Thanksgiving-Kim's version

Can you believe that it has already been a week since Thanksgiving? And Christmas is only 3 weeks away. Yikes!!!! I better get my act together.

Since Jodi already posted some photos of Thanksgiving at my house, I thought I'd give you my version.

We had a small Thanksgiving this year. It was Mom, Dad, Jodi, my family & Danica (Eric's oldest daughter). Andrea & Eric's families spent Thanksgiving with their inlaws. At least that was the excuse they gave for not coming. Todd had a lame excuse too. His excuse, he lives in Utah & had to work.

Danica was the only one from Eric's family who came to my house for dinner, but only because she had to work at 4pm. So she couldn't go with her family to Borrego Springs for their family dinner with Jeannette's (Eric's wife) extended family.

We were lucky that Mom, Dad & Jodi could attend. They almost weren't able to as mom fell and hit her head and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance the Monday before Thanksgiving. Luckily she was alright. Nothing broke. She just wanted to steal the spotlight away from Aunt Joan who had been in the hospital for hip replacement. At least that is what Aunt Joan said. She said it jokingly to Mom, but I'm sure there was a smidgen of truth in it as well.

Lucky for me, my hubby Mike loves to do the turkey & stuffing. Mom and Dad provided the turkey. I just had to pick it up from their house the week before Thanksgiving so that it had time to thaw out in the fridge.

Here is this years turkey. It's a Butterball!!! Nothing but the best for our family. Did you notice how the legs are all tucked in nice and the wings folded under. Mike's dad was a butcher, so he learned all these neat tricks from him.
I spared you the photo of Mike's tummy. He stuck it out real fat to look like the turkey. I took a photo, but I thought it was too much for you all.

Here is the stuffing all mixed up. We use Mrs Cubbison's cornbread stuffing. This is 2 boxes which is 4 bags of stuffing.
Here is Mike stuffing the turkey. He got all the above stuffing in this 17 pound turkey. Sorry that the photo is blurry.
Cooking corn, mashed potatoes and gravy. The large pot on the right in the back was used for boiling my yams before putting them in the oven to make candied yams.
Thanksgiving is the one time a year I wish I had a 5 burner stove and a double oven. But I don't. Boo hoo! But lucky for me Mike has a ton of Calphalon cookware. The one lone silver pot is mine & it is 27 years old. But it is still my favorite, even over the Calphalon.

And here is how our turkey turned out. Yummy!!!! This was Mike's best turkey to date.

We didn't want to squeeze in 8 people at one table. So I did up 2 tables. This table is in my kitchen/family room. If you want to see more photos of this tablescape, you can click here.
And here is the table in my living room area. I also did a post about this tablescape on my Starshine Chic blog. If you want to see more of this tablescape, click here.
Mike carved up the turkey & placed a lot of it on his favorite Lenox china serving platter.
Here is my plate of food. I did not artfully arrange it. The photo was an after thought after I piled everything on my plate. You're just lucky I remembered to take a photo before wolfing it all down.
We had turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, candied yams, corn, stuffing, green bean casserole and our annual Thanksgiving green jello salad. I did forget to take a photo of that.

Here is everyone that ate in the family room. Dad, Danica, Mom, Mike & me. But I did not take a photo of myself.

Eating at the living room table is Brandon, Jesse and Jodi. This was the kid's table.
Our goal was to eat at 2:00pm as Danica had to leave by 3:30pm to be to work by 4:00. We didn't actually eat until about 2:45pm. So Danica was able to eat before leaving for work. She was starting to get a little worried.

After dinner, Jodi and I put away the left overs and did the dishes. Then we messed around with her Cricut cutting machine that she had brought up with her. She left it for me to use, but so far, I haven't had the time.

We ate pumpkin pie for dessert (what is Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie?). Then Mom, Dad & Jodi left some time after dark. I think it was about 5:30 or 6:00.

It was actually a very nice and relaxing Thanksgiving. I enjoy having all my family around to celebrate, but it was also kind of nice to have a small gathering as well.

So that is what we did for Thanksgiving. What did you do? Eric already posted about his. If you missed it, you can see it by clicking here. And if you missed Jodi's version, you can click here.

And I final thing before you go, I'm having my first giveaway on my other blog Starshine Chic. I'm giving away all this:
Click here, to see how to enter my giveaway.

And come back tomorrow. I plan on posting about Jesse's birthday last night. We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown Riverside as well as the Mission Inn to see all the Christmas lights.