It’s only fitting that I tell you my muffin top is slightly protruding over my jeans this morning. A muffin top, for those who might not know, is the ring of fat around your middle that suddenly appears when you put on jeans that may be a little too snug. TMI? Maybe, but I tell you to be transparent, you know, to get to know each other better…

I’m sitting here with my coffee, and I hope you might have a cup too, then it would be like we were having coffee together as I told you the adventures of my Thanksgiving day weekend.

It all started with a screeching sound coming from my car early Wednesday morning. That screeching sound accompanied a burning rubber stench that emanated from my engine. Popping the hood, my husband says, “We can make it one more day, but then it has to be fixed. Just don’t drive too much today.” Oh, that’s easy, I thought. I’m just going to be at the office till noon. I dropped him off at work and headed to the office, realizing I forgot my lunch at home!

Just don’t drive it too much today. His words rang in my ears as I took the risk and drove passed the office to the house to quickly grab my lunch. Once I made it back to the office, I realized I forgot my key-card–at home. Locked out of the office, I had no other choice but to drive back home to grab my key-card. This would make trip #2. I tried to ignore the growing chard rubber smell.

Fast forward to 3 o’clock that day, as the engine jerks to a stop right outside my husband’s office. He calls a friend and from 3pm to 10pm that night they work on the car. $250 bucks later, I have a brand new radiator! Burning rubber stench=gone!

Burnt potato water=filling the house. See I was in charge of making the sweet potato casserole and the mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving. After peeling and chopping 10 large sweet potatoes and boiling them for a good 45 minutes they were perfectly done. Next were the white potatoes.

5 pounds of them! I put them on to boil and thinking they would probably take the same amount of time as the sweet potatoes I left them on the stove and went to take a shower. After about 20 minutes, I came back into the kitchen, where the pot of potatoes was boiling over onto my stove, filling the air with that burnt smell. The potatoes were well passed done, so I quickly grabbed them off and strained them. Starchy potato residue everywhere! My mom said you can’t hardly overcook potatoes–especially if you’re mashing them. (That’s probably the only reason they let me be in charge of the potatoes–can’t screw ‘em up!)

The food and family was great as usual. I tried not to eat too much this year, since I had just reached my pre-wedding weight and didn’t want to back track too much.

We slept through the Black Friday madness, and joined all the sane shoppers around 10:30am that morning.

First stop: Home Depot. My husband is like a kid in a candy store when it comes to that store. I don’t think it mattered what we bought there, as long as it came with a white and orange label it was good for him. We loaded up on Christmas lights and tree ornaments, excited for our first Christmas together!

Next stop: Wal-Mart. Our goal: The perfect tree. (BTW, don’t ever go to Wal-Mart when you’re in a spending mood.) We loaded up on more decorations, ridiculous stuff that you realize once you get home, really isn’t necessary.

Then, we saw it! The perfect tree! It was propped up along with many other trees outside in Wal-Marts lawn and garden center. There was something different about this particular tree. I could’ve sworn to you a beam of light shown down from heaven indicating this was the tree for us! 9 foot tall, but thin–you know, the skinny type. The type that doesn’t take up too much room…

I mean, it looked skinny. Yeah, it still had the string wrapped around it, but that doesn’t make too much of a difference… or so I thought!

We get it home, thanks to my mother-in-law’s SUV, and my husband stands it up in our living room. I look at it, turn my head, and look at it a different way…

“It’s kinda tall,” I say, trying to calculate if the star we bought would actually fit on the top without scraping the ceiling.

“It fits.”

“Okay, cut the string, let’s see it!”

My excitement could’ve only been matched by the shock I felt as the string slowly started to unravel. I wish I would’ve had a mirror, so I could watch as my gleeful smile slowly melted into the grimace I now felt on my face.

“It’s too big.”

“It’s fine.”

The branches continued to shake themselves free filling the space with their width. I started to wonder what the heck that beam from heaven was a couple minutes ago. Clearly this was not the perfect tree! If there had been any windows around, I’m sure those branches would’ve crashed right through. We stood there and looked at it, then looked at each other, bursting into laughter at our Griswold tree.

Lesson learned: Don’t buy the trees that are still strung up.

Even better lesson learned: Make the most of life’s little set-backs. That’s where memories are made.

Height: 9 feet

Width: 4 feet at bottom

After setting the date for our wedding for July 31st, all the plans were set in motion. Though it didn’t seem that time was going by at all, things were getting done and we were marking things off our wedding to-do list, including: order the invitations.

That was all until I got word that a particular series we do at LifeChurch.tv got pushed forward to August 1st and 2nd. This particular series is a pretty big deal for us at LC and we go all out with decorations, creating an atmosphere people would want to bring their friends to… 

The particular atmosphere our campus is creating has something to do with big dinosaur heads, cars in trees, waterfalls and incubators… none of which you would find at a wedding!

So, when all the dust settled the only thing that had to be changed was the date on the invitations. We have a new wedding date of August 7th!  

No dinosaurs allowed!