Thanksgiving Week

We had an awesome, extremely busy and productive Thanksgiving Week!

We started the week with play-dates, catching up with friends we hadn't seen in a while and letting the kids enjoy the much cooler weather.

Also I went grocery shopping with all four kids to three different grocery stores in one trip to get the final touches for our Thanksgiving meal and we all survived.

Wednesday night began our cooking firsts.  Since Chris is now beyond lactose intolerant (i.e. he gets violently ill), I needed to make pumpkin pie with goat's milk.  Unfortunately, I could not find evaporated goat's milk, so I had to make my own.  For those of you who don't know, this is a long drawn out process; two hours in fact of simmering, removing the film/skin and stirring every six minutes.  My biggest fear the whole time was that we would burn it and have to start all over; thankfully that never happened.  Oh, and by-the-way, it made the best pumpkin pie ever!

Early Thursday morning, I began the process of cooking my very first turkey (at nearly 42 years old), to be shared by our family and our close friends. All my life, I have bought the turkey cooked and cut in a box.  Immediately I had doubts, the directions on the turkey and other directions on the turkey bag seemed to be giving conflicting instructions.  Luckily my Aunt Janet had offered to be my "Turkey Hotline" and she was ready for my call.  My loving husband found my confusion so cute that he took pictures to post on Facebook.  Fortunately, Janet's advice worked perfectly; the turkey was so juicy, it literally fell off the bone.  The meal was a huge success with kids and adults coming back for more, so much so we had hardly any left overs.

While the turkey cooked, the kids the played in the backyard until we called them in to watch "The Mouse on the Mayflower"; a great family tradition we shared with our friends this year.  The kids really like watching this every year.  Though, we did have to explain to Titus that the "naked men" were called "Indians", not just "naked men".

At dinner, Chris took a moment to read "George Washington's Thanksgiving Address of 1789" to remind us all of why and for what our government originally set this day aside.  (I'll give you a hint - it wasn't just to watch football.)

We did, however, settle down after dinner to watch some football in our food induced comatose state, or at least the adults did. The kids played football as much as they watched. 

Titus has been asking all year - "When are we going back to the corn maze?". We decided we would make it our family tradition to go the Friday after Thanksgiving this year and in years to come.  We get to be outside, burn some calories and avoid the mayhem of city shoppers.

We brought along my "fourth son", Matthew, and everyone had a great time.  We had planned on letting Matthew and Lance go off on their own but they changed the rules a little this year that kids under 16 had to have an adult with them in the maze.  So I followed Lance and Matthew, and that's really all I did except stopping occasionally so I didn't have to follow them down a dead-end.  Titus joined our team mid-way.  Chris set-off to beat the boys with Jared running ahead and Amber on his back.  

Ironically, after two hours of searching the maze for all the clues, we ended up all finishing about the same time and in the same place.  I was so impressed that both teams had the tenacity to finish the entire maze.  Once again it was amazing to see Jared at the maze running ahead of Chris.  Last year he had to leave early with Grandpa and Titus because he could not walk anymore.  All the boys had great attitudes, Amber had a nice nap in the backpack, we all had a blast and worked up quite the appetite.

After lunch it was on to other adventures at the farm.  Titus was finally tall enough to ride the zip-line.  The boys had it all to themselves for a while and kept running back in line doing it again and again and AGAIN :-)

The last activity was the bounce pillow, this too had been unavailable to the "Mighty One" last year and now was all his to conquer along side his brothers.  The weather was absolutely perfect for our day.  As we left, the boys did the big slide one last time as Daddy and Amber took the tunnel out.

All this and we still had two days to go!

Saturday was two hour baseball practice for Chris and Lance, while the rest of us went to the park.  Afterwards, we (of course) sat down for the Ohio State/Michigan football game.  Thankfully Ohio State won, which makes for a much happier husband (Hee! Hee!).  Then, we started the Christmas decorating.  We actually managed to get down all the decorations and everything put up by Sunday afternoon.  More friends came by in the late afternoon and it was off to play some more.

Sunday, in addition to finishing our decorating (inside and out), we did science experiments, wash laundry, bike maintenance, and finished off our Thanksgiving Feng Shui - filling up the van with boxes of clothes we dropped off and plans to sort and sell other stuff at consignment sales early next year.  Amber even got into the spirit.  When Chris mentioned the dog needed a bath, Amber walked over to the wipes container, got out a wipe and began wiping down the dog :-)