We have had a nice, quiet holiday.
My cousin Lesleigh was supposed to come eat with us about 2, but
called at noon and said she was sick and couldn’t come. Bruce is in Iraq, of
course. So it was just the 4 of us. We decided to postpone eating until
tonight.
The kids helped me get the house straightened up this morning.
They were good help all day, actually.
I made the traditional foods: turkey, dressing, creamed corn,
cranberry sauce, fruit salad, cornbread, pecan pie. We were going to do green
beans, but decided against them at the last minute. [We had vegetable soup for
lunch so I wasn’t going to carp about it.]
Mother and I are not crazy about turkey so we don’t roast it. My
kids also prefer soft meats, not roasted or grilled. So we poached the turkey
breast on top of the stove, in water, salt and pepper, some chopped onions and
celery. The bird was only about 5 lbs. - at the end of the day it was so moist
it fell off the bones. We saved the broth for soups.
The dressing was a combined effort of Alesia and Mother and I. We
ended up not doing it in the crock pot, but made mother’s traditional dressing,
with one exception – we used Pepperidge Farm bread crumbs, which was a lot
easier. We made cornbread, and crumbled part of it in with the bread crumbs,
and added chopped onions and celery, chicken soup, baking powder, onion powder,
pepper and salt, poultry seasoning, and several eggs. It’s always wonderful. I
kept adding stuff until it was hard to stir. We ended up freezing an entire pan
full of dressing, which we can have at Christmas, which is great.
In the afternoon, while Mother napped, the kids and I saw an
animated movie called Bolt in 3-D. I expected to be bored, but it was a cute
story. It was a little weird at first hearing John Travolta's voice coming out of a white cartoon dog, but it was fun once I got past that..
At dinner tonight, we all went around and said 5 things we were
thankful for. Mother and I both said we were thankful for our family, our home,
etc. I added I am VERY thankful for our wonderful therapist. I am also thankful
my brother will be coming home soon. Alesia said, first thing, that she was
thankful to be here and not in the orphanage, where she got beaten up. She also
was thankful for her mom, her family, her teachers, who tried to help her, and
her friends, who looked out for her. It was an impressive list. Michael was
thankful for his family, Coco, and the delicious fruit salad.
After dinner we started watching Cleopatra, the Liz Taylor
version. Alesia is learning her ancient history just the way I did, through
movies! She is fascinated. She’s going to really be fascinated when we finish
the movie and she sees Liz and Richard Burton together, and I tell her the back
story there. Wowza.
This was Michael’s second Thanksgiving in America. Last year we
were with a lot of the extended family in Myrtle Beach, but we ate in a
restaurant. This year it was just us, but we ate a traditional meal. I pointed
this out to him while we ate. He was just trying to plow through his turkey and
dressing so he could eat his fruit salad….
