Giving Thanks!

So many things to give thanks for this year! This Thanksgiving, like most of my Thanksgivings lately, I started off the morning with a 5k turkey trot. I'm thankful this year that I ran my first official race with a sub 7 minute mile pace! I'd still like to work on my speed and hopefully break that 20 minute mark for a 5k, but this time I ran my 5k in 20 minutes and 51 seconds, with an average mile pace of 6:44! A year ago I ran turkey trot in 30 minutes and 58 seconds, so in a year I've cut over 10 minutes off that time! This time I was the 3rd fastest female and 14th place overall.

Other exciting news in the past week, I passed my first Architecture Registration Exam!! On to the next one now...woohoo!

When I got home from my run on Thanksgiving, I got right to some cooking. I spent most of the day cooking and cleaning in preparation for Ryan's parents to get into town. They got in early evening just in time for Thanksgiving dinner! It was a great dinner. I tried a few new recipes and I'd have to say the turkey recipe might have been my favorite out of everything. It was definitely worth the 30 hours of preparation it required! I got the recipe here, and stuck to it for the most part.

Ryan's parents were in town for the rest of Thanksgiving week and the beginning of the next, so we took a few days off of work and found some fun things around Seattle to do with them!

 Someone didn't like the Espresso we made him try!

 Our First Real Tree at our new house!

 Ryan putting on the lights

 Thanks so Jason's great idea, we put all of our race medals on the tree like ornaments

 Our Pretty Tree :)

 The market is all decorated for Christmas!

 We lucked out with some beautiful days in Seattle while they were here

 visiting the great wheel

 Yup, that's my husband

 Aaaand, those are my in laws ;)

 We went on a little hike near Leavenworth to wear Ben out

 Playing on the icy river

 Ben didn't really understand that despite the river being solid on the top, he should walk out to the middle! We got a few scares that he was going to sprint out there and break the ice and fall in!

 He liked to run all over the beach though

 And had fun jumping all around

 We spent the rest of that day in Leavenworth 

 It's all lit up for Christmas!

 Yay!

 Our little Georgians got to play in some snow too

We also spent a few hours one day at the EMP and went to the SciFi exhibit. It had the original Darth Vadar Light Saber in it and Yoda's cane. How cute is that?!?

The museum also had a horror film exhibit that had a scream booth in it that took pictures of you screaming :)

The last night they were here we went out to a local bar to play some trivia and got in a few games of shuffle board first. It was so much fun and out of about 30 teams we ended up tying for 11th, so that's not too bad considering most of the people there seemed to be regulars.