Happy Thanksgiving!

We had such a lovely Thanksgiving. J served up two tofurkeys, baked with tons of carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions, plus sweet potato cornbread and mashed potatoes. Grammie brought over green beans amandine and brussels sprouts with a maple-mustard glaze (delicious!) as well as a homemade cranberry compote. For dessert we had apple and pumpkin pie.

Before Thanksgiving, R and I spent some time with her new Fancy Nancy's Thanksgiving Feast book from Grammie and Grampy. In that book, Fancy Nancy is disappointed to have to eat at the kids' table because the kids get paper plates, paper napkins, and plastic cups, so she's thrilled when her uncle asks if he can switch seats with her and she gets to sit at the adult table and use the fancy china and linen napkins.

At our Thanksgiving meal, we pulled out our fancy china--I love being able to use it for special meals!--and we let R have her own china teacup to drink milk out of. She was so tickled!

The night before Thanksgiving, R helped me make napkin holders for everyone. We cut toilet paper rolls in half and covered them with brown construction paper, and then drew and cut out turkey bodies, beaks, and wattles. R did all the beaks and she and I both did wattles, and I did all the turkey bodies. We then traced R's hand and cut out various colors to make the turkey feathers, and R drew eyes on all of them and wrote everyone's names on the bottom of their holder.

Here's a more close-up view of the napkin holders and turkey centerpiece R made at school. I love them! They really made our table look so festive!!

On another note, we finally convinced R to let RUS move into her high chair, telling her that she was going to get her very own big girl chair--so that we could finally get rid of our huge plastic high chair. She had already agreed that she was going to move when she was 4.5, but she's not quite 4.5 yet (still two weeks to go!) so we had to wheedle her into it. She was really resistant to moving until we told her that she could put her name on her chair and decorate it however she liked. She wrote her name and cut it out, and then drew a heart and cut that out too. They are taped to her chair. THEN she wanted to make name tags for everyone at the table, so she wrote everyone's name, cut them out, and taped them to their assigned chairs.

Both kids played together so well before our meal while J and I were finalizing all the touches (I was getting the china out and helping clean/put things away while J was doing all the cooking). At one point R came running into the kitchen saying, "RUS wants to wear a dress!" I just kind of laughed and said, "Okay, whatever!" thinking that she was maybe pulling out her dress-up suitcase and digging into the princess dresses. But this is what we saw when they came back out of her room about ten minutes later:

R had pulled one of her actual dresses out of the closet and put it on RUS. And then he grabbed his favorite princess accessory--her princess hair dryer--and came out and dried his hair while showing off his fancy new dress. They were both so tickled. And I took a picture to document the occasion.

When Grammie and Grampy finally arrived, we got all the food on the table and sat down to eat. Here are the kids gearing up for the meal:

And here's Grammie giving me the side-eye while stirring the gravy (I hope she doesn't hate me for putting this picture online!)

While J carved up the tofurkey!

And here's everyone sitting down to enjoy the meal! It was delicious and we just finished up most of the leftovers today. I just love this meal and all the leftovers that go with it.