Adventures in Motherhood: Christmas and "The Apple Saga" Finale

Hello everyone!

It's been a little while since I posted anything, but I have a ginormous, picture-filled post for today. First, Christmas! It is my favorite holiday and Matthew and I went back to Omaha again this year. Here are the pictures:

Me with my two best friends, Liz and Kate. Usually we never get a picture where we all look like we like each other, so this one was nice. I don't get to see them nearly enough so it was fantastic to see them while I was home. :D

Christmas tree! There were seven of us there on Christmas morning this year and the tree isn't very big so the presents all kind of spilled out.

My mom has started getting my sisters and I each a Peggy Carr tray for Christmas, and this is the one she went with this year. I love it! I'll have to have people over soon so I can use it.

Handy-dandy multi-purpose tool from my dad.

Me with all of the bows from all the presents in my hair. I don't know when I started doing this, but it looks pretty funny by the end.

From Erin! It's got all sorts of slang German in it that I probably wouldn't know otherwise. I'm excited about it!

My dad got Matt and Jordan (Amber's boyfriend) matching shirts. Awesome.

The girls and Tony with Dad.

Aside from the Peggy Carr tray and German book, Matt and I mostly got Cutco knives. They are, far and away, the most amazing knives ever and now that I have them, all I want to do is go crazy in the kitchen cooking everything so I get a chance to use them.

This also relates to my other topic - The Apple! It has been six weeks (on Christmas Day) and I decided to cut it up to see what it looked like on the inside. It was super squishy on the outside and pretty much covered with bruises and I was really curious. So I peeled off all of the skin and then cut it up. (This had absolutely nothing to do with my spiffy new vegetable peeler and knives.) Anyway, here are all the pictures:

It's hard to see in the pictures, but there is a giant bruise over the n.

De-skinned

All sorts of gross bruises

When I was peeling the skin, it was bunching up under the peeler. Normally apple skin doesn't do that at all so I thought it was interesting.

You can sort of see it better here.

I look kind of evil in this picture...

Chopping up the apple!

On the actual inside, it looks perfectly good. (Also, I'm really not sure what's going on in the bottom part of this picture.)

I mostly took this picture to show how awesome my knives are because this one just cut two apple seeds perfectly in half.

The remains of the apple.

So my final conclusion is that the apple was definitely inedible. You could definitely see all of the bruises under the skin. What you couldn't see was how squishy it felt - and how there was almost no juice left in it. I cut out a little bit of one of the pieces to see how it tasted and it was really, really, really sour - even for a granny smith apple, and it was almost completely dry. I am pretty impressed with how it held up though. I was kind of expecting it to be like, melting on my counter by now.

In any event, I'm glad the experiment ended the way it did because I would be really freaked out if the apple was still edible at this point.

And one more thing for fun - I made a video as an excuse to play with scissors!

Here are the remains of the penny - I made another swirly thing! (I found the original part that I cut off about 10 feet away from where I was sitting.)