Thanksgiving Day Blessings

I can't remember ever having a Thanksgiving dinner outside in 80 degree weather! (That's Mesa for you!) The butter was melted into puddles by the time we finished eating...which incidentally only took about 30 minutes. It has always been amazing to me how quickly and thoroughly a crowd can ravage a table full of food, especially then that food has taken hours and hours to prepare! Although I shouldn't be surprised this time because...um, yum. That's all I have to say about our pit roasted turkey, my cousin Matt's prailine sweet potatoes, and my aunt Jeri's famous rolls and homemade jam. As always my stomach got full before my taste buds were done and I didn't really need to eat anything again until the next day. Except for my cousin McKenna's german chocolate pie and Jeri's pecan pie. There's always room for pie!!
So I really have to tell you more about this whole pit roasting thing. My uncle Casey makes the turkey part of Turkey day a neighborhood and ward affair. He rents a backhoe and digs out a long skinny portion of his one acre backyard. Then he fills the pit with whole tree stumps and limbs and branches. Under all of those logs was a pipe that was punctured with a million tiny holes and had two leaf blowers attached to the end. When the time was right he doused all the logs with accelerant and then another guy threw flares in to start the fire. Then when the fire was mostly started they turned on the leaf blowers to really get it going. We had a bonfire! All the neighbors came with their tinfoil wrapped turkeys and each turkey got its own metal tag so they could find it later. There were over a hundred turkeys! Someone brought hot chocolate and donuts and everyone just hung out and talked for a while. Then sometime later when the fire had died down all the turkeys were placed in the pit and roasted until mid-morning on Thanksgiving. I don't think any turkey is every really going to top that one! Cool, huh.
Now I am home, Rus on a work trip, kids a little crazy...they used up their "good kid reserve" on the drive home yesterday...and my home is a semi-wrecked mixture of fall/Christmas decorations. I can't help but wish it were still Thanksgiving day and I was still surrounded by so much fun family...
...like my cousins, many of them boys in their teens/early twenties, playing HORSE and beating the losers with a massive cardboard tube. (Hilarious.)
...Or that I was still in the car with Courtney, McKenna, Emma and my aunt Kim and my my mom headed out to see New Moon. (Not too shabby...loved Edward in the book, but loved Jacob in the movie - us girls are conditioned to love all things tan and muscular and Edward doesn't quite meet up.) My cousins were great to see the movie with; we all cracked up about the corny parts and cheered at the good parts.
...Or I wish I was sitting around the kitchen table with my sisters and mom and Jeanne and Courtney and my Grandma, making a paper "Believe" craft but looking like we were all dealing a deck of super chic cards. Jeanne got hers all glued together and then recruited me to embellish it for her. And then I did my grandma's. And then Amy copied me and Jeanne copied her and it felt like old times with my friends Taffy and Tara - they're always making me finish their crafts, too. :)
...Or I'd love to be in the crazy madness of Black Friday. What can I say, I love people, even crazy, flustered, obsessed spendy people who push and shove and buy all the good deals before you even show up at the store because you're not a crazy 12am-er. Amy, Tyler, my mom, and I all went to ToysRus and Walmart at 10am and we did just fine, thankyouverymuch.
What made it all work were the wonderful quiet moments at Rus's cousin's house where we stayed. His cousin James (and wife Silvia and three kids) was wonderful enough to leave town and loan us his house, complete with two twin beds in one room and another room with a crib and an amazingly comfy queen bed for us. And a gallon of milk which made breakfast easy. And a ton of toys that my kids loved. It was blissfully wonderful to be able to retreat there at night, put the kids in bed, and hang out with Tom, another cousin of Rus's. (So nice to see you, Tom.)
And to round out the whole family-seeing-adventure, we were able to go to Rus's cousin Jennifer's house to have dinner with her family and Mary and Clay, and to see beautiful Melissa who just got back from her mission and is gearing up for her next adventure, whatever that may be...
Okay and to really round things out we ate at Nielsen's right before we left. The Finer Things Grinder will always have a special place in my heart. And stomach. Mmm.
All in all it was the perfect Thanksgiving. The kind that just shoves all of your blessings in front of you so that you are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all.
See. Here are some of my blessings. (Superheroes aren't just for Halloween anymore.)