HAPPY BIRD DAY! The floors need mopping.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday EVER. Of course because it gives me time to reflect about what it is I am thankful for. But mostly because of dinner! And the opportunity to have "the perfect bite". Yum. I live for this. You can probably file this under "too much information" but at dinner, I take a little tiny bit of every one of my favorite Thanksgiving Day foods, and arrange it all on my fork for the perfect bite. Every time. And I can never deviate from our traditional menu that dates back to my childhood, for fear of compromising the perfect bite. That would be horrible! Then I'd have to wait a whole nother year! My sister used to refuse to sit next to me at the table because by the end, my plate would look like a pile of mush, but all of my favorite foods would be mixed together and it would look like paradise to me. I still do it now, but I make it look a little less sloppy. It was Poops' first Thankgiving, so we pulled the high chair up to the table and he had his first taste of turkey and he gagged and spit it all out. Oh well. Maybe next year. Anyway, I just love Thanksgiving. All of it. I spend pretty much the entire month of November sifting through magazines, watching Martha Stewart and the Today Show and pouring through websites looking for decorating and drink and food ideas. My mom came over a couple days early to help me (kind of like last year). We made place cards out of tiny pilgrim candles that we put in the tiniest terra cotta pot you'd ever seen and I wrote everyone's names on their little pot. Last year, I cut slits in tiny pumpkins and put name cards in them. For centerpieces this year, we carved out pumpkins and used them as vases for flowers. We shopped. For a couple days. And even then, Evan still had to make five trips out for stuff we forgot including cream cheese for the pumpkin cheesecake I was making. What a guy. My sister came down and at dinner, we were in hysterics over jokes that we couldn't explain to other people because it wouldn't be funny. She's the best. My dad flew in after a week of hunting up north, just in time for dinner. We had two small turkeys, one we baked, and the other that Evan fried in the driveway. I was scared for his life until my uncle showed up, who I knew had previous experience frying turkeys and I was relieved. It was an exhausting day of cooking and today, I am still trying to clean. There is a pile of china in the sink waiting for me but that's okay. Probably the funniest part of the day was Evan dropping his coke all over the floors I had just washed and then our shoes sticking to it and tracking it all over. But that was just the beginning of the series of floor events. Evan flooded the newly post-coke-washed floor with the water from the dirty mop bucket when he knocked it over. Then at some point, my mom, sister, and aunt, all kicked over the cat's water dish. I have decided it's time to move it. The floors were jinxed yesterday. Anyway, I'm thankful that the family was together and it was lovely. But we are seriously missing my sister's husband, though, and we can't wait for him to get back and start taking part in our family holiday madness. We miss you, Old Man! The holiday season has officially begun, and I know this because the smooth, easy favorites radio station has started playing only Christmas carols and I'll keep that radio station on until December 26th. Yay Christmas!