30 Days of Thanks!

My favorite time of year for blogging!

November 1 - Today I am thankful for how well my body does during pregnancy.  We were all set to host the 8th Annual Chili Cookoff at our house on Sunday, and by we were all ready I mean that the girls and I got the place ready.  Joe worked on Saturday and then we went to Chris and Heather's daughter Hannah's birthday party so the girls and I had to get the inside and outside of the house all done.  While I must admit my body is slower to respond, runs out of breath faster, and needs to stop more I am still impressed with what I can get done even being three weeks out.  Oh yeah and did I mention that Hannah's birthday party was complete with ponies!  Boy was that a hit with the girls.

Here's Gram and the girls visiting with the pony, not sure who loves this more her or them.

There's the birthday girl, Morgan and Tyler..

Tyler didn't want to ride the pony but Austin sure did, she even waited for over 30 minutes in line.

November 2 - Today I am thankful for traditions like the Chili Cookoff.  While it started with a measly three pots of chili between me and two of the guys I used to work with it sure has grown.  We had a house full of people and 14 total chili's.  This year Tadd  won with an amazing green chili spin off of posole.  First year ever that a green chili has won.  Way to go Tadd, he took home the trophy "Frank" (we call him Frank as in Frankenstein because one of the winners dropped him and my Mom - the next year's winner glued all the pieces back together except one missing one - perhaps she is where I get my love of puzzles).  You can't see the back here but it has each winner's name and year written on it.  Pretty cool little guy that has traveled so far for eight years.

November 3 - Today I am thankful for business relationships.  When I first got transferred to this new team I was responsible for bringing the team up to speed on the day to day tasks I take care of.  My now boss said that while it may be impossible to do, he would like for the other people on our team to hold the same amount of notoriety as I do going forward.  I didn't think much of it at the time but then outages happen like they did this morning.  I bet I have a friend on each team throughout all of Verizon, so this morning when there was a network outage I was able to hit up someone who is a friend of a friend of mine and get everything up and running without even involving the normal processes since they take forever in a company this size.