Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Ours was great. All the hard work yesterday paid off because today was not stressful at all. In fact, each time I found myself sitting on the couch I felt like I was forgetting something and would check my to do list. I just expected today to be a lot more chaotic than it was. Actually it wasn't chaotic at all!

I was happy with the way all the food turned out as well. Ed, who likes pretty much all my cooking but isn't one to compliment that often, said my gravy was "really, really good." Tonight he said everything was really good and that he had a good Thanksgiving. That certainly brought a smile to my face.

This was our menu:

• turkey & gravy (of course!!)
• mashed potatoes
• potato filling
• sweet potato casserole
• green bean casserole
• cranberry sauce
• yeast rolls

We had veggies and dip and cheese and crackers to snack on before our mid-afternoon meal and for dessert we had sugar cookies, chocolate spritz cookies, pumpkin bread and pecan pie.

I actually didn't overeat today but I definitely went overboard with the punch. I felt so sick this afternoon and knew that was the reason why.

Ed's dad joined us today. He couldn't believe how much Samantha was getting around and Gabrielle was thrilled to see her Granddad. We were very happy to have him join us!

We all took nice naps this afternoon - in shifts because Gabrielle was too hyped up on sugar to even think about a nap! But she went right to sleep tonight so that was good.

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone I'm really in the mood for Christmas! I will get some decorations down from the attic tomorrow while Ed is at work and then on Saturday we'll get the tree down and get that set up. Of course we won't be decorating the bottom half since we now have another little one getting into everything.

In my Kids Craft Weekly newsletter a couple of weeks ago was what I thought a really great idea for an Advent calendar. We have a fabric countdown sort of calendar I use every year in which we move the little snowman from pocket to pocket counting down the days until Christmas. But these ideas for advent calendars were much more meaningful. So this year I think we will do the paper chain idea in which various activities are written on the back side of each link. As we tear off a link each day we do that activity for the day. This will definitely require some planning so that we don't have a difficult or time consuming activity to do on an already very busy day. I have some ideas written down, some better than others, but I'm open to any suggestions any of you may have!

I think I always end my blog posts this way, probably because late night is one of the few chances I have to actually sit and write but I am tired and should get to bed.

And of course here are some pictures from the day. No pictures of food because none of it was really that visually interesting but it did taste awfully yummy!

I can't believe this is the only photo I took of Gabrielle but I guess it will have to do. I did get some cute video footage but that takes too long to upload. She has been drawing on her magnadoodle quite a bit lately.

I guess I did take one photo of food - sort of. This was the table after the meal. Everyone else had gotten up from the table and I was feeding Samantha. You can see the jar of baby food macaroni and cheese that she had for her Thanksgiving dinner.

I couldn't get her to hold the turkey leg for some reason. I also got some video footage of this moment and of course once my hands were full she decided to pick it up and try to put it in her mouth!

Smiley!!