Thanksgiving

Omar's family held with tradition and gathered at our house for Thanksgiving this year. It was lots of fun, and super crazy. We were so glad they came! There were games, motorcycles, dancing, laughing, hard work, and some nasty Thanksgiving food.



Omar's dad was a huge help with some of the projects we've been putting off forever. They stripped ugly cabin siding off the shed and replaced most of the wood for the roof. Grandpa Luis was so patient and cute with the little boys, letting them help pull out and hammer in nails. Daddy even got them their own, real, little hammers. And when Fernando arrived later in the day he had brought a whole little tool set. Needless to say, I had some happy tool loving boys in my back yard!



The boys also dug out my ugly hedges in the front! Yay! And that was no easy task getting them out of the hard desert dirt! I helped a little, I think, but I'm not even sure I was that helpful. My little guys had lots of fun trying to dig with everyone and loading stuff in the truck. Isaiah was so cute trying to take his wheelbarrow up the ramp just like daddy. He's at the stage I love where he wants to do everything just like daddy. Helaman has gotten a lot more independent, but Isaiah is in the hero-worship stage. And that combined with his belief there is nothing in this world he can't do, makes for some crazy stories! (Like the time he tried to ride his three-wheeler up the ramp after watching dad and Fernando load motorcycles--never look away from the crazy monkey!)



Meanwhile Llael and I were spending the day making batches and batches of jam and jelly. We made several batches of pomegranate jelly and one of Grandma Ruth's special apricot jam. We had completely run out, so I'm really grateful for all the Gridley fruit that came down to Ridgecrest this season! Helaman enjoys the fruits of our labors every day, and tries to talk me into peanut butter and jelly for every meal some days. :)

The real story of Thanksgiving, for me, however, was the dinner itself. It would be hard to imagine dinner turning out worse as a matter of fact! We had 3 times too much salt in our turkey brine, so it was suuuuper salty. As if that wasn't bad enough, one of the times I shut the timer off after basting, I actually shut the oven off. Hours the later the turkey wasn't cooking, because the oven was completely cold! It never did get done all the way, bleeding as Omar carved it. We just served the pieces on the outside that had gotten to temperature. Not that it was delicious anyway! Meanwhile, I had started the potatoes to get done when the turkey should have gotten done had the oven been on, so I left them soaking in the water for hours! Luckily, it was nothing a lot of butter and cream couldn't cover up. The rolls were undercooked. I forgot to put the pecans in the topping on my sweet potato casserole, so added them after it was cooked, but they just fell off. And in the flurry of finishing everything I accidentally dumped the milk into the gravy instead of the potatoes where I meant to dump. The gravy was so salty from being made from turkey drippings it didn't much matter anyway at that point! Hopefully, everyone wasn't too grossed out to ever come back...



Here are some pictures of all the fun, and I can't easily remove the ones already in the post, so just ignore those!

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