Thanksgiving confessions of a slacker blogger

For Thanksgiving, we invited my husband's family to come eat at our house. We worked slavishly to clean and make ready. The kids were dragged into it and required to (gasp) work. I did the shopping, decorating, dish washing, potato peeling, and I'm sure other things. :o) My husband cooked the turkey, dressing and gravy and mashed the potatoes. Yea him!! Many of the other "required" foods were assigned out. My sister-in-law G made the delicious and, at least for my family, required homemade rolls and she made the pies. My niece-in-law made the salad, salad dressing and relish tray. My mother-in-law made two favorite jellos: green pepper with lime Jello and the ribbon Jello. There were eighteen people here.

I entirely forgot to bring out my camera before the event to record the decorations and during the event to record the people! I must just be a blogger-pretender. No true blogger would have passed up that photo op. The meal was successful and it was nice to see some relatives I hadn't seen for at least a year, and one couple I hadn't seen for two years. This wasn't B's whole family--more like one third.

I'm game to do it all again next year or even at Christmas this year. I decided that if we were going to do this with any regularity, I'd trade in the plastic table cloths and try to get some good, matching cloth table cloths. I also got some drastically reduced cloth napkins to go with the green table cloths. I used "real" plates and silverware--almost all dishwasher safe. Clean up wasn't bad.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, my family came here for Thanksgiving dinner. There were 19 people here, including one friend TD.

It seemed to me, once the food was laid out, that by some unintentional brilliance on my part, my sister had had the lion share of the cooking. ;o)

For this go-round, my husband was in charge of the mashed potatoes and the gravy--easier duty than on Thursday. I made two relish trays, green salad, peeled the potatoes, made ribbon Jello salad for the first time (the secret is putting the first layer of jello in the freezer--thanks Sis for cluing me in), and I had to clean up and set everything up. L decorated and set the tables. My sister made the bread dressing, pies, whipped cream, sweet potato something-or-other (and I cooked that) and Dixie salad. Her husband deep fried or smoked the turkey. I'd never had that before.

For Saturday's meal, I did break out the camera before the dinner because we were waiting for my sis to arrive. I took some pictures but then once my sister arrived, I was busy trying to get things ready and entirely forgot to take any other pictures for the rest of the evening. So for what it is worth, here are a few photos but in no way a good representation of the meal or the attendees.

B is in the background, probably dealing with the potatoes at that point. In the foreground we see my niece M and my daughter L.

Here are my nephews R, C and R with my son T watching something on the computer.

Here are my son J, my nephew W and my nephew A. You can see that I employ the very latest techniques for keeping children out of the middle of hectic meal preparations--electronics.

My nephew T hid under the pool table to avoid getting his picture taken, otherwise all the under-18-year-old kids are pictured here. My niece C and her husband D came with my sister and her husband--no pictures of any of the four of them. (Maybe I will later borrow pictures from my sister-in-law's blog---shh, don't tell---since C is a true and dedicated blogger and would never let such a good photo op pass her by! I admire that about her.)

Here is a picture of the "kids" table.

Here are my brother and sister-in-law sitting at the "adult" table. I'm thankful they came for Thanksgiving. It was great to have almost all of us together. We were missing my nephew and his wife who are away at school and my niece and her son. Of course, we were missing my mother who was better off staying at her assisted living place for the evening.

I'm thankful that holidays and food bring people together. It was great to see everyone and to break bread with them.

Both dinners went well and maybe if we do this about 100 more times at our house, I'll really have this system down. Furthermore, I will continue to perfect that "delegate everything to everyone else" technique that I was practicing on my sis this year! Ha ha!

Thankfulness

I've been thinking about doing this for a while and now that we're nearing Thanksgiving, I think it is a good time for giving thanks, so I wanted to take a minute today and write about how thankful I am for my niece C (pictured above with her husband D), my sister's daughter.

She really helped me out so much when my kids were smaller. She has no idea how much that helped me keep my sanity. The kids always looked forward to being with her. She was cheerful and helpful to all of us. She was a trooper. I couldn't have made it without her.

She is smart, dependable, kind, talented, resourceful, frugal, stylish :-), funny, hardworking, and cute. She is such a good person and such a good example. I'm thankful for my good niece CF.

Curly Locks

Here are L and three great friends. This was taken several months ago. They had just curled one another's hair. Don't they look cute?! NB, MH, KH and my L.

Last evening, these scouts (J, T, W, T and J--see the letter pattern in that?) helped at the American Legion in one of the Tri-cities. T, fourth from the left, had done an eagle project to construct the pit for retiring flags. Note the white gloves--the boys had to wear the white gloves for handling the flags. I think for them it was more pyromania than patriotism.

My night photography is lacking, not to mention the slow shutter speed required by the camera in this setting. We had the roaring fire right by us, the bright lights of a ball field behind us, and the pitch black night right around us. I couldn't get a good picture despite any variety of camera settings because, really, I needed everyone to stand stock-still while the camera slowly captured the image but I was taking pictures of action. I chose the best pictures to post but even they are not good. This is T (the eagle scout to be). I think the bright light in the upper right corner of this photo is the moon.

These are my boys, J and T, standing on either side of their uncle T. Uncle T would periodically push flag fragments into the fire with this stick.

Here they are putting a large, over-sized flag on the fire. It looks like it is taking all four of the older scouts while W looks on by the box of flags. There were about thirty flags to be retired, with several of them being very, very large flags that came from the Heritage Park.

I think this is my T and the other J putting a flag on the fire with the other T shown behind them in the middle and my J behind on the right side. I think most of the flags were made of some kind of nylon which just--poof--went up in smoke the minute the flames touched that fabric.

It was a surreal event. I told my boys they'd had two unusual experiences so far in their lives that involved flags--this event and the time hundreds of scouts holding flags lined a long street to a Tri-city cemetery while the funeral procession of a young soldier made its way to the cemetery.

Another flash from the past

This is a photo of my Kindergarten class. Can you find me? :-) I have fond memories of that school year and of the teacher. I loved learning all the things Kindergarten had to offer. I always loved school.

From Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum:

"All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school. * * * Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

"Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

"And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together."

Did you find me? I'm right next to the teacher. Left to right. Back (4th) row: Mrs. W., yours truly, Kelly, Elaine, Tom, Roy, Kelvin, Tammy and Brad. 3rd row: John, Penny, Michael, Elaine, Kathy, Richard (his sister Becky was in the class, too, but she must have been sick that day), and ?. 2nd row: Cindy, Craig, and Candice. Front row: Alan, John, Morgan, Kathy, Ralph and Rory.

Such cute pumpkins

At the middle school, there were such cute pumpkins on display that I had to take pictures of them! I thought the pumpkins were real, which is why I wanted to photograph them right away, while they were still fresh, until I picked them up to move them! Cute, cute!

Picture from a few years ago

Here's a picture from a few years ago of my sister, my brother and me. I do not think we have changed much, have we? Isn't time strange that forty-three years ago can seem like only yesterday? Or at least the day before yesterday?