Year of Thanksgiving

This year was actually a fun year. My parent's ditched us for Thanksgiving and headed down to Arizona to be with my aunt. After that, they were headed over to San Diego to get on their cruise. They were going to be gone for some time. All of us kids decided that we would get together and prepare Thanksgiving dinner ourselves. It was really fun and really easy since we divided out all of the assignments. We were naturally in charge of the turkey. We had the turkey and we did one last year for Jeff's family. So we were the only ones that knew how to really do it. I was watching the TODAY show the day before and they showed 4-5 different ways to prepare a turkey.

One of them was putting bacon across the top and cooking it. I like bacon, it was worth the try. The bacon flavored the turkey but more importantly kept the breast meat moist. It totally worked.

As we were driving over to my parent's house, I had the hot turkey on my lap. We took the dogs with us so that they could play with their cousins. I thought that it would be a great idea to put Diesel in the back of the truck with Kaika. He would stay back there with her and learn the ropes of riding in a truck. He did okay for a while until half way there, he started putting his paws on the railing. The problem was that he was too short to see over so he would do that for a better view. Closer to my parent's house, we noticed that he was starting to hang over more than he should. We were going about 30mph when all of a sudden I saw him completely topple over the side. It was the saddest thing. He flipped and landed on his back, let out this horrible yelp and took off running away from the truck down the road. I had a turkey on my lap. I was stuck. Jeff jumped out and took chase. He found him in a horse field running like mad somewhere. I was so scared for him. We've only had him for 1 week and he was already badly injured. I hoped not. We put him in the back with Gunnar and got to my parent's to access the damage. He walked perfectly fine and the only thing that we could find was a little skin knick on his leg and a teeny tiny bit of blood on his nose. He was tired and calm all afternoon. He really was traumatized and scared I think. To this day, he is frightened of the truck when it is on or any moving car going by when we take him on walks. Great...

Jeff has sort of become the resident turkey carver...

And Gunnar was eating the turkey as fast as it was put on the platter.

Brent was making gravy...

As Noelle and I scooped mashed potatoes into this bowl. This was an enormous amount of potatoes and the funny part was that this was only about half that Noelle made. Not sure why she made so much!

For some reason these were the only pictures I got. We had such a fun time together. Later that night we headed over to Jeff's brother's house because it was his birthday. Him and I have birthdays two days apart so his this year happen to be on Thanksgiving. We had more pie and fun family time. We headed back to my parent's to fetch our dog and hang out more looking at the ads for the next day and then headed home. Heidi during the day mentioned how bad she felt that she didn't help mom with dinner all these years. It was so easy and could have saved my mom hours of preparation. Now our mad Thanksgiving skills have been revealed for years to come.