Friday Favorites #96

Happy Friday! So happy it's Friday, I'm full on suffering from it's the end of the year and I don't want to work right now. Looking for the break between Christmas and New Years.

Monday: Best Mashed Potato Recipe, using only one pot
Tuesday: Christmas Tour
Wednesday: December Cozy Sweaters
Thursday: My Life in Numbers

 A few more pictures from our Cabo trip, then I'm done, I promise. Mr. convinced me to do a resort dive. Have you done one of those? Well it's a scuba dive that you don't need to be certified to do, they give you a few instructions in the pool, then you watch a video and then they take you out in the open water. We've done it before, so I wasn't as freaked out as before...which was good. I'm really glad that I did it with Mr. Here are some of the pictures.

 We weren't that close, but not too far behind this...oh wait, you can see someone over there in the upper right, so yea we were this close...

Eel anyone?

On Tuesday I did a home tour, but I thought I would do a quick tutorial on how I converted our door into a holiday card holder. This is one of my favorite parts of Christmas, getting everyones cards and being able to look at them each time I go into the kitchen.

This is the door that is in our kitchen.

If you push on it, it opens to reveal our heater. The previous owners put this cork board in there, which has turned out to be super helpful.

First I find wrapping paper that that goes well with the house, I happen to use this last year and it worked out great that I was able to save it for this year. I attach the top side to the top of the cork board with staples. Then I wrap it down the door and back up to attach the other side to the bottom of the board.

Then I add that same polka dot ribbon from our Christmas tree, and put that vertical on the door.

Then I do the same ribbon horizontal.

I love that it looks like a present. I used to put a big bow in the middle, but in the end it just got in the way of putting more cards on the door, so I ditched that last year.

Then I use my reindeer clothes pins  and Christmas Tree Clothes pins to hold the cards on the ribbon. When that gets full I start using the really small clothes pin to attach the cards to each other.

We got some Christmas cards since I took the last pictures, so here it is getting full, loving it!

 Last weekend was fun, it was nice to only work 4 days after a vacation to get 3 more days off, which made this 5 day work week LONG!!!

Friday I got to take Baby Fox to school, then did a ton of errands with Mini Fox, I was inpressed with how many we got done. 

 Saturday we hit up the gym and then then the rock wall Baby Fox has been begging me to go back to...he rocked it as usual.

 

I finally got up on the wall again, it's been a while.

Then we got home and cooked our second Thanksgiving dinner, we felt like we didn't get enough turkey the first go around, so why not do it again...probably with doing it again a week later? Hard to find a small turkey...so 23 pounds it was. We used the Test Kitchen recipe which requires you to flip the bird half way through, I had Mr. do the heavy lifting this time...last year I did it and nearly killed myself.

Finished, it was yummy! Minus the fact that I couldn't get it thawed all the way in time, which I didn't really know, so while the temp said it was good, the way middle parts weren't...so we ate what we could for dinner and then threw it back in the oven...THEN it turned out good...anyone else have funny Turkey stories to share? Please tell me I'm not alone.

 

Sunday was a good friends birthday party at a play place we'd never been to, the kids loved it.

Cake face...

Confession time: Then we hit up In and Out for lunch...which was the second time this weekend we had it. Don't judge. Mini Fox was not happy I wanted to take a picture, she just wanted to play with her blocks.

If you don't read anything in this post, watch this...seriously.



On a totally different note....swooon. He seems like such a good guy in real life.



 Linking up here

My Life In Numbers - November Edition

Happy Monday Foxy Friends! Today I'm joining the lovely Deena for her Month in Numbers link up. I love looking back on the month and seeing all that I have done, click here for pervious months. So let's get started.


3300 - The numbers I had to travel for work....again, hopefully this is the last time for a while.

4 - The number of allergy shots, woo hoo, the numbers is the same, I didn't slide back any steps, moving on forward!

2 - The number of times Mini Fox went to the voting booth.






















13 - The number of days off I had, first day of vacation started with random lunch with Mr.

7 - Of those days were spent in Cabo with my family and friends

5,000 - The number in pounds of chips and guacamole I ate while in Cabo, yum!

1 - It was the very first vacation for us as a family that included more than 2 days, it was awesome and something we're going to do way more often now that the kids are a little older

2 - The number of soccer games we watched, and also the number of years Baby Fox has been playing soccer

6 - The number of days we had someone in our house for our kitchen remodel

*picture is poor quality because I took a screen shot of my facetime with the kids and Mr.

1 - The number of parent/teacher conferneces we had. Seriously guys I feel like I'm real life adulting right now.

6 - The number of hours we got to spend some with some friends we haven't seen in a while...well I guess technically that number is 12, but 6 of those hours we were sleeping, haha.

3 - The number of days I forgot to call Baby Fox's school to let them know he wasn't going to be in school, oops, perhaps this adulting thing isn't for me.

6.5 or so - The number of hours I binged watch Gilmore Girls with my mom and sister.

  

Linking up here

December Cozy: Sweaters

Hello Foxy Friends! Welcome to another week of The Blended Blog Style. Thank you for those that continue to link up and make this party a success! It's a new month, new Wednesday theme, we thought we would share things that are cozy, so each week in December we're going to share what makes us cozy for the Holidays.

I decided to share my comfy lay around the house outfit, and maybe if I go out, I'll throw on a pair of boots and call it a day. If  I'm feeling really fancy then I'll change out the leggings for some ripped jeans, but on this particular day I was just feeling lazy and was trying to decorate the house for Christmas. Plus it's finally cold enough for this sweater to make sense, haha, just a week ago it was 90°, yikes!

Some of the links are affiliate links  and I will  either receive a small commission if you click on it or if you make a purchase from on of these links, I may receive a commission on the sale of the product. By purchasing through Foxy's Domestic Side, you're helping me to continue creating fun things for this space.

This sweater is so soft and wonderful, everyone should have one. This one isn't available any more, but this one would work, so would this one, or this one, I'll just take one of each, one cannot have to many sweatshirt right? More importantly these leggings, oh these leggings are amazing, they're thick so you can't see anything when bending over, and they come up high on the waist to cover up that tummy from too much turkey. Did I mention they were comfy?

What is your favorite lounge around the house outfit? Link up below with your favorite outfit this week!

An InLinkz Link-up

 

Linking up here 

Christmas Tour Link Up

It's finally here! I'm linking with with Curly Crafty Mom,  Lindsay’s Sweet World , Our Pretty Little Girls, Wife Mommy Me for our Home Tour Link Up! I have a ton of pictures so let's just get to it.

Let's start upstairs...since that's the first thing we decorated. The kids LOVE our anything goes tree, it's colored lights, nothing fancy and it's Mr's favorite part of Christmas. Opening each ornament and remember where we got it, who we got it from, it's fun to share those memories with the kids. Each year the kids get to pick out one ornament, this year Mini Fox picked out Sofia and Baby Fox picked out a Batman car.

 Yes she has two Sofia ornaments, one from last year from a friend and then she picked it out this year.

 

 

This year we let the kids put the ornaments where ever they wanted...it was so cute, watching them try to fit 6 ornaments on the same branch. hey whatever floats their boat. This type A mama backed off and let them have their fun.

 

My old Strawberry Shortcake ornament, from the early 80's. She asked me, when I get older can I have this one?

Tree all done, notice most of the ornaments are on the bottom half. So darn cute.

This is my oldest ornament. I got it before I even came to the United States. I was supposed to come in November but there was a mix up at the adoption agency and I didn't end up coming until January, but my grandparents bought me this anyway.

When we moved into our house I wanted a new stair case, when we remodeled it I didn't realize that it was going to be the central thing in our house. But I'm so glad that it is, I just love it so much and we pretty much found the perfect tree to fit in with the curve. Yes it's fake, allergies (in case you didn't know, I'm allergic to every plant, tree and grass in California), and it's perfect.

 

Here's a before picture for you.

 

 

I just love polka dots, so of course when I saw the display that had most of this stuff on it, I needed it ALL, my mom helped me pick out what I needed and how much I was going to need.

 

What is not pictured, all of the silver bells that Mr's mom gave him, she bought him one each year for 30 years. I need to polish them, and well that didn't get done before I took these photos. I did a video last year how we put up our Christmas Tree and how we decorate it here. And if you want to see how we decorate our banister click here...I'm rocking my awesome cast, this was about a month after my ankle surgery.

I just love decorating my mantel, I feel like it's a bit bigger than a normal mantel so I have a lot of room to play with.

I just love how it looks at night all lit up.

I finally did more with my kitchen window this year. Usually I just fill the jars with ornaments and call it a day. But last year I attempted to do something with it, but this year turned out perfect. I love the candle and lighting it after dinner while doing the dishes, just gets me in a festive mood.

In my kitchen there is a secret door that hides our heater, a few years I had this brilliant idea to wrap the door with wrapping paper, and put all of our Christmas cards there. I just love being able to look at all of the Christmas cards, throughout the season.

Before:

Finished product, image all of our holiday cards on this...it's super fun.

 

Moving onto the front entry of the house. Just last year I started decorating the entryway table. I changed it up a little this year and found some new things to put on it, but I'm loving the way it came out. And I have no idea where that Santa book came from...I was unpacking things and it was just there...

 

 

I realized after I completed the table, it's a whole table of Santa stuff. The box on the right is a Fun Fact Santa countdown. Each day the light turns green and a new message from one of the elves or Mrs. Claus gives you a cute message.

 

On to the last spot in the house, the front door. You can find the tutorial for this wreath here. I love how whimsical and fun the wreath came out. All bought at Hobby Lobby on 50% off, can't beat that.

 

 

So that's it, it's not much, but I love all the festivities. I'm hoping this year Mr. puts the Christmas lights outside. Oh speaking of which...we do have a lighted Christmas tree outside, but we only put it out there on Christmas day while we are hosting Christmas dinner. I think it's fun, and it's just outside the three sets of French doors. Of course I can't find a picture of it, but just image a Christmas Tree outside as your eating dinner.

 

Now it's your turn! Link up below all of your Christmas decorations! We love to snoop see how you decorate your houses too! 

 

An InLinkz Link-up

Linking up here and here

Christmas Blog Hop: Recipes

Happy Monday Foxy Friends. Today the ladies at The Blended Blog have decided to give you a few weeks of Christmas blog Hops, today is Recipes, next week is Home tours and then the last week is Christmas Memories. If you're coming over here from Lana's blog, welcome! Thanks for stopping by!

In full disclosure my aunt gave me this recipe, and I've changed in a bit, but not much. I had these big plans to show you a step by step, but then when I got to actually cooking it, I was also cooking 4 other things (we decided to do another Thanksgiving Dinner) and forgot that I wanted to take pictures, I should have written a note on the stove. Oh well...and the recipe is?....Mashed Potatoes!  Now these aren't any normal mashed potatoes, nope, these are the easiest and best mashed potatoes you'll ever eat. It takes one pot, and all you have to add at the end is butter and mash away, no draining water, nothing, it's all done for you.

Ingredients:

4 pounds of Russet potatoes, peeled and quared and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
12 tablespoons of butter (mine was salted)
1 teaspoon of sugar
1 1/2 cups of whole milk (could use half and half if you wanted)
1/2 cup of water
Salt and Pepper


Directions:

Step 1:

Place cut potatoes into a colander and rinse under cold water until it runs clear (you have to look closely as it's not totally obvious, the water is just slightly cloudy, but not much, took me about a minute before mine ran clear), drain thoroughly.

Step 2:

Melt 4 Tablespoons of butter in large pot over medium heat, add potatoes, 1 1/4 cups of milk and all the water (if you are using unsalted butter, add 1 tsp now), cover.  Bring to a boil then reduce heat to simmer, stirring occasionally until potatoes are tender and most of the liquid is absorbed. (30-35 minutes).

Hint: My potatoes were super tender, and falling apart when most of the liquid was absorbed, you want a bit of liquid left, so when you mash they is something there to mash it up with

Step 3:

Off heat, add remaining 8 tablespoons of butter and mash with potato masher until smooth. I have not tried this with an electric mixer, as the potatoes are so soft that it takes about a minute of mashing. Fold in the remaining 1/4 cup of milk, until liquid is absorbed and potatoes are creamy. Enjoy!

And this is how it looked on my plate, yum! We have left overs for days, which makes me incredibly happy.

How easy is that? No draining of the potatoes, no having to put through potato ricer, can't get any easier than that!

Also on a side note: I made my killer stuffing recipe, and they turned out looking better this time, here's the new picture, if you want to get that recipe, click here.

Now hop on over to Carrie to see what she's cooking up!

 Linking up here