Turkey Trot

Why does craziness always erupt right around the holidays? This year I will have 10.5 adults at my house for Thanksgiving (my original family of 5 + JP + all 4 of my grandparents + Landon, who will probably only eat the rolls and corn pudding), I hurt my back again on Wednesday, and I am slammed at work. I was in the office until midnight on Friday, though I did go home for 2 hours to see Landon, eat dinner, and pick up a DQ blizzard to power me through the rest of my memo. I'm not sure it helped but it was definitely tasty.

JP has multiple group projects and papers due this week, so I spent the weekend prepping for the big meal with Landon. It's a good thing he loves HEB because we spent quite a lot of time there. He stands up in the cart and talks to everyone we pass in the aisles. Sometimes it's just a hello, sometimes he likes to tell them I'm his mom ("MY mama!"), and other times he wants to show them the fireman on his t-shirt. People have started to recognize him at the store- I think he has more friends in our neighborhood than I do. We also cleaned the house and made multiple to-do lists of the rest of the phases of Thanksgiving prep. I love entertaining, truly, it is not something that stresses me out and I get to buy pretty decor for the table and use all my fancy serving dishes, I just have to do it in a very organized, very to-do list heavy manner.

I forgot to share some big news from last week - we now have official, matching master bedroom furniture! (Which is how I hurt my back.) I ordered the bedroom set six weeks ago and had no idea when it would arrive. We got the call Tuesday afternoon that it would be here Wednesday, so we had to move all our current furniture upstairs so the new stuff could be delivered. And our old furniture? was heavy. Luckily JP is very strong and did 95% of the work, but some of the pieces were unwieldy and I had to help guide them up our stairs that inconveniently turn at sharp angles twice along the way. But everything looks great spread among our upstairs bedrooms. Oddly enough, while none of the pieces matched each other, each matched one of the rooms upstairs, so now they all have a full set. We were able to use every piece, some of which have a lot of sentimental value, and my 6'2" brother is excited about getting our old queen-sized bed and upgrading from his double. The feeling of completeness makes me very happy.

I stayed up way too late on Wednesday switching all the clothes from our old drawers to the new ones, getting out all the decorating items I've been slowly buying over the past 15 months, and then just sitting and admiring our beautiful room. As I told JP when he got back from practice that evening- "it looks like grown-ups live here!" I love it so much. We waited 4.5 years to have a real bedroom set and then spent 15 months saving up for it and slowly buying the linens and curtains and picture frames that would make it complete (and buy "we" I mean me). There's still a few things I need to arrange and get JP to hang- including a very pretty wood medicine cabinet I found for the bathroom, which of course required moving a towel rod we put up a year ago, spackling the holes, painting them over, and then re-installing the rod about 4" down. It's a good thing he loves me because I have a few more project ideas left to implement. But then we should be done.

My back is spasming as I write this and I can't take ibuprofen for it (damn pregnancy taking away all the helpful drugs). Cooking the 20 lb. turkey and all the sides should be interesting on Thursday. But I'm excited to have my whole family together and I love putting out a big meal. I found the cutest stuffed turkey at Marshalls and Landon carries it all around the house saying "gobble gobble". It's going to be a great holiday, I just need to get through this massive work to-do list first!