thanksgiving, family style

we currently have three sick kiddos in the house. mikey with a lingering cough and low-grade fever. allie with a lovely stomach bug that makes her throw up multiple times a day. and lauren with another stomach bug that’s causing her to throw up first thing in the morning, then have plumbing issues for the rest of the day. which then gives me no choice but to set aside all the busy holiday plans i had set in order to tend to the kiddos and help them feel better. tiring, for sure, but also nice to know that sometimes, all they want is mommy.

anyway, for thanksgiving, we considered going up north to celebrate with phil’s mom and brother but we decided at the last minute to stay home and relax instead since phil had to work on saturday. so we ended up having a great little day with the kids.

we started the started the celebration on wednesday night with a little kogi truck chasing. (taken with phil’s iphone)

on thanksgiving day, we headed over to citywalk to hang out for a little while. allie (and mikey) loved watching this little wave maker.

little toes.

daddy with the little monkeys.

we stopped in the crepe store to try the chocolate-banana concoction. two little fingers found their way into the whipped cream pretty quickly.

lauren thought it was pretty tasty, too.

these two think they’re at a playground no matter where we are.

then allie put on a little dance recital for us:

and lauren’s officially a walker now! she’s been walking across the living room, making turns, and especially loves walking to mikey and giving him a hug. she’s pretty proud of her new skill. at thanksgiving time though, she was still mostly cruising and only taking a step or two before sinking back down to crawl.

this is her you-can’t-catch-me face:

checking out the tree:

she was making it a point not to look at me (because she knew i wanted her to), but i love this one anyway:

mikey was pretty happy about going on the escalator with me while daddy and the girls (and the stroller) took the elevator.

and he was also pretty happy about going to his favorite place for lunch:

lauren was pretty pleased with her new shoes:

and daddy let the kids make a ‘dancing heads’ music cd just before we left.

while the kids took their afternoon naps, phil and i set to work making our thanksgiving feast. phil agreed to make the bird (we chose chicken this year instead of turkey since mikey declared that he liked thanksgiving food, but then requested that we have chicken– i don’t think he quite understands that usually thanksgiving includes turkey. so i think we have a few years left that we can get out of eating turkey before the kids catch on and insist that we eat ‘what everyone else eats’).

making dinner this year was really fun since we got to do it together and phil proved himself to be really helpful with the side dishes, too.

the spread (we don’t have much by way of decorations and fancy table settings, we’re kinda all about the food– roasted chicken, sausage-apple-cranberry stuffing, parmesan mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon and toasted almonds, and whipped yams topped with pecans and brown sugar):