Your First Thanksgiving

As I mentioned last year, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, if not my favorite. It's all about spending time with family, EATING; there's no pressure to buy presents or do anything fancy. Plus, I have lots of wonderful memories of Thanksgiving with my grandfather when I was a little girl. The best part of your first Thanksgiving was that we got to spend four whole days with you! This was the most time we'd had together since I was on maternity leave, and I loved every minute of it.

Auntie Amanda got in Wednesday after a very delayed flight (per usual). We took her and Daideo to The General Muir for dinner, and you were pretty excited to ruin your outfit with some sweet potatoes. You even got to try some of Daddy's hamburger, so you were pretty happy about that.

Thursday, we got up pretty early and got to work so that Mommy and Auntie Amanda could start drinking cooking. Daddy kept you entertained while I cooked.

This is what our menu looked like on your first Thanksgiving:

• Sweet Potato Biscuits
• Roasted Turkey with Herb Butter
• Potato Leek "Pie"
• Roasted Vegetables (which we lovingly nicknamed "fart casserole")
• Amanda's Green Beans
• Mashed Potatoes
• Mashed Sweet Potatoes
• Chocolate Pie
• Apple Pie

We had a little issue with the turkey. Even though we followed the recipe, the thermometer said it was waaay underdone. AND it was really pink. This got us worried, so we kept it in the oven for way too long and it totally dried out. The thermometer still read underdone (even though Daideo tried to recalibrate it), so we just decided that it was a very vascular turkey (hence the rubor) and threw a bunch of gravy on it to make up for the dryness. Not my best work, but otherwise the food was pretty spectacular.

One of the best parts about our Thanksgiving menu was that I got to use my ice cream maker to make real vanilla ice cream from scratch. This meant that you got to try ice cream for the first time! Check out Auntie Sara's reaction to your face:

On Friday, we went to pick out your first Christmas tree. You were pretty adorable about it.

Later that day, your Grampa and Ms. Holly arrived to spend the rest of the weekend with us. The last time they saw you, you were just a few days old, so they were pretty excited to see you. They even brought you some early birthday and Christmas presents!

You got a lot of fun family time in that weekend...

...and you got in lots of snuggles, too!

Thanksgiving is also an important time because it's Hate Week: the week where Mommy and Auntie Amanda's team plays FSU. This game was especially important this year, but unfortunately we blew it.

At least we looked cute while watching the game!