Thanksgiving 2009!!

Brighton REALLY enjoyed all the yummy food and REALLY packed it in! :)

We had an AWESOME Thanksgiving break! Dave had the whole week off and we used that time to work on remodelling projects around the house. Dave and I finished the kids bathroom and the master bathroom! I painted both (the master twice...the first color I choice stank) and he installed the new water-saving toilets we bought last spring, a new vanity/counter/sink/faucet in the kids bathroom (it looks soooooooooo good! pictures to come soon...), new light fixtures in both bathrooms and fixed our sink once and for all so that now it actually drains! We also discovered why our hot water in the master bath did not work properly; the hot water line was not turned on all the way! That was an easy fix! And now we can actually wash our faces in the sink with warm water and it drains!!! :) Dave also got most of the front entry way completed with new bamboo flooring! It looks so amazing! We found the first three boxes on clearance at Sam's Club and then picked up a few more (at regular price, boohoo) at a Sam's in Denver. Way to go, Dave!!

The day of Thanksgiving was one of my favorite of my whole life, I think. We had cleaned the house really nicely the day before. It's always lovely to wake up to such nice cleanliness! I got the stuffing and turkey cooking and then we did a bunch of Thanksgiving school stuff. I had printed off a TON of material for the kids to work on a few week prior and then found even more good stuff that morning. The kids and Dave hung out on the nice clean kitchen floor doing some activity worksheets while I read about the history of Thanksgiving aloud. Wow, I sure learned a LOT! It was really cozy and the information was captivating enough to keep kids listening and we discussed along the way. The kids and Dave each had a Thanksgiving BINGO sheet they were supposed to be working on while listening to me read aloud...they were supposed to listen for the words on their BINGO page to be able to get BINGO. Sebastian is the only one who actually got BINGO, but it was fun anyway. :)

All the food turned out really yummy! The turkey was done more than an hour before I had anticipated it being done, though, so I did a bit of scrambling to get dinner finished. We had the turkey, yummy stuffing (my mom's recipe), cranberry sauce (first year having that), homemade rolls (family recipe), green bean casserole (new family tradition for the last few years), sweet potato casserole with marshmallows (first year for that), mashed potatoes and, of course, gravy! We always buy sparkling juice every Thanksgiving and this year bought some "fancy" glasses to drink it out of! They are plastic, but turned out to be waaaaay taller than I thought and I was very nervous about huge spills, but no one spilled!

We had plenty of left-overs which Elijah especially enjoyed for many days afterward. Last night was the last night the left-overs would be good and we still had a lot of turkey and stuffing left that I did not want to go to waste so I looked up some recipes on the Internet and made 3 freezer meals out of the left-overs and a modified turkey pot pie with stuffing as the crust for dinner last night. Dave and I thought it was SUPER yummy...the kids mostly picked at theirs; Haven ate all of the turkey out of hers, Elijah ate all the peas out of his, Fiona ate most of the carrots and turkey out of hers, Sebastian stared at his. :)