Thanksgiving 2012

This year, what with having a newborn and still trying to regain our family equilibrium, we decided not to travel for Thanksgiving.  The thought of wrangling our two kiddos on multiple flights and staying in a new place just long enough for them to get used to it before we had to turn right around and fly back was -- daunting.  So we decided to have a nice, quiet Thanksgiving at home!

We did mention to the PEF staff that we'd be around and willing to host some students for dinner.  As of Tuesday morning, we had one student likely confirmed to come over.  After staff meeting on Tuesday, David came home with a few other names as possibilities, so he emailed them and told them to feel free to come and bring other friends who were on campus for Thanksgiving.  As of Tuesday evening, we had six students confirmed.  By Wednesday evening, we were expecting twelve students.  And on Thursday morning, as David was driving to pick students up, we got two more possible additions to our table.  Ahh, scheduling fun with college students...  :)

We ended up having fourteen adults, including us, around our table for dinner.  (Which is exactly how many chairs we have, and one more than the number of fancy china dinner plates, and two more than the number of fancy water glasses.  So David and I used regular dishes, but at least we had seats!)  And I think we had just enough food for everyone.  :)  I had so much fun planning the dinner and making the dishes -- I relied pretty heavily on make-ahead recipes this year, and the dinner was actually pretty low-stress.  Thanks, in part, I'm sure, to my crazy planning tendencies...


What?  At least I didn't draw up charts and timelines this time!

The students who came over were such a lovely group, all of whom live too far away to make the trip home for just a few days.  They were all enchanted with Joshua and Sophia, and Joshua loved having so many new friends over!  He enlisted them to chase him back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, and one of the guys pulled out his phone and started playing an appropriate orchestral score to accompany the chase.  :)  The kids both went down for their naps just before we sat down to dinner in the early afternoon, and we had lively and entertaining grown-up conversation as we ate.

I was unfortunately too busy prepping and serving the meal to get any photos of the food or even of our guests, but I'm including some iPhone snapshots of the aftermath -- because, you know, pics or it didn't happen.  :)



And two cute Instagram shots of the kiddos -- Joshua enjoying the super-fun obstacle course we created just for him, and Sophia enjoying her favorite Thanksgiving dinner course.


Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving surrounded by good friends!