Thanksgiving: The Meal

Even though I so do not enjoy cooking, I managed to pull together a roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, stuffing, Grandma Edna Cranberries, rosemary bread, and the infamous Mason/Dietrich traditional raspberry rice pudding.  I cooked all this while avoiding a toddler who spent the morning grabbing things off counters that he shouldn’t be able to reach yet (but can), dumping out all sorts of things he wasn’t supposed to find, crashing into people who didn’t want to be crashed into,  running with pencils and scissors that the big kidlets keep leaving out, crying and fussing because he wanted to eat the food he knew I was working with (so he found The Banana’s play dough and tried eating that salty stuff instead, but he ended up spitting it out all over the dining room floor).  It’s a good thing he’s cute.  And it’s a good thing we weren’t having anyone over to our house, because you wouldn’t have believed the state of the chaotic place.  It was a little bit stressful, but OK.

We were thrilled that Dr. Peds made it home from the hospital just in the nick of time to eat with us.  He did have to do a bit of momentary research in the middle of dinner and call a surgeon, but it was all good.  Everyone calls a surgeon in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, right????  Seriously, I am forever amazed at my husband’s extraordinary ability to jump in and out of his professional world and the chaos of our homelife.  One minute he’s tickling a kidlet.  The next minute he’s talking to a medical specialist.

You might recall from previous Thanksgiving posts, how an almond is always placed in the raspberry rice pudding.  Whoever finds the almond in their personal dish gets a prize.  It always makes Thanksgiving just that much more interesting.  Some people get pretty competitive about that little nut. Because I forgot to purchase whole almonds from the grocery store this year, I improvised and stuck a cashew in the raspberry rice pudding.  No one seemed to mind.  The prize was fervently searched for, and YaYa came up with the cashew in her dish.  There were a few Banana tears, because The Banana has been waiting for that almond for years and years, and it just seems to be elusive.  In the end all was well.

After eating, we stuck the turkey in the fridge, left everything else on the table, and quickly went on a walk before the sun set. The Banana and Mr. SP used to stick their legs up and relax in the stroller when they were toddlers too, but I still get a tremendous kick out of Mr. Trouble on Two Feet chilling out in his comfy seat on wheels.