Growing up, Thanksgiving and the entire holiday season were always fun, but we never really had any big traditions (at least not any that were big enough for me to remember). When mom and I were living in Florida and I was old enough, I always kind of took it upon myself to cook Thanksgiving dinner... One year that sticks out in my mind was the year that I trapped myself in the kitchen using my t.v. to barricade myself, and cooked Thanksgiving dinner while watching the Buffy marathon. But there wasn't really anything that we did every year, and had to do for the sake of tradition. So when Nic (who is very tradition oriented, and has since rubbed off on me) and I started dating, mom and I just kind of adopted his family's holiday traditions.
The first few years went pretty well, but it just didn't feel like the holidays. Then in 2007 I figured out what it was... I wasn't cooking! Why on earth wasn't I cooking? So Nic's mom and I decided to adopt a new tradition; now instead of everybody bringing a little bit, she and I cook everything ourselves. Now cooking for 20+ people has always been somewhat chaotic, but the past 2 years it has gotten a little more difficult... Last year, I was knocked up by my preacher (Nic's a preacher, don't freak out!) and could barely keep my eyes open, and then after cooking all day, I was too nauseous to actually eat much of it. This year, our little bundle of joy was outside of the womb for Thanksgiving, which if nothing else made me feel a lot better physically. Knowing that I had a 6 1/2 month old baby to take care of this year kind of made me worry about how all of the cooking was going to go. Given that I was responsible for half of the dishes that the 20+ people were going to be devouring, I knew that I had to figure something out. We decided that this year we would just have everything assembled and ready to throw in the oven and then on to the table... At least that was the plan. When we got over to Nic's parents house on the morning of Thanksgiving, I had pretty much everything ready to go, all I had to do was mix up the bread (I always make Challah... and if when reading this you didn't make a sound in your head like you were hocking a loogie, then you didn't pronounce it properly), put my pie in the dish, and bake everything off... Nic's mom, however, had decided that most of her stuff couldn't be assembled in advance for one reason or another, so she had to do pretty much everything that day (with the exception of the dressing, which was ready to go in the oven).
So we're already off to a slower start than we'd planned, when I discovered that I'd left the eggs for my Challah at our house, and that his mom didn't have enough eggs for her stuff and mine... Oops! Wonderful Nic comes to my rescue and runs (well, okay he drove) back to the house to get them... Fortunately we live 10 minutes away or he would have just been going to the store. I thought that I was doing okay on time for everything, so I just kind of spent most of the morning chilling out, playing with Nigel and watching the parade... By the time I get around to mixing my bread so that it can proof (fancy bread making term for rising) I realize that "uh-oh, the bread takes longer than I remembered!" My bad! Other than that, and spilling corn casserole all over the bottom of the oven, there weren't really any catastrophies. All of the food made it to the table (even though some of it was late), no body was taken to jail for killing her in-laws, and we all went home fat and happy, and went to bed early so that we could get up and go shopping for Black Friday!
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| This is Nic's grandmother's bread bowl... There is a picture of Nic sitting up in it when he was little, so while she was down for Thanksgiving, we decided to take a picture of Nigel sitting in it, too. |
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| Nigel enjoyed his Thanksgiving feast as well... His bib says "Everybody is thankful for me." So true! |
Speaking of which... We've loved going shopping on Black Friday for several years. We're pretty sure that we've got it figured out just right. For the most part, we're not really going with the intention of trampling innocent old ladies (although are the old ladies really all that innocent?) in order to get the best deals on the toys and electronics. We just like to go for the fun of it. We go to the mall first while everyone else is at Wal-mart and then we switch... By the time we actually make it to Wal-mart, all of the chaos has pretty much calmed down... So given our love of Black Friday shopping (of course it's TRADITION!), we wanted to share said tradition with our bouncing baby boy. We were just about to head off to the mall about 4 o'clock that morning when said bouncing baby boy decided to wake up... The horror movie music definitely played in my head at this point. Was he going to go back to sleep? Was he going to be cranky all day? Was he going to nap while we were shopping? Was he going to think that waking up at 4 in the morning was an acceptable thing? All of these questions ran through my mind when I saw him sitting wide awake and smiling in his car seat.
Okay, I'm back (did you notice that I was missing for a few weeks?)
Nigel, for the most part, has always been a pretty good car rider (I'm trying to block out the trip back from my dads in August), so I wasn't too worried about how he was going to do on the ride up to the mall... I actually figured that he'd just go on back to sleep, like he usually does on any extended ride. Apparently he knew all of the Black Friday excitement that was to come his way, and he couldn't bring himself to go back to sleep. Fortunately, though, he just chilled in the back listening to Christmas music most of the way (I did have to climb back there for a few minutes to give him a bottle, but that wasn't too terribly difficult).
Not too long in to our shopping trip I could tell that he was working on an "uh-oh." I knew that one of the bathrooms in one of the department stores was really nice, so I decided to just wait to change him until we got to that bathroom instead of fighting the crowd in the bathroom in the food court with the oddly placed changing table that extends long ways instead of sideways and seems to bend down a little bit further than I'm comfortable with. We found a few cute things in Children's place that were on a pretty good sale, so I got in line and Nic took Nigel out of the store. On their way out, Nigel fell asleep. Well, I sure wasn't going to wake him up to change his diaper now! (Call me a bad mommy all you want, but not purposefully waking your child up at 5 o'clock in the morning just to change a diaper is about survival, people!) I ended up deciding that the two items that I'd found in Children's Place weren't worth the 3 hour line that I was going to have to wait in to buy them (he was probably going to grow out of them before I even got through the line), so I put them back, and we continued on our journey through the Galleria.
We make it down to JCPenney, by which time Nigel has woken up again, so I decided to go ahead and change him, in hopes that their bathroom was the fabulously wonderful bathroom that I knew existed in one of the department stores (it was not, but it wasn't too bad, so we stayed). I decided to only take the little diaper changing kit instead of the whole huge bag that weighs nearly as much as he does. I get in the bathroom (I swear the sign on the door said "Women's") and see urinals... Weird! Apparently, JCPenney figured that most of the Black Friday shoppers were going to be female, so they designated both bathrooms for women and sent the men to the back of the Customer Service department to use the restroom. After getting over seeing the urinals, I pull down the changing table and get to work... Poor Baby Nigel. I unsnap the legs of his romper to discover POOP-ACOPLYPSE!!!!!! I'm not even kidding you! There was so much poop! I'm pretty sure normal adults don't poop that much! And the worst part was that there was more poop on his leg and in his romper than there actually was in his diaper! Of course the good news in all of this was that I had forgotten to refill the wipe container and there were only 2 wipes left. TWO!! I use two wipes at a time to clean up a normal poop, let along POOP-ACOLYPSE!!!!! Fortunately, one of the cleaning ladies was in there cleaning the restroom, and she came to my rescue handing me wet paper towels and getting me a trash bag to put his romper in. Now if you'll remember I only brought the diaper changing kit... This didn't include a change of clothes. So after getting him cleaned up (if I could have, I probably would have given him a bath right there in the sink, it was so nasty) I carried my naked (well, he had on a diaper) baby out to the luggage department of JCPenney (I swear I'm not getting paid for how many times I say their name), to get him dressed.
Everything after that was pretty tame. We finished going through the mall. Dined at Chic-Fil-A in Alabaster. Went to Walmart. Went home for a brief resting period before tackling the tree. We got the tree up, and lit, and got Nic's Star Wars and Star Trek talking Hallmark ornaments on (with no cussing this year!!), and that was about all that we had time for before heading back out to our traditional Black Friday evening shopping with Josh.
It was while we were out this second time that Nigel started coughing... And he was coughing, and coughing, and coughing. The poor little guy. When he would start coughing he would just look at me like, "Mommy, why is this happening to me?" "Why does this hurt?" He was so dang pittiful! My poor little guy was sick for the first time, and I didn't know what to do to make him feel better. Fortunately, I have my go-to Baby Guru, Alicia. She told me that I needed to squirt salty water up his nose, stick a rubber thing up there and suck out everything except for his brain... Easier said than done. He Did. Not. Like. This. At. All!
Needless to say, we spent the rest of the weekend at the house, trying to get him feeling better. We had the Iron Bowl to keep us occupied on Saturday, and Baby Nigel and I stayed home from church on Sunday. It was that Sunday that I discovered that singing the chorus to "Man Eater" calms him down... I still sing it to him whenever he's upset, and it still works! I don't know what it is about the chorus to that song, but I sure am glad that Runaway Bride was on that morning (they play the song in that movie, in case you were thoroughly confused)!
Overall, I would say that Thanksgiving 2011 made for some memories! Great food, fun times with family, Poop-Acolypse, Nigel's first cold, and the discovery of "Man Eater." Two months later and I'm still looking back on it and smiling. I'm just hoping that next year he keeps his poop in his diaper... Have I said "poop" too many times? :)
