Thanksgiving Weekend

This past Thanksgiving weekend was wonderfully full of family and good food--just like Thanksgiving should be. My parents, Matt, Whitney and Olivia along with Matt's brother and his wife joined us for our big dinner.

Since not all of our guests could be here until Friday, we postponed our feast a day and spent Thursday evening making preparations. To make things easier, we didn't start the cooking until after the kids were in bed--or at least we thought they were in bed. Reed sneaked out of bed looking for a drink, but I decided to let him stay up and help us. He was in heaven working with all the grown ups. He was bouncing around the kitchen helping with this and that, grinning and feeling so important. I asked Reed, "So is the best Thanksgiving ever?" He gave a huge smile and said, "More like the best night ever!" Watching him enjoy himself so much was one of the highlights of the weekend for me.

Reed and Grandfather making frog-eyed salad.


Yes--he was wearing ninja clothes to bed.


We were up pretty late cooking and we eventually wore Reed out. After promising not to tell Max about his special evening he hopped right in bed without another word.


On Friday morning we finished our final preparations including some wonderful rolls by Sam and a cute little Indian.


While Sam was putting the finishing touches on the rolls, I threw together Thanksgiving costumes for Ruby and Reed. Max had Reed's old Indian costume and, although I had planned to do it in advance, I had run out of time to do anything for Reed or Ruby. I thought we would skip dressing up this year, but I quickly discovered that we now have an official family tradition that could not be skipped.

I had grand plans for making a cute little pilgrim girl costume for Ruby, but with no time and no sewing machine available I used the scissors to create suitable costumes for both Reed and Ruby. I was actually pretty surprised and impressed at how well they turned out considering the 5 minutes I had to put them together. The kids were thrilled.

My little pilgrim girl.


Ruby and I in a "for posterity" picture. Looking at this now I'm starting wonder if those 5 minutes would have been better spent doing something with my hair.


I'm not sure what the numbers were like at the first Thanksgiving, but the pilgrims were definitely outnumbered in our group.

Olivia, Ruby, Black Hawk (Max) and Squanto (Reed)



My little Indians


Olivia was more of a Great Plains Indian.


The weather was beautiful----and thankfully Reed's rain dance didn't do anything to change that.



Amazingly enough everything came together at the last minute (thanks to a very group effort) and tasted great. Somehow I remembered to take a picture of the food, but not of everyone at the table. Maybe next year.