{ r. life }: Thanksgiving Weekend

We had a great Thanksgiving Weekend full of family time, visitors, and of course FOOD. On Thursday we enjoyed brunch at our neighbor's house in the morning and the rest of the day was spent relaxing, playing Scrabble (our favorite!), and making cinnamon rolls - which turned out to be very yummy.

rolling out dough for my first cinnamon rolls

Friday was spent shopping, as I tried to find the best deals I could. I realized that I should have gotten up earlier when I went to Wal-Mart at 9am and all the things I had on my list were already sold out. Booo! But I managed to find some other good deals at Old Navy, Michael's and Costco. Every year I remind myself to get up at 5am and score some sweet deals, and every year I sleep past 5 and miss out. Next year will be MY year for shopping. :) Mom and Parker came up on Friday night to spend some time with us. Will loves Parker, he just stares at him and smiles or laughs at whatever silly thing he's doing. We did some cooking and Parker and I did a "pretzel project." (Dipping pretzels into white chocolate and covering them with sprinkles.) He loved sprinking them and of course eating them!

Sunday we had a big dinner with Dad and Tina and Nika who came up from Portland. Keturah came down with Clark and we had a turkey dinner that afternoon. This was my first time cooking a turkey which is funny since I'm a vegetarian. Let's just say it was a learning experience. I was nervous about doing it "right." Since we have no meat thermometer, it was difficult to tell if the bird was cooked through. So we took it out after 4 hours and Ryan started to carve it. It wasn't done. But he still cut up the meat and we nuked it. Everyone said it was yummy, but I think they were just being polite. Next year: Tofurkey. (tofo "turkey") apparently Trader Joe's has them. So we'll see about that. All the other food turned out to be delicious and we all chowed down.

The Food!