Thanksgiving Highlights and Lowlights

Spending a week in Arizona for Thanksgiving was (nearly) blissful! I always like to get the bad news out of the way first, so let's cover some of the lowlights briefly.

Lowlights:

Henry woke up at 3:30am the morning of our departure with major diarrhea (apologies). It lasted FOUR days into our trip. It made for a lot of diaper changes, temper tantrums, babying and coddling, then trying to reverse the damage done from all the babying and coddling. I came home exhausted, especially since Phil was not with me.

Poor Jack, he was a bit neglected by me, so thank heavens Auntie Lyssa stepped up and helped as much as possible. Sadly, by the end of our visit, Jack was mistakenly calling Alyssa "Mama" and cared more when she walked out the door than when I did. He still walks around the house saying, "Where'd Lala go?" He loves her to pieces.

And the biggest lowlight of the trip was at our actual Thanksgiving dinner. Henry, having stuffed his face with appetizers all morning, sat down for dinner and two minutes into it threw up everywhere. That had to be the shortest Thanksgiving meal in history! It definitely will be memorable, though. Still, a major lowlight because my appetite was ruined after that, and probably everyone else's, too.

Highlights:

My sisters and I had an embarassing impromptu photo shoot in front of my mom's blue bedroom wall. We even got my mom involved and we were laughing so hard we were crying on the floor. This is one of the pictures of us sisters, we were trying to be hard-core. Turns out we are just hard-core weirdos.

After not seeing my mom much, the boys sure warmed up to Nanna. Here they are playing in the desk chair with her as she spun them around. Just look at their faces! They love to point her out in pictures now.

We spent lots of time watching Christmas movies, namely The Grinch, Rudolph, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and my personal favorite, Holiday Inn. My boys love Christmas movies, I made sure of it!

The food we did eat for Thanksgiving dinner ended up being delicious. Alyssa and I decided to try all new recipes and we made them ourselves: sage stuffing, butternut squash puree with maple syrup, creamy mashed potatoes and a rich chocolate cream pie. I pretty much spent the entire trip eating a lot of food. And isn't my mom a cutie? She was a fabulous hostess and watched the boys for me so I could shop of Black Friday. It was so fun!