Pittsburgh is STILL Da Bomb.

Mike and I headed back out east again to celebrate Pie Day (The holiday formerly known as "Thanksgiving") with family. This time Mike's sister and fam came up from Virginia and Mike's parents and Aunt flew out from Salt Lake, and we all crashed at Mike's brother and fam's sweet pad for the weekend. It was basically a mini Wilde reunion with the younger half of Mike's siblings. In other words, it was pretty awesome.

What is not awesome is the fact that we have fallen back to our gloomy photo-less days and did not take a single picture the whole time we were there. Lame. We'll have to get back on track with that one. Alas, this trip was sadly undocumented on our end. (Maybe I'll steal some pics of the weekend off other blogs and claim them as my own... mwahahaha!) Anyway, here are the highlights of our gnarly (albeit photo-less) Pie Day:

-Pie. I LOVE pie. I cannot express this strongly enough. Despite my love, I had never attempted to make one before. It was just too intimidating to me. BUT, I decided to try my hand at it this year, and I made my first two pumpkin pies BY MYSELF. I felt very proud of how yummy they turned out. (Though leaving them uneaten while we drove 7 hours with nothing but Wendy's in our stomachs was a nearly impossible test of self discipline. I'm surprised we showed up with any pie at all.)
-Mike. Mike is a great person to take road trips with. The time passes much faster when you're sitting next to someone with such a foxy rump.
-Food. I love food, therefore I love Pie Day. This year did not disappoint. Lots of yummy food and leftovers made every meal a delight.
-Meeting Lucy. We met our new little niece, who I was delighted to see is a brunette. I'm rooting for more brunettes on the Wilde side, so good work Lucy.
-BANG! Mike introduced to me the game Bang when we were engaged. It took me a few rounds to understand how it worked, but now that I'm catching on more I'm starting to really like it.
-James and Bethany did a spectacular job of juggling everything you have to take care of when you're hosting, and they did it all with a newborn, a sick toddler, even being sick themselves (in James' case.) I was greatly impressed.
-Black Friday. I'm not usually a big shopper, but we scored big time on this year's day-after-Pie-day sales. We even got a pre-lit Christmas tree on sale for 75% off. We weren't going to have a Christmas tree since they are usually so expensive, but we ended up getting one due to the awesome price. I now feel very festive.
-Downtown. I love being downtown in cities during Christmas season. Pittsburgh had this huge Christmas tree and a skating rink, plus an impressive display of gingerbread houses. My favorite was either Noah's Ark, Cookie Monster, or Hogwarts. There was also this Santas from around the World thing that showed how the Santa character is depicted in other countries. Did you know that Santa is completely bald in China? And Santa is a woman in Italy? (La Befana per voi che conoscete la cultura Italiana.) Oh, and Santa is blue in Russia.
-Amish people. We drove through a fairly large community of Amish in Ohio on the way back to South Bend and we saw lots of Amish people. We thought it was cool.

That's about it. Thanks guys for such a great weekend! Next time we'll get the camera out of the bag AND use it.