Thanksgiving 1

How was your Thanksgiving? Ours was beautifully extended! We started off with our annual church “breakfast for dinner” on Wednesday night. It was sweet fellowship time with folks from both our church and the Methodist church.

Then on Thursday, it was time to just be us. We enjoyed a calm, peaceful morning, and then started getting ready for our family dinner.

The kids set a beautiful table…

…and Doug stocked it with a delicious dinner! Grilled shrimp and salmon, corn on the cob, tri-colored rotini in a garlic cream cheese sauce, and crescent rolls. All topped off with our favorite punch, served on fall colored plates with coordinating silly turkey napkins!

And, of course, the kids were dressed appropriately in the precious turkey shirts that Karlyn from church made for them. They wore these almost every day the week before Thanksgiving!

After dinner and a rest time, we gathered up all of the fall/Thanksgiving décor (except what we would need for Saturday’s Thanksgiving celebration #4) and pulled out Christmas stuff. Usually that’s a Friday after Thanksgiving thing, but we were going to be gone Friday and busy Saturday, so we decided to go for Thursday afternoon.

Steven helped Doug get the tree ready for assembly and then we all pitched in on the branches. But, most of our lights were out, so the decorating of the tree had to wait for a few more days until we could get more lights.

The girls enjoyed picking out a nativity set to set up in their rooms (Steven claimed the Veggie Tales snow globes!).

Meanwhile, Steven helped me unpack the various little nativity sets from around the world.

Oh, and the trio did get to decorate their own little tree – one that sits in their hallway and is covered with tiny penguin and bear ornaments.

The whole day was sweet and peaceful, reminding us how thankful we are to just be a family!