Getting Ready for Turkey Day...

Thanksgiving is just about my very favorite holiday! I love that we, as a nation, set aside one day of the year to be with family and friends and just be thankful for our good fortune. I love that Thanksgiving is the one holiday that (so far) our materialistic culture hasn't been able to corrupt - there is no frenzy of greed, no pressure to buy anything (at least until the day after!) It's about taking the time to create a wonderful feast for your family and friends, and I think that is just fabulous.

So, I am busy getting ready for our Thanksgiving. I wish that we had some family or friends coming over to share our feast with us. We thought up until a couple weeks ago that dh's mom would be joining us, but unfortunately she is fighting cancer and is too ill to travel. So, this year it will just be us. I do love creating a special day for my family! Yesterday and today we're doing some heavy housecleaning, and today I'll start my cooking, too. Here is our menu for Thanksgiving, 2006.

Breakfast: Sandy's Sour Cream Coffee Cake (a delicious family recipe!)

Lunch: Appetizers! Crab dip, assorted cheeses and crackers, a relish tray with pickles and olives, and chex mix.

Dinner: Roast turkey and gravy, sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, green bean casserole, cranberry relish

Desert: Apple Pie and Pumpkin Pie

Last night I made a special breakfast treat for dh to take to work with him to tell his co-workers "Happy Thanksgiving", and for us to enjoy this morning, too. The Pumpkin Butterscotch Muffins over at Tammy's Recipes are absolutely delicious. So easy, they come out looking pretty, and it only takes 15-20 minutes to get them into the oven, so it's a perfect "extra" in the busy days leading up to Thanksgiving. The only issue I had with the recipe was that it made *far* more batter than 18 muffin's worth. I made 18 muffins *and* a 9 inch round cake pan. *Not* that I'm complaining, lol! :-)

While I'm busy cleaning and cooking, I'm going to be thinking of ways I can include the boys in our preparations. Obviously, they're (grudgingly) helping with the clean-up, but I want more than that. As a family, we are woefully craft-phobic. Oh, don't get me wrong, I love to knit and stitch. I mean the school-type crafty things. I see pictures of my virtual homeschooling friends doing lovely notebook pages, lap books, etc, and I just shake my head. Even if I managed to pull something together like that, my boys would look at me like I grew a third eye if I asked them to do that sort of thing. That said, they do love the scissors and glue stuff, and I believe we need to do more of that sort of thing as I think it would help with their fine-motor control issues. So, I am looking around for fun Thanksgiving crafts! I just love these leaf turkeys, and if only I had some googly-eyes laying around I would do this as I think the boys would love it. I might try to get something similiar going with just some construction paper cut-outs. I also really like the thankfullness tree, and we're definitely going to work on it today and tomorrow - what a lovely idea!!

Now, I need to go and actually get to work. I will post pictures of the boys and our crafts soon!