Thanksgiving Week

I don't have a ton of pictures from the start of our Thanksgiving week -- the screen on my phone went out and I had to send off for a new one (but, I was very thankful this Thanksgiving that we'd bought the insurance on it!) and I didn't get it back until later in the week.

 

Our Thanksgiving week was different this year. I have to admit, that it never really felt like Thanksgiving to me. We had tons of fun, but it just wasn't quite the same. We spent the first couple of days of the week at home -- Matt is trying to finish his lit review for his dissertation and I was doing some baking to get ready for later in the week.

 

We actually celebrated Thanksgiving on Wednesday this year. It was our year to be with Matt's family and some of his family couldn't be there on Thursday, so we all met on Wednesday to have our Thanksgiving dinner. Like I said, it was tons of fun to be with everyone! We had a great time with Grammy and Pops and sweet Uncle Cameron spent the afternoon chasing our kids around the backyard! They are still talking about the fun that they had with him!

 

We headed home late Wednesday. We got up Thursday morning and did some fun things to try and make our day special. I'll admit that I did have myself a good cry that morning -- to me the biggest part of Thanksgiving is being with your family and I was so sad that we didn't get to be with any of our family that day. My biggest consolation in all of this is that Matt has promised me that from this point on we will be spending the real Thanksgiving day with at least one of our families. So, we tried to make the best of this year. I made a HUGE thanksgiving breakfast. We knew that we wanted to stay in Searcy as long as possible and that would make it impossible for me to get home and prepare a thanksgiving meal for us on Thursday (all that prep that goes into it would be too much) so I decided to do a big ol' breakfast. And, what a feast we had! We had omelet casserole, cinnamon rolls, paris puffins, fruit, bacon, sausage and biscuits. It was quite a feast!

 



 We followed up breakfast with some family fun. We watched the end of the Macy's Parade which the kids actually loved! I was surprised that it kept their attention but we all had a great time watching it! Then, we played games for a couple of hours and had such a good time! One of the things we like to do as a family -- and do a LOT -- is play games and we are getting pretty competitive. :)

 Then later that afternoon we headed to the movie to see Frozen. I was the one that was really pushing to go see the movie because I thought it was something that we would all enjoy and it didn't disappoint! It was sooooo good! We got a huge bowl of popcorn and candy and that was our "thanksgiving dinner." Ha!

The kids have been singing the songs from Frozen all week and I've put them on my phone and we can jam to them all the time!

It was a very unconventional thanksgiving for sure. But, we made the best of it and we taught our kids a big lesson in the process -- that sometimes we do things that are hard on us because they are important to someone else. And, we do it with a smile and a good attitude. I'm thankful this year that we had the opportunity to teach them this lesson and I know that next year I'll be doubly thankful to get to spend thanksgiving day with family.