Almost Thanksgiving

It's almost Thanksgiving - another first for us here in America.

Ava is pretty excited about Thanksgiving although she has absolutely no idea what it's about! All she cares about is that she gets to eat turkey and cranberry sauce, and for that she's very thankful.

I'm looking forward to roasting a turkey and baking a pumpkin pie. I have this image in my head of me roasting an entire turkey, so big that it takes up the entire oven. Of course, there's no way that we could realistically eat that much turkey (no matter how much Ava loves it) so I've let practicality take over and I'm roasting a turkey breast roll instead. This way we get all the best turkey meat anyway. I'm not so good with all the "gooby" bits!

Ava has been drawing lots of turkeys for Thanksgiving decorations and for friends back home  - who of course will not be celebrating Thanksgiving. Here are a few of Ava's best turkey drawings.

Ava's first attempt at drawing a turkey.

The turkey gets a little more body this time

A Thanksgiving picture for our neighbors

Halloween Wrap Up

Well, I've been a little slack at keeping Little Hiccups up to date lately. Well, more than a little slack really. I had all these grandiose ideas about the fantastic blog entries I'd post one I arrived in the US and was no longer bogged down with work, but as usual life (i.e. two small children) has gotten in the way!

So in an effort to get back into it here's the second part of my Halloween post - the post-Halloween post, as it were!

After all the excitement during the lead up to the big day, our first ever Halloween lived up to the high expectations of Ava and I. Ok, so there was a minor setback when we discovered that the Halloween party we'd been planning to attend wasn't actually on but our evening of trick or treating more than made up for it.

I had originally decided that both Ava and Lola would be dressed as ladybugs for Halloween. I'd been coveting ladybug hoodies that I'd seen on Etsy for quite some time and Halloween seemed like the perfect excuse to go ahead and buy them for the girls. Ava was happy with the idea of matching ladybug costumes until we stepped foot inside a Halloween superstore. Once she saw the huge array of (much more exciting) costumes she just had to find her own costume. Many costumes were tried on: Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Supergirl, weird cat in a miniskirt... I was quite surprised however when Ava decided that her favorite costume was Cleopatra. The reason for my surprise was that it was also my favorite costume for her! That doesn't usually happen. I think the fact that a wig was involved made it a little more fun than some of the other costumes.