Dateline: 25 November 2021, Thanksgiving day
On Sunday, we picked up our son and his husband at the airport. On Monday our daughter and husband and their four children drove in. So we have had a houseful. But it all ends tomorrow.
Because of them all leaving the day after Thanksgiving, we decided to make our Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday. Otherwise, there would have been too many leftovers for the wife and I to finish on our own. It was a great feast, even with leaving out the corn. On Monday our son prepared a nice meal of chicken breasts, pasta, and broccoli. Tuesday the four younger adults (I don’t think I can call them “young” any more as they are now at the lower end of middle-aged), and I prepared Grandpa’s Mythical Sandwich along with cabbage and carrots. That, along with a nice breakfast casserole and some blueberry muffins our daughter brought and a fruit salad Lynda made, and we have eaten very well.
I instituted a new rule for this visit: No screens in the morning until they had read 30 minutes in a physical book. They could pick any book(s) in the house. Ephraim chose a Dickens book off our shelves, the one with the Christmas stories. Ezra grabbed the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. Elise picked a Chronicles of Narnia book, but then changed her mind when her uncles gave her a book as an early Christmas present, a book with famous women’s stories, I think. I actually haven’t been able to look at it much. She read it in the first two days and began re-reading it today. It was kind of hard to get the youngest, Elijah, to participate.
We worked on the fort in the nearby woods, and it is done, all but three posts. That included finishing one wall destroyed when a tree fell on it and moving one entrance and closing another. Ezra and I also worked on the path to the fort, marking it with logs. They didn’t play much it in, but I have come to realize that the fun is in the building.
Lots of board games were played, the grandparents not really participating. But the grandkids had fun at it. Little Elijah let me read to him several times.
Thanksgiving is in the books for 2021. It was the first time for the whole family to be together since Thanksgiving 2019. May there be many more such times.
