Friesencold

Bauer got a book from Gigi recently called Thanks for Thanksgiving, so that’s been our little catch-phrase around here the past week or so. That, and “the feast,” which is how Bauer began referring to our Thanksgiving meal with the Burns family. The Burns are the ones we took the RV trip with last Thanksgiving to Charlottesville, so it was a lot of fun to spend a consecutive Thanksgiving with them this year.

Our Thursday started with the Turkey Day 5K, a race that our friends Amber and Rudy, and their friends Jenny and Bill, made up. It was not an official race, but it was just as much fun, maybe even more because it wasn’t so competitive nor did we even almost get trampled with the double stroller. TJ even won a pumpkin pie, for coming in last place, since he was the one jogging with the stroller. I was only a little bit ahead of him running with Amber and a lady named Dianna. Our time was around 28 minutes, which was a nice relaxing pace for 3 miles.

We used our cover for the BOB for the first time. It definitely won first place!

After the race, we went over to our friends The Meyers’ house for brunch and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV. The kids enjoyed the TV-watching, until Bauer remembered that he’d rather play in their fun basement!

Later in the afternoon, we had the Burns over for the feast. Billy came early to heat up the oil for deep-frying the turkey.

It takes a lot of oil, evidently.

I don’t know if it was the deep-frying or the organic-ness of the turkey that made it so good, but for a mostly non-meat-eater like myself, I honestly enjoyed eating that meat.

Billy and TJ also fried up some sweet potato chips in the oil after the turkey came out.

Here we all are, just before eating.

And here’s our feast! This is TJ’s plate, to be more specific. There’s white meat turkey, Trader Joe’s cornbread stuffing, Paula Dean’s green-bean casserole, candied sweet potatoes, sweet potato chips, cranberry sauce, and Great Harvest honey wheat rolls. I also made the cranberry-apple pie I had mentioned before for dessert.

Wow. That was just about all we could say. Wow.

We really enjoyed that meal and had the leftovers today. Thanks for Thanksgiving!

You never know what the kids are going to do when they run off to play after dinner. I guess Bauer and Brooke decided to have reading time in Cash’s crib. Believe it or not, they even put most of the books back by themselves.

I’ve been meaning to introduce Cash’s new haircut. Here are a couple before pictures (even the hat doesn’t hide it):

And here’s how cute he looks after:

Notice Cash’s weapon of choice. I let him take this ax with him to the nursery at church last Sunday because it happened to be the toy he was attached to that day. I realized as I’m having to explain why Cash is bringing an ax to church with him that maybe next time I’ll try to have him pick a different toy.

Like his shaker that Nana gave him and which he was loving today, as you can see in these pictures. What I’m loving are the little socks he’s wearing, also courtesy of Nana. They are the Trumpette baby socks. Cash has 6 pairs, all different colors, all organic cotton with different “green” words printed on them. Nana said they were a splurge, but I’m so glad she did. He wears them every day! (You can see them best in the 4th picture down.)

I love the little Christmas trees on the back of Cash’s shirt, which used to be Bauer’s shirt, as did the sweater Cash is wearing in the ax picture.

Speaking of Christmas trees, we put ours up yesterday, on the day after Thanksgiving. I think this is the earliest we’ve done it before, but it could hardly be early enough for Bauer. He is so excited about everything Christmas, especially the lights on houses and stores and trees around downtown Naperville. The little tree we used last year was a 4-ft artificial tree, which we set up on a little table to make it seem bigger. We had planned to use the same tree this year, until TJ and I saw a 6-ft artificial tree at Target last week for $19.99. We decided to get it, and let Bauer put the smaller one in his room. He loves it! He especially loves moving his ornaments around to different spots on his tree.

Totally changing the subject, but let me end with 2 things Bauer has said lately:

First, the other day TJ was asking Bauer what he thought Mom’s job was. TJ said that Bauer thought about it a while, and then he said “Reading.” When TJ told me, I couldn’t have been more happy. He thinks my job is reading! Which reminds me, I will need to share two things on the subject of reading next time….

Next was something that happened this afternoon. When Bauer woke up from his nap, he was really upset because he said he has pooped in his pull-up. You could tell he didn’t want that to be the case, but he was afraid it was. This happened one other time recently when he was sick and to make a long story short, it was quite a mess, although I can honestly say I handled the whole thing superbly. I don’t know if he was having memories of that day and the clean-up process or if he thought I would be upset (which I assured him I wasn’t), but he was really rather distraught about it. I continually reassured him that it was no problem, that it was an accident, that we would get him all cleaned up…..so I carried him to the bathroom to remove his clothes and pull-up, only to realize that he had not, in fact, done a pooper. I think he couldn’t quite believe it, so I showed him the pull-up to prove it. And then he goes, “The poop changed its mind. The pee kept the poop in.”