Thanksgiving

Hard to believe, but it was time for Thanksgiving! We hosted the Acuff's this year and as usual, it was a great time! Ben was super helpful in preparing our feast. The kids had the day before Thanksgiving off of school, so we spent the day preparing. He actually made the cranberry sauce (all by himself following the recipe), chopped all the celery, parsley and bread for the stuffing and peeled and cut about half of the potatoes. He said he wanted me to remember this Thanksgiving as the one that he prepared because I was pregnant! What a sweet kid! Actually, it was a huge help and what a great thing to see how proud he was of himself. The only reason he stopped was because he cut himself peeling the potatoes! As a side note, the night before Thanksgiving we awoke to a sound downstairs in the kitchen. Upon investigation, Paul discovered that Belle had gotten up to the counter and eaten about half of our bread supply for the stuffing (one tray full)! He was awesome and immediately (around 2 am remember) got out the rest of our bread supply (luckily we had some) and cut it up. He put it in the oven on warm setting and by morning it was stale enough to make the stuffing with. Thank you sweets! I was rather upset, but he took care of it! BAD DOG!!!

After getting the stuff chopped and ready, we moved onto the Thanksgiving crafts I had planned.  It was so nice to spend the day relaxing with the kids and doing a craft.  They love doing crafts and we haven't done one in so long because things have been so busy!  

We made toilet paper roll turkeys and they turned out really cute!  I had saved one toilet paper roll per kid, but they were enjoying it so much that they decided it wasn't enough.  They went around the house looking in the trash cans of the bathrooms to find more empty rolls...luckily we use a lot of tp in this house!  I was fine with this, until I discovered Ben unwrapping toilet paper upstairs to get another roll!  That wasn't ok, but we ended up with a lot of turkeys!  

 Up close shot!

What a fun day!  The next morning we got up and relaxed for a bit after a good breakfast.  We watched the Macy's Day Parade on TV for a while before getting the dinner in the oven.

Then the Acuff's came over and what fun it was so see the college cousins again!  Juliette was especially excited to spend time with Cousin Andrew (our favorite freshman at ND!!).

What a delicious feast!

YAY Cousin Time!

These two are so silly!

Then it was time to relax!

Luckily Aunt Domi was happy to give Belle some love (I wasn't giving Belle any love after the bread incident).

What a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We have so many things to be thankful for this year, including living close enough to the Acuff's to be able to spend holidays with them!  We missed all of our family from afar and thanked God for our many blessings.  Happy Thanksgiving!