Thanksgiving

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

Rachael from Tumbleweeds and Tantrums hosted all of us military families that weren't going home for the holiday.  A few weeks before the big event she told me she wanted a sit down meal and wanted my help.  I don't think she will ever know how happy that made me asking for my help!  

We got to work right away.

My mom mailed me all the pumpkins and gourds we used for the day from Nature's Select Orchard.

Rachael got her table inspiration from here.

I made all the gals flower crowns and everyone got a place cards with inspiration from here.

Everthing turned out great!

Thanks Rachael!

Now on to Christmas ;)

xo

Erin

See another Thanksgiving we had together here.

See out Autumn Dinner Party here.

Table Settings for Thanksgiving

See the full blog post and more pictures of this table setting here.

See the more pictures of this table setting and our autumn dinner party here.

You can probably already tell I love dinner parties and what is Thanksgiving than the all American dinner party?!

I love creative ways to decorate a table. 

How are you decorating your Thanksgiving table this year?

Check out some more ideas here.

xo

Erin

It's Not Winter Yet...

I've been hearing friends and family say they got a jump on Christmas this year and are already done with all of their shopping.  I love Christmas time and all it represents but it seems unnatural to me to start all the celebration before Thanksgiving!  Don't get me wrong, I put up the Christmas decorations and listen to Christmas music 24/7 but only starting the day after Thanksgiving.  I also just want to hang onto Autumn as long as I can because it's also one of my favorite times.  This fall, I was able to go home to my parents orchard to help out and I took a billion pictures.  Here are some more images to keep us all in the Autumn season and don't forget everything you are thankful for!

You can see more of my visit to the orchard this year and more posts about Nature's Select Orchard here.

xo

Erin

Mt. Washington and My Veteran

A few weeks ago we took a day off of work and headed up to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.  It is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States at 6,288 ft but is most known for it's dangerous ever changing weather.  The Mountain has claimed many lives (even a couple a few weeks before we were there) due to the sudden changes of weather, high wind speeds, and the rough terrain.  There is an Observatory at the top that records all the extreme weather.  The day we spent there was beautiful, surprisingly, because it was already September!  There was hardly any wind and I really didn't even need a coat.

I've never climbed the Mountain (yet) but this was Ryan's fourth time hiking up it.  This time he was on a mission though; to climb it in less than 2 hours.  I'm not sure of the official record but we think it's around one hour and fifteen minutes.

Ryan officially climbed up the Tuckerman's Ravine in 2 hours and 2 minutes!

The Cog Railway is something I would love to come back and do. 

 It's an hour long ride up the opposite side of the mountain

Even though I didn't climb with Ryan I still got to the top via the Auto Road.  This was really intense for me.  I dropped Ryan off at the base of the trail and told him I would meet him up there.  I wasn't planning on driving up but had planned to take the train up.  Well, we found out that the train was on the opposite side of the Mountain than the trail head so it wasn't feasible for me to drive an hour to the other side.  I panicked a little, prayed a lot and then just got in the line to drive up.  I refused to look over the edge or even out my window driving up.  I only looked at the road in front of me.   I was having nervous flashbacks to this scary road in AZ.  My method worked for me and I made it up. 

The picture below is the windy road up.

This is the gravel part of the road.  Complete drop off! and yes it's a two lane road so you do have to be all the way over to the edge on the way down.  Thankfully we drove down after they stopped letting cars up that day so I had the road to myself.

I'm so proud of Ryan for more than just his ability to conquer mountains but also for serving in the United States Navy for nine years.  I've seen the sacrifices he's made because of his service and I feel like a thank you once a year will never be enough.

Thank you to all the veterans out there!

More of our hikes around New England:

Lion's Head, Salisbury, CT

Bear Mountain, CT

Lantern Hill, CT

Bluff Point State Park, CT

Napatree Point, RI

xo

Erin

Autumn Dinner Party

Amanda from Amanda Louise and I did it again; a dinner party!  I'm so thankful to have her as a friend.  We both love to throw dinner parties and even decided to continue this year with one for each season! 

This go around, we added a kids table equipped with  sparklers, fun straws, 

and markers to draw on the table top.

I mailed myself some decorative gourds from my parent's orchard when

 I was home this fall and we had a bit of an adventure getting those cattails! 

Ryan of course helped out again by cutting our slab of wood for the center piece

 and making creative cinder block heaters to keep us warm on the deck.

It was a fun night but we learned some lessons from this one that we won't repeat next time.  We decided to make a day of it and started cooking in the afternoon and figured we would slowly pull it all together in plenty of time to snap photos while the sun is still out and casually wait for our guests to arrive.  Well, we ended up frantically trying to cook everything, especially Amanda's pumpkin pie, and just felt this time crunch we weren't expecting.  We did pull it all together but with better planning (making the food the night before, or in the morning) we can enjoy the fun part much more (all the decorating and DIY's)!!

Head over to Amanda Louise to see more photos of the night

 and to find out how much we spent on the night!

Stay tuned for our winter dinner party in February!

See our Summer dinner party on the patio here.

See our DIY deck furniture here.

Check out our inspiration for the night here.

xo

Erin

Dog Days: Happy Monday!

These guys are still taking us on their daily hike each night.  We are so blessed to live where we do so we can just walk out our door and go for a long hike.

Our autumn hikes are consisting of a lot of boulder hopping.  Glacier gets nervous if he doesn't have a running start so he will just sit at the bottom of a boulder and whine. Azul is still the boulder hopping champion.  He's like Ryan and if it was up to him he would only hop from rock to rock and not touch the ground.

Happy Monday!

See more of these two here.

xo

Erin

Pumpkin Specatacular

This was our third annual visit to the Pumpkin Spectacular at the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence, RI.  

I forgot how impressive it was with over 5,000 pumpkins before we began walking down the trail.  This year's theme was the various regions of the U.S.A and they blasted the appropriate music for each place you were currently looking at.  Did you know Rhode Island has a song?!

Check it out here.

Anyway, I think the bottom two pumpkins are meant for WI.; a deer and a cow with the word "Cheese" above it.  I didn't find any pumpkin for CT but what would even be on in?  There were many pumpkins for New England of lighthouses and lobsters and such.

If you get a chance to check it out, it's defiantly worth it.

xo

Erin

See our visit two years ago here.