Thanksgiving, Table for 4!

This year we had our first ever Just-Us-Thanksgiving.  The first year we were married, we never would've considered staying in Beaumont for a major holiday, and especially not with no one visiting.  Nearly 8 years and 2 kids later, the place has grown on us and much as I love traveling, it's not always all it's cracked up to be when it involves 1,000 mile roadtrips with young kids.  So, it's holidays at home this year, and our Thanksgiving turned out to be awesome.  For 3 days straight (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Saturday) we never left our house.  In this day and age of overloaded schedules, it was complete bliss.  Three solid days of family time:  eating Thanksgiving goodies, hours spent in the backyard, watching football on tv, movie nights, countless hotwheels car races, putting up our Christmas tree, all the other Christmas decorating, etc.  So, here's the recap of our Thanksgiving, Table for 4!

The weather leading up to Thanksgiving day did a LOT to get me in the holiday-spirit.  Nothing like a chill in the air to make me feel like it's Thanksgiving and Christmas is right around the corner.  I don't have words to adequately describe how excited I was when the temperature started dropping a few days before Thanksgiving!!  Grayson was super excited to see "white stuff" when he looked out the front window on Thanksgiving morning.  Don't get too excited - by "white stuff" he just means frost!  Every evening now he asks "Is it gonna be cold tonight??  Will there be white stuff in the morning??".  Poor baby, he wants to see snow so badly!!  So we started the day off bright and early, outside in our PJs, inspecting the frost.

For breakfast I tried a new recipe - Cinnamon Roll/French Toast Casserole, yum!  And while that cooked, the kids' turned their Cozy Coupe into a spaceship and made a quick trip around the solar system.

After breakfast we relaxed for a while, watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  

Then I started cooking the feast... I know it's slightly ridiculous to cook this much food for just the 4 of us, but we wanted our traditional Thanksgiving food, so that's what I made.  We had ham, dressing, mashed potatoes & gravy, sweet potato casserole, green beans, homemade applesauce, pumpkin bread, pecan pie, mincemeat pie, and pumpkin cake.  It's all so yummy and it's not stuff that I usually bother to cook other times of the year, so I really don't mind that we've spent the last week eating the leftovers.  Afterall, Thanksgiving leftovers is good stuff!

And while I cooked, this sweet moment right here happened:

When we sat down to eat, Grayson wanted to be the first one to say the blessing, as is often the case.  Sometimes it's a rote prayer & he's obviously ready to eat, and others times it's such a sweet prayer straight from the heart.  You just never know what's about to come out of his mouth when it's Grayson's turn to pray!!  As it turned out, Grayson's Thanksgiving prayer was one of the heartmelting ones... so heartmelting, in fact, that I wrote it down for his baby book, which is why I can still quote it nearly a week later.  And just so that the middle part makes sense, he's been praying for different missionaries each day, as part of a mission focus at Sunday School, leading up to Lottie Moon / mission offerings.  He's covered enough different missionaries now that he's thoroughly confused on who's who and only keeps a few of their names straight, which is why he was praying for "that girl telling people about Jesus".  So, without further ado, Grayson's Thanksgiving blessing:  

"Thank you for everything, everything You gived us, God. 

Please give that girl a good day going around telling the girls & boys about Jesus. 

And Happy Thanksgiving, God. 

Amen."

I literally teared up when he said "And Happy Thanksgiving, God."  Wasn't expecting that one.  Love the faith of a child, before the thought "That's not important enough to pray about" or "God's too busy to care about that" has ever crossed their minds.

Two more random sweet moments from the day:

After our meal, we headed out to the backyard, where not only did Grayson insist on wearing his football uniform (from Halloween) and then the boys played football, but Grayson also caught a FROG for the first time ever!  Whoa.  That's an exciting day even it wasn't Thanksgiving!  I think he caught this frog 15 different times.  Not even exaggerating.  They'd pet it for a few minutes, the frog would hop down, then Grayson would take off after the poor frog again!

We wrapped up our Thanksgiving with movie-night on the couch.  First time Harrison has joined us for a movie-night and he actually lasted the whole movie!  Blissful family day.  :)