Thanksgiving 2016

Thanksgiving 2016 started as all good Thanksgivings should: with a cuddly viewing of the Macy's parade.  I'm pretty sure Spencer watched the entire thing under the blanket and never got up from the couch once.

Ginger took a nap for the entire parade. 

Michael's cousin's daughter was IN the parade with her high school band.  We had been told to watch for the red Power Ranger.  The band was walking behind it. 

There they are!  The Cary High School marching band from Cary, North Carolina. 

After the parade we got down to the important business.  Like setting out the pies. 

And making sure the booze was flowing. 

A forced and bribed family picture. 

Appetizers.  

I bought some of the Thanksgiving kettle chips from Trader Joe's.  They will be a regular from now on.

People pictures 

Finally time to eat.  My dad and brother were on turkey duty. 

I always make the praline sweet potato casserole (on the right).

Bella was not happy about me taking pictures.  She told me "NO" about 8 million times. 

Spencer and Bella love each other.  She lets Spencer do things that she won't let anybody else do.  Like talk to her and hug her. 

Michael felt like we were leaning apart from each other and it looked bad. 

He was much more pleased with this one. 

I can't remember why my mom and Dan were high-fiving, but I made them recreate the moment for blogging purposes.  Which would be much better if I knew why. 

Pre-Thanksgiving

I can't even wrap my brain around Thanksgiving being over.  Thanksgiving is over and I'm blogging about the days leading up to it.  What?  What happened to 2016?

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving we took the kids out to lunch specifically to see our friend Blaine perform.  Blaine was on The Voice this season so we made a big deal about how he's a celebrity now and we appreciate him still talking to us.  Whenever I see him perform I take a picture with him and text it to Joni (his wife) because it's just a funny thing we do.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving I took a test shot of the Christmas tree because I wanted to see how it looked for our Christmas picture.

I made some sort of mistake when I took the above picture and pushed some button and the camera, all on its own, created all of these pictures.  Some of them are quite artistic.  And I have no idea how it happened so I don't know how to make it happen again. 

Back to pictures that I intentionally took. 

I went on another field trip at work the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.  This little girl is on my caseload.  She said we should take a selfie to pass the time on the bus.  She's one of my favorites. 

We took all of the kids to an animal rescue.  One of our resource teachers volunteers there. 

I was obsessed with this donkey wearing Eeyore pants. 

And this horse in rainbow brite anklets. 

I made a chocolate chess pie on Tuesday night. 

I even made a braided crust. 

I worked on Wednesday morning. Just a half day to partially make up for there being no work on Thursday.

After work I went to Spencer's school because I had volunteered to serve pie at the 3rd grade pie share.  I also brought a dutch apple pie to share. 

I took some pictures between slicing and serving.  I was at the fruit pie table.  We had lots and lots of parent volunteers, so it was an easy gig. 

The 3rd graders are coming! 

Every kid was allowed two slices.  There were at least 35 whole pies left over, so they could have totally had three each.  I let Spencer and a few of his friends have a third slice.  Shhh.  Don't tell.  

We drove down to Tucson that afternoon for the holiday weekend.  My mom read "The Night Before Thanksgiving" to Elliott at bedtime.  Spencer read it to her at his bedtime.  I'm going to continue making them read it every year until they're like, well, there is no age at which I won't force it.  Ha!