Holiday Recap Randomness

In preparation for hosting Thanksgiving this year, my kitchen and dining room started off by looking like this ...

... and like this ...

... and while I will admit that it took a long time to get all of that organized and into my cupboards and refrigerators, it did eventually get cleaned up!  My brother, Tory, and his family joined us at our home for Turkey Day festivities this year and it was completely wonderful to get to spend some time with them!  It really blessed my heart to see Colin playing so well with my nephew, Elijah, as this has not always been the case in the past - but at this particular gathering, they played as if they were old buddies!

Lisa and I spent much time cooking and cleaning (though I have to give credit to Monte and Tory, as they did almost all of the post dinner clean up!) ...

... *sorry Lisa, this is the only mid-cooking picture of us that I have!  Once the meal preparation was complete, we sat down and enjoyed an amazing dinner, of which I completely forgot to capture a photo!  Oops :)  After dinner and clean up, we played a pretty intense game of Monopoly, complete with people forming allies with other players against all the rest of the players.  Intense, I tell you.  Intense! :)

After Monopoly and some chatting, we called it a night.  The next morning we were all up bright and early and showered and played with 'le bebe' (my beautiful newborn niece, Abby):

... and Ellis chose out his dressy clothes for the day ... :)

... and we all loaded up into our vehicles and headed to my brother, Jeremy's, house for yet another Thanksgiving dinner.  Due to the fact that Jeremy had to work on Thanksgiving Day, we were all getting together to celebrate on Black Friday (no shopping included).  It was a great day of food, laughs, kids playing at the park, rocking the baby to sleep (have I mentioned that I'm a total baby hog?!) and enjoying the company of family.  It ended with a group picture of all of the grandchildren (a.k.a. all of my children, as well as my nieces and nephews) ...

... aren't they a crazy cute bunch?!  All in all, Thanksgiving weekend has been an amazing one for us!  I've got updates coming soon as to how my most recent doctor's appointment went (and about the appointment coming up on Wednesday) and an update as to why we've emptied all of the contents of our garage and are no longer using it.  Stay tuned for those updates!  Hoping your holiday was splendid!