Family Friday: Happy Thanksgiving!

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  This is my favorite holiday - lots of amazing food and no obligation for presents.  Here on this island, we don't have any family to spend the holiday with but we were blessed to have some great friends come celebrate with us!

I dressed the table with a neutral tablecloth and then used a strip of fabric as table runner, topped with a piece of burlap.  One of our sweet guests brought the beautiful flowers!  Everyone brought some side dishes and we ended up with quite a feast: turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, sushi, homemade poke, pumpkin cheesecake, and bread pudding.  Everything was delicious.

Johnnie was in charge of cooking the turkey this year and he did an amazing job!  This was actually the first turkey we ever cooked ourselves.  It was a huge bird... 27 pounds of deliciousness!  We put a pretty good dent in it ourselves, sent a few meals to friends, and still have a ton of leftovers.  I hear a turkey pot pie recipe calling our name...

Cameron loved the attention of everyone in the house.  I don't think she has ever laughed that much in one day before!  She went down for an afternoon nap just before we ate - perfect timing :)

Dulce also loved the attention from everyone and loved the turkey dinner we gave her.

Johnnie was deployed last Thanksgiving so this is our first one together as a family!  It was perfect.

We did not go out shopping for the Black Friday sales.  Traffic and crowds are bad every day of the year here so this one day of sales makes that exponentially worse.  On an island of over 1 million people, there are only 5 Walmarts, 2 Targets, 2 Best Buys, 1 Toys R Us, 1 Babies R Us, etc...  you get the picture, there are limited stores and parking spaces here for that many people to all be shopping at once.

There were some fantastic deals to be found for those who got out early enough.  However, a lot of the deals weren't as great as you would think.  Normal retail prices here in Hawaii are 20-30% higher here than in the mainland so even with that great coupon you cut out of the paper, you're still basically getting things for the price you would've normally paid elsewhere.  But we're in Hawaii so that coupon makes it as good as it's going to get.  The majority of things are much cheaper on Amazon so that's where we do a lot of our shopping.

Instead of shopping Friday morning, we slept in and then Cameron played, Johnnie worked on Master's degree homework, and I made a Christmas wreath for the front door.  This is the same grapevine wreath I used for Halloween.  I attach everything with wires so that I can reuse and redecorate it for every season.  Next step... buy a Christmas tree!

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"Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast."

~William Shakespeare

Family Friday: Happy Thanksgiving!

11 Weeks Old

Happy Thanksgiving!  Cameron and I celebrated with neighbors and had a lovely time.  The only thing missing was Johnnie but we are lucky to be able to video chat with him often.  Our dinner was a potluck style get-together so there was a great variety of food.  I made a pumpkin pie and dinner rolls... and I'm still not sure how I found the time to do that!

Johnnie and everyone deployed with him had a Thanksgiving dinner complete with decorations and ice sculptures!  It's not the same as being home for the holiday but it's a great effort that hopefully made the men and women there feel some holiday cheer.  My heart goes out to all those who are separated from their loved ones during this holiday season.

Pumpkin pie is my favorite and the one I made for dinner came out perfect.  I used the McCormick's Signiture Pumpkin Pie recipe and added an extra teaspoon or two of cinnamon.  I actually made my own pie crust only because I couldn't find the Pillsbury refrigerated pie crusts and I didn't want to use a frozen crust.  I used leaf cookie cutters to add pie crust decorations to the top.

The dinner rolls are my new favorite roll recipe.  I've made them three times now and they come out perfect every time!  They're quick to make and taste great even days later.  I found the recipe on Pinterest.  They are One Hour Rolls from whatisonyourmenu.blogspot.com.  If you try them, you won't be disappointed :)

I bought Cameron's "My First Thanksgiving" onesie over a month ago so my project this week (nothing like waiting until the last minute) was to sew a skirt to go with it.  I purchased the Ruffled Circle Skirt pattern (a PDF download) from the Etsy shop, Whimsey Couture.  I didn't have any colorful band elastic so I added a waistband and threaded wide elastic through it.  It was so simple, relatively quick, and so cute that I will definitely be making more skirts for Cameron soon!

Cameron has been refusing pacifiers this week.  She sucked on one only twice all week and that was when she was really tired.  She prefers sucking on her fingers and an occasional thumb.  I don't mind this at all because breaking a child of a pacifier addiction when they're older can be a harrowing experience.  Her fingers are always available so she can self-soothe herself as needed.  Last Sunday night, we had ourselves a mommy-daughter date of fist sucking.  Yes, this is my new idea of "fun" :)

This is one of those two times she took a pacifier.  She was so tired that she fell asleep within minutes of me cuddling with her.

We're starting to work on moving up bedtime this week.  She was going to bed around 11pm.  Tonight she was in bed by 9:30.  Earlier this week she was in bed once at 7:30.  Going to bed earlier means waking up earlier but that's probably a good thing... there were many mornings when we stayed in bed way too long :)

Cameron and I went grocery shopping for the first time together alone.  (hmmm... together alone... you know what I mean!)  I wore her in the Ergo carrier so that I could push a cart and fill it with groceries.  She was very alert at first, looking around wide-eyed at everything, but she was fast asleep by the time we hit the end of the second aisle.  I know there are people around me who would be happy to babysit but I actually enjoy taking her places with me.  She's generally really well behaved and I know that it will get her accustomed to being out and experiencing new things.

Cameron has finally left the "newborn" phase and is getting old enough where she's actually fun to hang out with, take shopping, and visit friends.  Babies are a lot of work but it's getting better every day :)

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"Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them,

is the true measure of our thanksgiving."

  ~W.T. Purkiser