Thanksgiving

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  Our day was slow and quiet and just what we needed.  Dr. Peds had to work at the hospital, but he made it home in time for our late afternoon meal.  The rest of us stayed in our pajamas and slowly cooked  and played throughout the day.

Kidlets helped out in the kitchen bit by bit, which is not something I usually handle well, but it ended up being a lot of fun!  They helped with all the stages of their favorite dish, our traditional almond raspberry rice pudding.  Mr. TOF also helped make Grandma Edna’s cranberry sauce.  We started making it in our blender last year and it’s so easy!  The turkey and baked squash were particularly tasty this year, and for the first time, I made pumpkin pie!  I don’t make pie crust, which is why I haven’t ever made pumpkin pie.  My mom makes the most amazing pie crust in the world, but there is no recipe, and the process makes zero sense to me.  However, a little more than a year ago, I came across a recipe for a no-roll pie crust that can be used with custard-like pies and fruit pies that don’t have a top, and it works.  It’s actually quite tasty.  I enjoyed the pumpkin pie a lot.

My favorite part of the day was taking out the jar that held all of the tags off of our Thankful Tree from last year.  While we were eating I read all of the tags out loud, and it was so fun to remember the things the kids wrote last year.  For example, Mr. TOF wrote that he was thankful for “beep beeps,” which meant construction vehicles, but he doesn’t call them beep beeps anymore.  There were lots of great examples that really brought back great memories.  So, I think another step to our tradition of the Thankful Tree has begun.  When I took the tree down this year, I carefully wrote the date on all the tags and placed them in the big jar with the tags from last year, to be read next Thanksgiving.