Halloween Weekend

Again, it has been way too long since my last post!  Wednesday-Friday is always so crazy for me, and then if I have anything at all going on over the weekend I feel like I look at the calendar and suddenly it's Sunday night again.  I guess that is a good thing though, that time has been flying by lately.  Before I know it it will be Tuesday afternoon and we'll be at the seven week mark.  And since Kevin left a couple of weeks later than the rest of the guys, we are technically two months into the deployment, which is awesome!  I feel like we are finally starting to make some progress with our countdown.  Only ten months, at most, to go!

On Friday evening my mom and brother, Shannon, arrived at our house for the weekend.  I was so excited to have them here to keep us company for a couple of days.  I attempted to make my first real gluten free meal for them.  I was about 75% successful.  I made gluten free pasta for myself and Kerriann, regular for everyone else only because I ran out of GF, homemade meat sauce, GF french bread and a salad.  Everything was delicious, with the exception of the bread.

I still have no clue what went wrong because I followed the directions to a T, other than not using the "heavy mixer" that it called for (maybe one day I will have my beautiful Kitchenaid that I've been dreaming of, and then I can make homemade bread).  Oh well, everyone still left the table with a full stomach, so I guess that's all that counts!  After dinner, I made an apple spice cake (gluten AND dairy free) and it was DELICIOUS.

I have eaten over half of the pan by myself since then... oops!  I'm probably going to be making it pretty often from here on out, so get excited to try it if you'll be stopping by my house anytime in the near future!

Our original plan for Saturday was to go to "Zoo Boo" at the Pittsburgh Zoo, but when we woke up to snow, we decided we'd just do a little shopping instead.

We spent the morning relaxing and then picked up Christiane and headed to the South Hills Village mall in the afternoon.  Kerriann was sort of out of control for most of the trip so I didn't accomplish much, but we did get her some new tennis shoes since she has out grown both of her pairs.  I always told myself I would never by my child velcro light up shoes, especially with a character on them, but Kerriann is now the proud new owner of exactly that.

She loves Dora so much that I just couldn't help but give in.  She has been dancing around in her Dora light up shoes ever since!  I think the $20 was well worth it in the end for her happiness.  I'll try to get a picture of her in them soon.

After we were thoroughly worn out and starving, we had dinner at Red Robin.

This was my first time dining there, and I was excited to find that they actually had a gluten free menu.  I had a great Avo-Cobb-O salad, and I'm pretty sure everyone else enjoyed their dinner just as much.

We spent today doing Halloween activities, but that's for another post! :)