Thanksgiving 2011

What I'm most thankful for this year.....my beautiful family. :) 

Happy Liam...

This is the first Thanksgiving in SC, away from my family but we have the pleasure of hosting Nick's parents for the holiday.
We did not have a "traditional bird" on the table.  Everyone knows I do not like handling meat, especially poultry so this year I am thankful for Trader Joe's pre-cooked turkey breast!  They had a tasting at the store so we didn't take a total gamble on the turkey- it was Nick pre-approved.

Here's the rest of the feast:

This is my first Thanksgiving hosting (I just hosted the house-I did not cook) and there was bound to be a "story".  All of the food turned out great---thanks to Mary for preparing it.  However, the dessert was a disaster.  Mary told me that Ron just had to have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving so I bought all the ingredients to make one at home.  The recipes seemed very easy so I wasn't worried about it.  I bought the ingredients from memory rather than a recipe and ended up buying evaporated milk instead of sweetened condensed milk.  I realized this and looked at various recipes and decided that it was ok to substitute the evaporated milk for condensed milk.  We baked the pie.  I took one bite and knew something had gone wrong.  It's ok to substitute evap. milk for condensed milk IF you ADD sugar.  I overlooked that part! So essentially we ended up with a sugarless pie---what I call "baby food pumpkin pie"...just awful!   I may try to salvage it tomorrow morning by using the filling to make pumpkin pancakes.  

Liam sat on his big chair for the first time....only for a few minutes. 

After our early dinner we set up the Christmas tree.  Nick took Gavin shopping for Christmas trees a couple of weeks ago and Gavin picked out this tree.  He chose the white Christmas tree.  He was really excited to get the tree set up.

Grandpa and Grandma help to set up the tree

Giving directions

Adding his Cars ornaments

Here's Gavin opening up his Little People Nativity Set....such a cute little set.  I love that he can play with it.

 Gavin didn't know what an angel was or looked like.  The set comes with an angel that goes on top of the nativity scene so he told Nick, "I want to put the dragonfly on top".  He now knows it's an Angel. :)

It was a great family day.
I did miss my family but I will see them in just a couple of weeks so I was able to keep my emotions in check today. :)