Thanksgiving

It has been a crazy week!  I don't have a single picture from Thanksgiving Day.  I stayed up late the night before making a pumpkin pie and all other things that could be done a day in advance.  Steve let me sleep in, even though he was up late too.  I let him do that for me way too much.  How bratty of me.

He took the kids over to Ken and Rachel's house for some breakfast and football watching, while I stayed home and cooked.  It was kind of crazy and wonderful to be all alone in my house.  I downloaded an audio book to keep me company.  My selection was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I love it.

I chopped vegetables and roasted them in our electric roaster so I wouldn't take up valuable oven time.  They didn't caramelize properly.  After brining the turkey overnight, I patted it dry, coated the skin with oil, and stuffed it with aromatics.  I think it came out perfectly, but then we covered it with foil because we started an hour later than planned and the skin lost its crispness.  My gravy was too thin and my homemade pumpkin pie cracked wide open in the middle while cooling.  My heart broke a little bit over my failures.

But, we were with family, and that is nothing to be heart-broken about.  We are so blessed to live near Rachel and Ken, Christine, and the Earnest family.  Their culinary contributions were perfection.  We all stuffed ourselves.  Christine and her friend had to leave because Christine was working Black Friday at Anthropologie and had to be there at 5AM!  The rest of us adults sat in our living room after the kids went to bed and just talked.  It was lovely.

Annee and Darin stayed at our place with the sleeping children, while Steve and I went to a store at midnight to buy a washer and dryer:

  

Ha!  It was insane!  Luckily, there was a separate line for those buying appliances and the majority of the people were going for the TVs.  The ordeal only took us an hour and a half.  I'm pretty excited about our purchase.  It will be nice to have a washer that (hopefully) doesn't break every few months and actually cleans clothes.


My heart is filled with gratitude for my blessings.  I have too many to count, but I try to count them in prayer each day.  Perhaps I haven't yet faced hard enough trials to prove me wrong, but so far I've come to know that being grateful makes any stage of life a beautiful one.