Thanksgiving meals

Liam and Kat had plans to spend Thanksgiving dinner with her family, so we arranged to have them come over for a Thanksgiving breakfast, not a typical tradition but with the dinner plans under control made a very nice start to the day. We had bagels with tomatoes and smoked salmon, and also some really delicious tamales that Beatrice made and brought over. Yum!

Liam and Kat also helped me with an excel problem (still unsolved, but they have diagnosed it as so difficult, it warrants contacting Microsoft! That’s big. Thanks for trying!) and we skyped with Granny and Grandad who were in Cork, so we also got to see Nan, Patrick and Katie. Great seeing everyone!

Liam and Kat headed off, Miles showered and for the second day in a row this trip enjoyed the luxury of having an espresso machine at his disposal. John and I started on the cooking and hospitality prep – hospitality being what I call the “everything else,” the part of any hosting event that goes well when it goes unnoticed. Things like place settings, chairs, candles, games ready to play. Anyway, all went just fine and Debbie, Jeff, Maddie, Nana and Grandpa arrived in the afternoon.  I’ll have more photos from mom’s phone later to post, but here are some from the evening for now.

Before dinner, Miles, Maddie and I played one of her favorite games to play here, “sick pony.” Maddie is the pony who gets hurt and Miles and I are the emergency technicians and the doctors who usually end up putting a cast on her leg and giving her crutches. It’s a very happy ending for a horse with a leg injury!

John did an amazing job with the cooking as usual, and Debbie brought a really delicious green bean casserole. Here’s the buffet, with green beans, mashed potatoes, squash, stuffing, and turkey. We’d had a salad first.

Ready to eat with our salads! And start thinking about what we are grateful for (which would be discussed with the main dishes.)

Cutie pies!

Nice pic of Debbie!

Fast forward to after dinner, that moment when you’ve eaten turkey, gotten tired, are sitting on the couch, and the card game suddenly seems like it’s almost too much.

John and Maddie were a team in our game of Uno Attack.

Uno Attack has a machine that will draw a card for you instead of you just drawing from the deck. However, instead of just one card it randomly spits out zero, one or more cards. It’s quite exciting to get pelted by cards, even if the goal is to get rid of your cards.

Ooh, Mom’s down to just two cards! I think she won, though we kept playing to third place so it may have been that she placed in the top 3.

What a lovely Thanksgiving, everyone! Thanks for coming over, we really enjoyed it!