In Memory of Turkey Day

The tiny bit of OCD in me just can't let it get too far into December (seriously, where did November go? It flew, FLEW by.) without documenting Thanksgiving.  We drove down to see some good friends of ours in southern VA. 
So now instead of being 11 hours away, we are only 3 (technically speaking, and without any traffic.)
Before I get into our weekend festivities however, I wanted to clue you in to a couple of priceless bits of wisdom that I have discovered about traveling with children.

#1 I have discovered the earplug.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  It actually made the trip, dare I say, enjoyable? All it did was put my daughters' voices at a more tolerable level.  I could still hear them and address their "needs" but didn't have to endure the part of the trip where they get bored and pretend to be Velociraptors.

#2 Take the opportunity to plug in each of your children at some point during the trip.  Forget the roadside bingo for a spell and take a nap yourself while they all get sucked into Beyonce music videos and preschool games on the iphone.

#3 Plug in your husband too, if at all possible.  It keeps him AND you entertained.

#4 The all purpose bucket/can.  It can catch garbage, emergency tinkle and barf...and it has.  Worth it's weight in gold.  And I have become slightly addicted to the little garbage bags from the baby section at Target.  Perfect.

#5 Flavored sunflower seeds.  The keep us all entertained and create the illusion of actually eating so the kids don't complain every 8.3 minutes that they are starving to death.  Just make sure you bring some cups to spit the shells into or else you will chug the water bottles you  have too quickly (thus creating a need for the emergency tinkle bucket.) You might also end up throwing them out the window and getting them stuck to the windows on the side of the car.  And that is disgusting.

#6 The broken DVD player.  It's ghetto, but that's how we roll Baby.  It actually still works, it just hangs by it's wires from the ceiling.  We are going to have to do something about that before we drive 8 million miles home to Texas for Christmas.  It is so much easier to tell the kids "how many movies left" until we get there instead of using actual measurements of time.  "Hey, we are only two Alice in Wonderlands, one Neverending Story and three episodes of Charlie and Lola away kids!"

We met the Millers when we lived in VA several years ago and just can't get rid of them, or rather, they can't get rid of us.  We like them, a lot.  They have become our travel buddies (we have done a cruise to Cozamel and a trip to Costa Rica...where to next you ask? We have a running list.)  We have a lot of fun with them and we adore their kids.  So Thanksgiving was a blast and they were very generous to invite our family of 6 to crash in their beautiful home--especially considering that Laurie just had a baby 5 weeks prior!  We kicked their oldest out of her room and she left us a welcome note and goodies.

 Hazel hit it off with Mark and the ding dongs...hmmm Mike, I think I know why she liked you so much.  Hostess can buy love from anyone.

 And I hit it off with Laurie's gi-normous bottle of sanitizer.  Dreamy.

 And now is the part where I tell you that I am a loser because I was so busy taking pictures of enormous bottles of sanitizer that this is the only picture that I got of our lovely hostess and her amazing spread on Thanksgiving.  She truly has a talent for hostessing, organization and cleanliness.  It's one of the many reasons that I love her so.

 But look, I had enough presence of mind to take a picture of my food.
I am a dork.  It's kind of weakness in my family.  We take pictures of food.  So sue us.

 And then we made them stay up late every night to play with us.  I wish I could say that my Nertz skills from Costa Rica carried over...but I think I have lost my lucky streak (or maybe I just let them win so they would like me.)

 We even went to one of our favorite parks from when we lived there and I tried to take pictures in the semi-dark.  I also beat both Clark and Mike AND ten year old Ben in a foot race.  OK, so maybe I got a little bit of a head start but I ran more than 10 yards and didn't throw up.  I get points for that.  I would share the video of it with you but as it turns out, I look like a total goober when I run.  Why didn't anyone tell me in high school?

Thank you for letting us snuggle baby Ellie and for feeding us bacon and for playing games and eating and just hanging out!
Thank you Millers for having us!!!