Thanksgiving 2017

That’s right! We survived hosting our third Thanksgiving dinner! It is fun and also exhausting. I’m so glad we’re doing it. Both M and J said to me separately that they love Thanksgiving, that they love it even more now that we host Thanksgiving dinner, and that since we’ve started hosting Thanksgiving, it’s their favorite holiday.  So that’s awesome. What an endorsement, right? Sign me up for next year!

Anyway, it was a busy week leading up to the holiday. M’s crazy schedule continued with her most highly-anticipated Proctors C.A.S.T. assignment of the season: Joe Biden! She was absolutely giddy. She came rushing home from track and was chirping about how she had to run and take a shower “for Joe” and she was kidding, but. . . not entirely. I had forgotten that, along with the nostalgic Obama feelings, Leslie Knope loves-loves-loves Joe Biden on Parks & Rec. The volunteer coordinator said that people could wear pins or something, so I pulled out some of our old bling. She chose the running mates pin.

Anyway, that was Monday. I spent most of Monday working on my KidsOutAndAbout newsletters to get that out of the way before the hardcore entertaining prep.

It turns out that my parents couldn’t make it up for Thanksgiving, so my mom sent bouquets for the tables.

On Tuesday I did my major grocery shopping trip. It was so much food that I had to get a second cart, and the cashiers at Hannaford were giving me the sort of extra love that big spenders get, like free re-usable bags and help getting out to the car. I even had to put the back seats down for more space.

The good thing about hosting the third time around is that I’ve already figured out basic logistics. I know I’ve got enough cloth napkins and tablecloths and fork and all that. Now we’ve moved on to tweaking. Last year our table, scavenged from a curb, felt like it might collapse at any moment. This year, we’d bought a brand-new, super-sturdy folding table. Cute W bought a new fat separator for gravy making, and he feels that it might be life-changing. It definitely made his afternoon easier.

Our first guests arrived on Wednesday afternoon and the last guests left on Saturday morning. We were 19 people eating Thanksgiving dinner, and we had nine extra people sleeping over on our busiest night. It’s a small house, so that meant accommodations were. . . rustic. But it worked. Our family finally got to meet my little brother’s girlfriend, so that was good. She’s been around for a while now, but frankly, we don’t get out much, so I was the last sibling to finally meet her.

We pretty much cooked all day Wednesday, ate all day Thursday, and hung around and ate some more all day on Friday.  Friday was also the day that our town crew came around to suck up the leaves we’d left at curbside, so my 1st grade nephew was pretty thrilled about that. Or he was until the crushing disappointment that occurred when the guys on the crew didn’t immediately recognize that he was a kindred spirit and recruit him to join their team. We also took a walk to Central Park, where there’s new playground equipment. I’ll share a couple of pictures soon.

And now it’s Saturday and I’ll tell you a secret: it’s 5 pm and I’m still in my pajamas. We’ve moved some furniture back into place and done a lot of laundry and clothes-folding, but besides that we’ve really been embracing relaxation. We’ll kick it back into gear tomorrow.

Maybe.