know if I would have survived those first couple of weeks without my mom and dad by my side. Maybe more details on the survival of the early days will be provided a little later, and maybe not - I got a little teary just thinking about it now, so apparently six months later the waves of exhaustion and newborn terror are still palpable. So for now I'll continue to pause briefly and say thank to my parents. For everything. Absolutely everything.

Holden enjoying some naptime with Grandpa over Thanksgiving weekend...

...and doing the same thing six months ago when he was almost a week old.

Can you believe how much he's grown and changed?!? Me either.

So, I disappeared...

...into a world of busy season and baby and LIFE and heeeere I am, alive and well!! And in the spirit of playing catch up, I'm going to try to blog every day in December. Just putting that out there while I'm feeling a small burst of optimism and motivation. So it may not actually happen, but I'm going to try. Some days it may just be a picture of Holden, which is probably all you really want anyway.

And in the interest of not trying too hard right off the bat and hurting myself, we're going to start on a light note with some silly faces. I like to call this Holden's "little old man lips" look; he's been sporting it quite a bit these days, probably as a side effect of figuring out these two teeth he has. He's entirely too much fun and giggly and happy, so I try to soak up as much of it as I possibly can. Rock on, little old man lips - I love you.

Hey baby!

One month ago, this tiny little person came into our lives and changed things forever.  Infinitely for the better.  Those first few weeks were anything but easy, but worth every minute when I remind myself what an important job this is - raising, caring, loving this little man.  Welcome to the world, Holden Michael Pendarvis.  Born May 29, 2014 - 7 pounds, 1 ounce, and 21 inches of perfect.

And I'm really not sure how we went from that little guy up there to this one down here who is already ONE MONTH OLD!  It's a bit of a blurry haze, really.

I'll try to capture some parenthood adventures here on the blog...but my boss is a little demanding these days and I tend to run a little short on time.  Priorities!

Mustaches and bowties

A month ago (a whole month ago!) my dear, wonderful, amazing friends threw an adorable "mustaches and bowties" baby shower to celebrate Baby Holden, yay!!  In the midst of the tax crazy, it was so nice to just take 48 hours away from my desk (ok, really more like 44.5 hours...a whirlwind from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon when I was back at my desk around 4:00, blech) and spend some quality time with family and friends getting ready for the little guy's arrival.

I'm such a lucky gal to have such wonderful friends - love you girls!!  A few pictures from the festivities...

Me and the mommies...well, the grandmommies-to-be!

little man onesies

My cravings!  Clementines and...sugary little kid cereals. :) Transformed by Kami into delicious Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal bar treats.  SO GOOD.

The wonderful hostesses and party-throwers extraordinaire

Everything's more delicious through a mustache straw!

Piles and piles o' wonderful presents and the great start to Holden's library

My wonderful mom made Holden the most adorable rocking horse quilt - I love it!!

The name game

After much debate and flipping through baby name books (the Craig method) and keeping of spreadsheets (obviously the Erin method), we finally decided on a name for our kid...

Holden Michael Pendarvis

There's his sweet little face from FOUR MONTHS AGO (dang, how did that happen?!?) when we first found out we're having a little boy.  He's certainly changed quite a bit in the last four months - I mean, he's gone from the size of a banana to a head of romaine lettuce.  Approximately.  Since it's kinda hard to see what's going on in there.

And actually, we decided all of this awhile ago...but I thought an official blog announcement was in order!

Can't wait to meet you, Holden!  Actually, I can wait a little while longer - keep on baking in there, ok? Watch, after all of this careful deliberation we'll totally change our minds when we meet him.*

* Ummm...probably won't change our minds, actually. That goes against my planning nature.

Expecting the arrival...

...of some teeny feet to fill these shoes!  Baby Pendarvis is on his or her way (and yes, we're finding out boy or girl- dying to know!!), ready for a May 2014 arrival.  Eeeeekkkk!!  And if you're actually reading this, you probably already knew the news. =) But here are some tiny baby shoes to really drive the point home.

We couldn't be more excited.  And a little freaked out.  But mostly...excited, blessed, and ready to embark on this great parenthood adventure.  Can't wait to meet you, Baby Pendarvis - I think you're really going to rock our world.

Family fried fall weekend o' fun

A few weekends ago we had alllll the parents in town, pretty much just to go to the epicness that is the State Fair of Texas and eat delicious fried things.  Seriously.  This was the plan.  Momma Dale mentioned this summer that she'd really like to come to town for the fair, so we booked it for post-10/15 (you know, crazy tax deadlines and such) and had the whole gang in town for some Texas-sized adventures.

Ready for fair adventures!

And then we went and had a generally fabulous time and we ate allllll of this (LOTS of sharing on the food - otherwise you would have had to roll me out of there):

1. Omg, we started with Twinkies - they were handing them out FOR FREE as we walked into the fair, presumably to celebrate the fact that Twinkies still exist.  What a way to start and prep our palates.
2. Fried Thanksgiving dinner - this was one of our favorites!  It's impressive when an early contender can hang in the competition for so long.  Basically a giant fried ball of turkey and dressing goodness with gravy and cranberry sauce for dipping.  It was really, really good.
3. I think they were called...pig's toes?  Essentially a deep fried jalapeño bacon-wrapped situation with chili and nacho cheese for dipping.  Disgustingly delicious.
4. Fried spaghetti & meatballs - also one of our favorites.* Spaghetti and meatball bits with plenty of melty, gooey cheese and marinara.  Yum.
5. Fried shrimp & grits, also delicious but a little greasy.  Imagine that, the piles of deep fried are getting a little greasy.
6. The classic, Fletcher's corny dogs - both original and jalapeño
7. Free baby cones of soft serve ice cream!!  One of my favorite reasons to visit the Food & Fiber Pavilion.
8. Fresh, delicious, life-giving fruit.  Yes, a giant cup of fresh fruit.  Mom's decision, and a really, really good one.
9. Fireballs - this fried pimiento cheese situation, which sounds delicious in theory but just wasn't very good.  Too spicy and kinda blech.
10. Deep fried biscuits and gravy.  Pretty much gravy inside a biscuit inside fried.  Also greasy along the lines of the shrimp & grits situation, but pretty good.  Didn't blow my socks off.
11. Bratwurst...yeah, on a stick!  One of the few non-deep fried items, just delicious meat on a stick.
12. Fried King Ranch casserole IN THE SHAPE OF TEXAS.  Pretty dang good.
13. Fried Cuban roll.  Also a bit of a grease bomb, but really delicious.
14. Red beans and rice - one of the best bang for your buck items at the fair, and it may actually qualify as "real food" instead of a just an artery-clogging fair specialty item.  Props to Mom for being the voice of reason.
15. Fried grilled cheese.  This was AMAZING.  It came with those little crunchy potato sticks on the side AND had tomato soup (which tasted very, very, very much like Campbell's out of a can) for dipping.  I loved this.
16. Fried jambalaya - spicy and delicious.  Our last of the savory items.
17. Fried Nutella - time for dessert deliciousness, and this was delightful.  It even came with fresh fruit on top, which made it totally healthy.
18. Fried peanut butter & jelly sandwich - I'm counting this as dessert, and it was really delicious.  You know how fantastic peanut butter is when it gets all melty and warm?  Throw some jelly and powdered sugar into that situation and you're doing ok.

* with this and the Thanksgiving dinner, maybe we just liked the fried food when served in softball-sized form?  hmmm....

This list does not account for beverages...none of which were fried, thank goodness.  That fried beer incident was truly awful.  Check out all the shades of brown below.

Shrimp & grits on the left, giant spaghetti & meatball situation on the right

You can't go wrong with a corny dog, as long as you have plenty o' mustard

Dad, double-fisting the corn dogs - nice work!

Omg - King Ranch casserole, Cuban roll, red beans & rice, and fried grilled cheese.  Holy moly spread of food stuff.

A healthy heaping of Nutella - oh yum

Deep fried PB&J in all of its 100%-bad-for-you glory

Ok, putting it in a list is kinda scaring me.  We all made it out alive, though.

Yeah, it was mostly about the food, but I mean, it wasn't allllll food.  There was also plenty of car show time for the boys...

...and breaks in the ridiculous massage chairs (twice! they were amazing) and making new puppy friends...

...and more animal time (horses and rabbits and tiny adorable baby kittens, oh my! and checking out new Big Tex (I thought he looked a little scary).

Happy fair weekend, y'all!

Mommers

Happy birthday eve, Mom! Apparently I'm all about celebrating the eves this month...it works.  Anyway, you rock, Mom, and you totally deserve a blog shout-out.  Happy almost birthday, and keep on being awesome.  Especially at earring putting-on.

I knew you were coming, so I went ahead and baked a cake

A month ago (yeah, I know, July disappeared, too) we had some visitors (hi, Mom and Dad!!), and since one of them was having a birthday, it really was the perfect reason to bake a cake.  So I did.  At, like, midnight the night before because I have poor time management skills when it comes to prioritizing things and strongly feel that sometimes watching crap TV is number one.  Oops.  Let's commence with the caking.

Is it scary when the stuff IN the mixer matches the color OF the mixer?  Only a little bit...

And that's why you slap on a crumb coat - look at that hot mess of a cake

There, that's better!  Thumbs up to the cake!

This is Dad we're talking about, so I knew red velvet was the way to go.  And yes, it's kinda ridiculous to bake a giant cake for four people to maybe have one piece each, but when has that ever stopped me?  So we kept on celebrating by doing the present thing...

birthday present opening while wearing Father's Day present - now, that's pretty cool, Dad

...and journeying over to Ft. Worth and eating some really delicious Mexican food at El Rancho Grande, where we've been going as a family since before I can remember...

...and doing some definite Dad-style shopping, where Craig was more than just a little out of his element.

"What the heck are these things?" - oh, Craig, so much horse education to go

It was a little on the crazy-hot side, but we explored the stockyards for a little while and found some horsey friends.

Then back home to just sit in air conditioning where certain animals were a little less inclined to be friends...

...but then pretty much got over it and decided these guys weren't so bad after all.

oh, kitten, you are ridiculous

Happy birthday, Dad, creepy dripping candles and all!

Eleven for '11

Eleven pictures to oh so briefly sum up my 2011

I moved back to Dallas from DC...in the middle of a giant snowy disaster.  Which you'd really think would be much more likely to happen the other way around.  But I was home.

And not only did I move to Texas...but Zach did, too.  And his dad, of course.  And Harry thought this was pretty much the worst day ever.  I worried.  A lot.  And basically it's all ok now.

I bought a dress.  Not just any dress.  THE dress.  And they celebrated by attacking us with bubbles, which was fun and wonderful in every way.  I'm so glad my mom was there.

My sissy went and graduated from Duke Law School.  Kinda a big deal.  Just sayin.

So many wonderful times throughout the year with so many wonderful friends, and nothing says it better than four Fredericksburg pies.  Yes, four.  We needed alllll the flavors.  So grateful for these wonderful friends, and not just because they agree to four pies.

We celebrated this whole "we're engaged!!" business with some official photography moments.  And I've just never been happier.

I have two of the most amazing friends a girl could ask for in Carolyn and Kami, and our annual summer trip is always, always one of the highlights of my year.  And Beaver Creek in the summer is a TREAT with these ridiculous Texas summers.

Soooo....we bought a house.  A month before the wedding.  Much going on?  Nah.  Just the usual.  So we bought a giant, beautiful house to turn into a home and build our lives together.  Ok, maybe a touch more awesome than "the usual."

Last year I did some recipe testing for a cookbook...and the cookbook became real and a free copy was shipped to me and my name is in there and I think the whole thing is just generally cool because I absolutely loved the work and the whole experience.  I. love. food.  You know this.

Craig and I got married.  And we had a wonderful wedding.  Surrounded by family and friends.  And we had a FUN wedding.  One of the most amazing days of my life, really and truly.

And we followed up the wonderful, amazing wedding with a wonderful, amazing honeymoon to Costa Rica where we did ridiculous things like zipline through the rainforest.  Such an incredible trip, and really a very incredible year.