When our children leave, they LEAVE! With one in Seattle, one in Portland and one in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, only two are in our time zone. Brynn and Chad and their four live near the coast of North Carolina, while Mike and Adrienne and Kate live in Delaware.
The two in the East came for Thanksgiving, braving I-40 and I-95 respectively.
Paula appreciated the good help of her daughter-in-law in the kitchen. This lady peels a mean potato.
There were no pictures of the feast. I was either too busy grilling the turkey, setting the table, or grabbing things as they went by during the free-for-all known as Thanksgiving dinner.
It turned out to be a beautiful day, not unusual this time of the year for Raleigh. The grandkids headed straight for the school playground afterwards. We did several trials of Spin the Three-Year-Old to see how soon she could walk after about thirty revolutions. Luckily she didn't throw up.
If the tree leans slightly toward the right, it's because the three-year-old concentrated on that side, and considering her reach, most of her ornaments ended up on the bottom half of the right.
Annie, the bespectacled kid on the right, was very proud of her stick collection, and insisted we arouse ourselves from our post-prandial stupor and marvel at the shapes she had made with them.
Paula pulled a fast one and got help decorating the tree.
Paula has always mocked the long, tapering glass ornaments and calls them "torpedoes." Through the years, somehow, and I'm not saying how, they have had a much higher-than-normal mortality rate. It's kind of weird how she'll say "Ooops!" and after a pause, a torpedo will shatter on the floor...Just sayin.'
Kate, the lopsided three-year-old has inherited her good taste from her grandfather, and appreciates the torpedoes.
She has also inherited important talents from him, including the following:
And no, the old myth about getting your eyes stuck when you cross them is not true. I hope.
My grandson Nathan wanted to do clutch clinic, even though only 2.4% of cars nowadays are sold with a manual transmission. We took the Miata to the church parking lot.
So, Thanksgiving dinner was great. However, with a bunch of extra people and two of them teenagers, we noticed that the provisions in general were disappearing at an alarming rate. Cereal boxes were empty in minutes. Leftovers weren't left over. We were throwing comestibles at them to keep them at bay, but it wasn't holding them for long. Pretty soon, they started looking around for other things to consume...
Now, I'm not saying that Paula and the tree rats haven't had their disagreements. They love to drop empty pine cone shards on her front sidewalk, and she no longer tries to grow tomatoes after they got a taste for them. However, this was getting ridiculous. Battered and fried squirrel steaks, while admittedly a Southern thang, are kind of a mess on the stove, and the neighbors start talking.
Plus, even our tomato-fed plump little tree chickens weren't going to last very long with this horde.
Luckily, work, school and other awful things were becoming more urgent, and while gazing hungrily up into our pine trees, the kids and grandkids packed their cars and took off, figuring MacDonald's would be an OK second-best. Even if they don't serve squirrel ribs.
We hope that your Thanksgiving worked out all right also, and that they left you something more than some relieved rodents in their wake.
Dave & Paula
