College Football + 30 Days of Thanks

Today we were gifted with free tailgating passes and football tickets to today's ODU game. Mark's sister, Ann, was given these by a friend and she was kind enough to invite Mark and I to come along. We enjoy going to ODU football games but we had never had the chance to tailgate there! 

I was in charge of bringing the pasta salad and dessert. Pasta salad was easy, but I decided I would try and be creative with the dessert. : ) Last year before Christmas time I bought this gigantic tub of cookie cutters - I don't remember how much it was to be honest - but this things has come in handy over the last year. It has a cookie cutter for just about every occasion imaginable. So I got it down today and crossed my fingers that there would be something resembling a football shape in there...

 

And there was! But I shouldn't have been surprised, I mean this tub has a cookie cutter shape of a bat in there…(the animal, not the baseball kind) so a football shape isn't really that crazy.

There were also letters in that tub so I pulled out the O, D, and U shapes to just to add some variety.

Super cute right? I totally took a picture of them in dough form though just incase they turned to big blobs in the oven. 

Thankfully they didn't! Icing the cookies was a little harder than I had imagined. I messed up the white "laces" on my first few football cookies and even after that they didn't turn out like anything that comes off of Cake Boss, but I still thought they were cute.

Of course because the icing of the cookies took longer than I had planned, we ended up running a little late. In my haste to put the cookies in a plastic container and clean at the same time, I ended up knocking 5 or so cookies to the floor when I pulled the baking sheet off of the oven to put in the sink. *face palm* Good thing I had made more than I needed. : )

We enjoyed the day at the game and even met the unofficial ODU mascot Charlie. He's a labradoodle shaved to look like a lion with a mane. Its a little hard to tell in the picture below, but when he first got this new haircut last year, people were calling the cops because they thought a "baby lion" had escaped from the nearby zoo. How do I know that? It made our local 5 o'clock news. I'm not sure if those people that called in had ever seen a baby lion before, since this creature below is clearly a dog, but it made Charlie a local celebrity and its a fun story. He turned out to be a sweat heart too!

Day 2: 

I am thankful for football. College and professional. Its a fun sporting event that my husband and I both enjoy watching. We are always excited when summer ends to have football to look forward too, even if we like rival teams. And we love it even more when we can enjoy a game in person, in November, in 70 degree weather. Its a recreational activity that we both love, and its always good to have things like that in a marriage. :)

PS

Just so we're clear… the 30 things I'm thankful for will be in no particular order. Because, obviously football is not second in line the top things I'm thankful for coming right after my Savior. Duh, right? But I just wanted to make sure we were all thinking the same thing. ; )