November 2019 Part 3: Thanksgiving

For the third time in a year, all of my siblings, siblings-in-law, nieces, and nephews gathered at my Mom's house, this time for the first ever Thanksgiving feast hosted at my Mom's house. That's right, in the nearly 40 years that she was married, she'd never once had the space to host Thanksgiving dinner. The cousins were especially excited to be together for a big, long sleepover! Emily had been working hard on these little crochet figures to give them, and these three in particular enjoyed the spoils. 

Cassidy and Thomas did their own Turkey trot on Thanksgiving day. We made them a finish line when they made it back. 

The annual stuffing of the celery: 

Final preparations. 

Serving food to the children. 

We had quite the crew and quite the long table. In addition to the 27 Chadwick clan members, we also had my two grandparents, my Aunt Trina, Uncle Doug, and 3 cousins. 

A bit after dinner, we took family pictures. It was snowing at that point, so I posed everyone inside, and then we wandered out to take our group shot as quickly as possible. 

I did a few family pictures for Chelsea and Emily, and then we sent all the kids in to stay warm. Then we took more pictures. 

We've done this height order photo for as long as I can remember. 

And then some silliness: 

And then we put the in-laws through the circuit as well: 

Height order: 

Silliness: 

And then all together. 

Doing the ornament thing made me realize how few pictures we had with just one of us and one of our parents. I decided that we wouldn't have this problem again, and I made each sibling pose individually with my mom. They were happy to oblige me. Here's my picture with Mom. 

Then, age order with just my siblings. I got them all in order, leaving a spot for me. I told them to fill in all the gaps as soon as I got in there. They really followed directions really, really well, and I confess that I had my breath knocked out of me!

I think it must be a law of nature that when Ethan, McCallan, and Gabe are together, Gabe needs to be tossed high into the air. 

We still needed to do the grandkids pictures, so after these, I headed inside to make that happen. About the time we were ready for a picture, Ethan came in dressed like a gorilla. 

Some kids laughed, but the littlest ones started crying hysterically. I don't think anyone mentioned to Ethan that we weren't done with pictures. We had to take some measures to make everyone happy again. 

After pictures, we played games. 

Then, the next day, we got busy setting up Mom's tree for her. She was pretty excited to have her tree in her new house. 

Mom and Dad picked out these cute little solar lights in an after-Christmas sale the year before, and Mom was so excited to finally put them out. 

We also made some outdoor presents with Christmas lights, 2x2s, fabric and ribbon. Ethan and Cal worked on cutting the 2x2s and putting together the frames, and then Taryn, Erika, Mom, and I figured out how to make boxes (Emily and Chelsea had already left by then, and Cassidy didn't want to make any). Here's how mine turned out: 

On Saturday, we also had a braiding train going on. Too bad we didn't think of this earlier when Emily and Chelsea (with her three girls) was here. We could have had an amazing train with all of us! 

Cassidy really wanted a picture of her and Cal in the freshly fallen snow in her cute plaid clothes. Cal humored her. 

It was so fantastic being with everyone for Thanksgiving. We all kept a stiff upper lip, and amazingly we didn't end up all in a puddle over missing Dad, though we all missed him so much. It was all just a little bittersweet. We felt his absence in the picture, at the table, and when we played "Time's Up". But, I'm so grateful that this first major holiday we got to spend together.