Happy Thanksgiving a little late .....sniff. achoo! rumble. BLECH!

Oh, another holiday has passed us by. We have so many reasons to be grateful. We truly are very blessed. This was our first time celebrating American Thanksgiving in 5 years and it was fun to be in our new home. It's a great holiday to just relax, be together, reflect, watch football and stuff your face...

I normally enjoy all the preparations for the feast but I overdid it a bit this year. I prepared way WAY too much food. After spending an entire day in the kitchen mixing, blending, smashing, browning and basting, I came to the sad realization that Dayven is the only one in our family that actually likes the traditional Thanksgiving foods. At the risk of sounding un-American, I'll admit I'm not wild about any of the fixin's. I just feel pressure to make them because it's tradition and having prime rib on Thanksgiving seems weird, right? I prepared all the usual suspects and served them up to lukewarm reviews from the kids. They barely touched their food before they announced they were done and I wondered what I would do with the bazillion pounds of mashed potatoes and cornbread stuffing. Even Tate let me down and I thought he would be all over those potatoes! Dayven and I plowed our way through but in the end we didn't finish it all. We can only do leftovers for so many meals. It kills me to waste food but next year I'll know better. Yes kids, the pilgrims DID feast on lasagna. Eat up!  Still, it was a good day. The kids came in to the kitchen intermittently to help and I really did enjoy cooking with them. It was also nice just being with the family, at home with no particular place to be.

Lord help us. There was a lot of hacking and nose sleeve wiping during preparations.

Loves to cook, this one!

Don't they look excited about the feast??

Of course no holiday in our house would be complete without an illness of some sort. It started with mild colds, moved on to the stomach bug (Hadley threw up half the weekend), strep throat for me with aches, chills and nausea, ear infection for Tate and two teeth coming in plus Hadley's stomach bug he picked up (Tate and I were the worst), then a mild bug/"man cold" for Dayven.  Sprinkle in a few runny noses, bloody noses, hacking coughs and diarrhea and that pretty much sums up the last five days at our house. I think I have cleaned more bodily fluids in the past week than I have all year. Our washer has been going on the sanitary cycle for at least 24 hours straight. Our new carpet has officially been christened. Hadley kept asking what we were baking when she saw me leaving various bowls around the house. I told her it was because people keep spontaneously throwing up and I'm trying to be proactive!

We had "Butterfingers", Wyatt's class pet with us all weekend. We were supposed to be journaling and taking pictures of all the interesting things we did while hosting him. We had to get creative since we thought it was best not to share that Butterfingers helped scrub vomit from carpet or collect dirty tissues from bedside tables. Somewhere in the weekend Dayven drug the Christmas decorations up from the basement since "it's tradition to do it Thanksgiving weekend" and we discovered half the pre-lit tree is toast and the garland was just too dang confusing on the banisters and I need a better wreath hanger so now there's just a pile of plastic bins piled high in one corner with a half lit tree in the other. My energy has been focused elsewhere. I'm just not there yet. Criminey people, it's only November.

Happy Holidays!