The Zorio Family: Time for Turkey and Birthday Cake!

We hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. This year John's job required that he work Thanksgiving so we stayed in Alabama for the holiday. Since John did not have to be at work until the afternoon though, we had a little Thanksgiving dinner of our own for lunch. I knew it would just be myself, John, and Dawson eating, I decided to make a turkey breast instead of a whole turkey. This was great because we still had days of leftovers, but we didn't have so many that we got sick of turkey! I also made broccoli casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy (for John), and stuffing. We set the table with our china to make it a special lunch! This was Dawson's first time eating on china so I'll have to remember that one for the baby book (haha!). We relaxed in the morning and watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while playing with Dawson, and then we ate our meal before John went to work.
That evening for dinner some of our wonderful friends, the Perez family, invited Dawson and me over to eat Thanksgiving dinner with their family since they knew John was working. They had a feast which was delicious, but Dawson decided he was only interested in eating the yummy homemade rolls (silly boy!). They have a cat named Polly that Dawson was obsessed with while we were there. Luckily, Polly was very patient with Dawson! We had fun visiting and celebrating Thanksgiving when our friends!
John took a vacation day from work on Friday because it was my 25th birthday! We celebrated by doing some shopping. Even though it was Black Friday, we didn't get up and do any early shopping. I'm not getting up early on my birthday, especially when Dawson gave me a super-rare and wonderful birthday gift--he slept until around 8:30!!! (This NEVER happens!!!!) We waited until around 9:30 before venturing out into the crowds. John got a Caramel Cheese Cake for my birthday cake this year and, of course, it had pink candles! It was so tasty! We spent the rest of the day playing with Dawson which was my very favorite thing to do on my birthday. :) After Dawson went to bed our (again) wonderful friends the Perezs offered to listen for Dawson so that John and I could see a late movie. It was great to have a date on my birthday, since our last date had been when we were in Florida about two months ago. John said the movie was my choice, so we saw "Love and Other Drugs" which is a chick flick, but was good...John even said so. I had a wonderful 25th birthday spending it with my two favorite guys!
We spent the rest of the weekend Christmas shopping (we're almost completely finished! yay!), relaxing, playing with Dawson, of course, and decorating our house. We now have the entire inside of our house decorated (pictures to come in the next blog update), and we have about half of our lights up outside. Dawson LOVES LOVES LOVES all of the Christmas decorations. He loves the tree. We ended up putting all of our breakable (aka all of the pretty) ornaments on the top half of the tree out of Dawson's reach, and he's doing fair with staying out of the tree...it's just SO tempting. Our nativity scene is also of great interest to Dawson. If asked he can point to the wise men, Mary, Baby Jesus, Joseph, the sheep (he points to it and says BAAAA), and most of the time the donkey (which John keeps confusing him on by calling it a "burro" which is Spanish for donkey...I don't know why...haha). We also do the Elf on the Shelf tradition, and Dawson loves pointing out his elf, Charlie. I will have more about Charlie the Elf on the Shelf in another blog after I take a picture of the elf. I think Dawson thinks all of the decorations are just for him. He gets so excited every time he sees our tree. I think it's so sweet!
Last week Dawson started LOVING to give kisses which is wonderful! On Wednesday night he also looked at me as I was putting him in his crib and said very clearly, "good night!" Then he burst in giggles. This was the first time he had said "good night," and I was thrilled.
Dawson really loves coloring these days, so I decided we would do a craft each day December 1-25 and have 25 Days of Christmas Crafts. A lot of the ones I have come up with are super simple, just coloring sheets, but some are a little more involved. Today was our first craft and we colored and glued cotton balls on a snowman. I have posted a picture below. He was more interested in putting glue all over the page than he was coloring or putting cotton on the glue. He now knows the word "glue" as he was saying it over and over "glue, glue, glue, GLUE, GLUE, GLUE!" because he wanted to only put glue on the page. Silly boy!
Enjoy the pictures below, and look for another update soon because we are going to see Santa this weekend and I am going to take pictures of Dawson with his Elf on the Shelf and our decorations hopefully!