All the Trimmings

For only the second time in seventeen years, we had Thanksgiving just our little family. The last time this happened was in 2013, before Sophie and Topher were born. While we missed our extended family, I was happy to spend the day with our seven.

Bryan and I split the meal prep. I cooked the sweet potatoes and regular potatoes, diced strawberries for the Jello salad, made the stuffing, rolls, cranberry sauce, and all eight pies. (That's not as impressive as it sounds, two were frozen and two were instant pudding pies. The other four were the same batch of pumpkin pie that had enough batter to make that many.) Bryan built and baked the sweet potatoes, seasoned and mixed the mashed potatoes, put together the Jello salad, cooked the green beans and corn, and prepared and cooked the turkey. Everything was delicious. 

Here's one of the many pumpkin pies. It looks unsure. When the kids saw that it appeared to have a face, they all announced they would eat the other pies, but not this one.

For the most part, Topher had a great first Thanksgiving. There were a few rough patches though. He and I both woke up with colds and spent the day sniffling and sneezing. And then, during the big dinner, as he was eating sweet potatoes for the first time, I noticed he had just cut his third tooth. In spite of not feeling well, he was, on the whole, a happy boy.

The kids played calmly throughout the day, which is a major thing for our loud bunch. During the meal they practiced their best manners. I was thankful that I'd chosen to teach about manners for my week of preschool this month. Sophie remembered a lot of what we talked about. I'm mentioning this because we've been struggling with good manners during meals. In fact, the kids had gotten into such a bad habit of yelling over each other and interrupting us while we tried to talk during meals in our echo-y kitchen, a few weeks ago we took a cue from the book Farmer Boy and instituted silent dinners for the kids. I felt terrible about it, especially because the kids had trouble remembering and would inevitably get excused from the table when they talked. They would eventually come back to finish eating, but it wasn't fun for anyone. However, it seems to have worked because when we rescinded the rule for Thanksgiving dinner, everyone did well. We were able to have a great conversation and my ears weren't ringing afterward. Maybe we just needed a reset?

Happy Thanksgiving!