Thanksgiving

We spent the holiday in Pennsylvania with my brother Scott's family and my parents. It was a lot of fun and the food was delish (thanks to my sis-in-law, Codi). We mostly laid around all weekend which was FABULOUS!The kiddie table (the two babies were elsewhere):

The kids loved hanging out together. Lizzie and a couple of her cousins spent a night swimming and sleeping at Nana and Papa's hotel which seemed to be nice for everyone involved.Scott showed us his snakes. His adorable little assistant is his five-year-old daughter who is pretty much fearless when it comes to snakes.

In this shot I'm pretty sure Scott had just asked Iris how many times she has been bitten by one of the snakes. Three times! I like snakes, but I'm not sure the warm fuzzies would linger after even one bite.

The kids (AND ANDREW) couldn't get enough of Nana's iPad. Something the grown-ups couldn't get enough of: Killer Bunnies.

Andrew took the kids outside to ride bikes and scooters one afternoon, and to Tangled (with Papa) another. One day Drew suggested that I do something with my kids and, offended, I started to list all the things that I had done with them only to realize that I actually hadn't done much but change diapers and dish out food. I'll bond this weekend when Drew's ski-patrolling.

I had a lot of Thanksgiving activities planned, but barely got around to any of them. Here's what we managed to do:

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Make a pumpkin pie with a hand turkey (because Liz loves pumpkin pie and we weren't planning to have them at Thanksgiving dinner because us grown-ups don't particularly care for it). It didn't look at all like the example from the magazine, but tasted just fine.

We practiced our etiquette. Now, I'm not saying we had stellar Thanksgiving table manners or anything but, maybe there was some improvement (or at least we're more aware of the rules). I plan to make this refresher course an annual thing.

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When I told Andrew about my plan he said something about not wanting to have the "manners police" at every meal and about how I shouldn't expect everyone to be super proper all the time. For example, he said people shouldn't have to put their napkins in their lap at fast food restaurants. I told him that I completely disagreed and that people should especially put their napkins in their laps in fast food restaurants. Luckily for me Liz was excited about the learning the rules.

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For our lessons I traced place settings on the back of dollar-store place mats so Liz could learn the appropriate way to set a table.

We made stuff with apples which is not exactly holiday-related, but seasonal (and I had a lot of apples to use up). We tried to make mini caramel apples which didn't quite work but tasted fabulous. Our inside-out caramel apples worked much better. I also made baby food for Ellie and Drew made the filling for our stuffed french toast. Yum.

We made a Thanksgiving Gratitude turkey. I drew it. Liz painted it. And . . .

We all added feathers to it throughout the month (Lainey put them wherever she could reach--I love it).

Some of my favorite contributions from Lizzie:

Now I'm looking forward to tomorrow and the countdown to Christmas. My advent calendar is filled with daily activities, my holiday library books are wrapped, and I've even managed to buy some gifts already which is a huge improvement from last year.