Easy As Pie

I made pumpkin pie yesterday. For the first time ever! I've watched my mom make plenty of pies for Thanksgiving throughout the years, and I've made a cherry pie (I can bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy...) , but yesterday was the first time on my own with pumpkin. It turned out great! It's much easier than I thought. I had this idea in my head that it would be difficult, I guess because the pie has to bake forever and cool for even longer. But I don't have to do anything for those parts of the process, so no worries. I was also intimidated by the crust. Even though I have made pie crust before, my tastes have become more refined (read: picky) when it comes to crust. It has to be flaky and all-around perfect. I found a recipe on my favorite non-friend/relative blog which boasted the most perfectly flaky delicious crust ever. So I tried it. Turns out, it is perfect and flaky and delicous! Here's the link.

In more family oriented news:

Samanth is walking pretty much full time now. She falls a lot, but rather than revert to crawling when she falls she just stands up and walks some more. It's very cute and I always think of what my dad said after he watched the kids for a weekend a while back: "Now I know why they call kids this age toddlers." A word that both rhymes and describes Samantha's movements pops into mind: waddler (I don't know if that's really a word).

Drew and Owen are getting so excited for Christmas. They are a little confused as to the occasion (or are they?). We occasionally ask Drew and Owen what they'd like for Christmas. We have a book that we read to remind us why we celebrate Christmas. The boys know that Christmas is Jesus' birthday. So now they go around asking people, "What do you want for your birthday?"

I recently made some head scarves for my step mom; her hair is gone from her chemo treatments. She's doing well and is going to go back to work, so she had to have something to keep her head warm. I'm hoping I'll get some pictures of her wearing the scarves, but for now I'll post the pictures of me wearing them (I had to test them out to make sure they were good enough to give away). I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out and I'm thinking of making a bunch more to donate to chemo wards.

Here are all five scarves lined up (well, four scarves and a cap).

Above is a chemo hat that I made from this pattern.

Below are some scarves I made from a pattern I pulled out of thin air. They're all my favorites.