Thanksgiving weekend

Happy holidays 2020! Yay! I took this picture of the kids the day after Thanksgiving and I love it so so so much.

I had a few minutes waiting in the car yesterday so decided to upload some photos from my phone to my blog so I could do a writeup later, but apparently I deleted everything from my Thanksgiving photos and so I had to create an IG stories highlight and then screenshot that...and I just don't have time to crop the photos. So here we go! Built-in captions and everything. This probably won't be very coherent bc right now I'm helping Luke with math homework, reminding Nathan to keep practicing piano (normally he is ALL about piano time but right now he really wants to get back to his book, which is atypical for him so hurray hurray!), redirecting Abigail who is WAY more interested in Isaac's Zoom call (his first Young Men's meeting! My baby) than in her AP Euro homework. Neil is putting Matty to bed and Juliet is going over science flashcards. 

Matty came home from preschool with this adorable little turkey hat!

We had Thanksgiving with just ourselves this weekend. Most of the posts I saw on social media were from friends who were nervous about cooking the whole meal on their own, which made me grateful that I've had lots of practice and I wasn't dealing with all the fear of Thanksgiving prep along with the rest of 2020 stress! I think we've hosted more often than not over the last few ten years. 

Here's Isaac making his pumpkin pies, which we made from pie pumpkins...sooooooo much better than canned and I will definitely be doing this in the future!

Abigail making Pioneer Woman's Dreamy Apple Pie (the BEST!). 

Neil and Luke put together a lemon meringue pie...

And here's Jules weaving the lattice for the top of her cherry pie. Neil and I made a pecan pie (the really really good kind with maple syrup and nary a drop of corn syrup in sight) and a Mississippi mud chocolate and cream pie. 

One of my favorite things is setting the table--there's a story to every single bit of this tablescape. 

This is the first year that we spatchcocked the turkey and it was perfection. So so so much juicier! We also did an herb butter (Kerrygold butter emulsified with garlic & shallots and lots of fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage, parsley) that Neil carefully rubbed over the turkey UNDER the skin. Definitely took one for the team there. 

On Friday I met my friend Kelsey (who was visiting from California) for a socially-distanced 12 mile run, then I came home and we ate pie and marathoned the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the next couple of days (extended edition holy cow it was so long and my eyeballs were on fire). 

Cute little Matty with his Christmas jammies reading Christmas books!

And his crazy hair. I just cut off all this fluff last week and man I miss it, but he told me in no uncertain terms that either I cut his hair or he would (I mean, it was way down in his eyes, but it was so so cute and fluffy and blond, and now it's like a little brown shorn sheep). 

We celebrated Neil's birthday the week before Thanksgiving! I gave him a guitar and we had a lot of really fun evenings by the fire with him strumming and singing. 

And a picture we snapped one morning before church! 

As passionate as I am about the way the interior of our house looks all year long, Neil is equally passionate about the exterior during December. This was the beginning of a LOT of attention to lights and perfectly outlining the roof on all 4 sides of the house. 

 

The Right Side of History

 

Thanksgiving Books Roundup

It's time! Are you feeling all cozy and ready to start baking and watching kids parade around in cute little construction paper Pilgrim hats! And reading some of the BEST BOOKS ALL YEAR?!!! 

In November (Cynthia Rylant)

I love this book so so so much and I am SO excited every year when it's time to read it again. It combines beautiful lyrical prose with impressionistic illustrations: "In November, the smell of food is different. It is an orange smell. A squash and a pumpkin smell. It tastes like cinnamon and can fill up a house in the morning, can pull everyone from bed in a fog. Food is better in November than any other time of the year." 

Over the River and Through the Wood (Lydia Marie Child)

This lovely little book intersperses single-color illustrations accompanying the song text with double-spread full-color illustrations on the following pages (so you get 2 pages of song, 2 pages of illustrations). This is the original method of going to grandmother's house, complete with horse-drawn sleigh, so expect some breathtaking Edwardian couture! Sheet music is included at the end. 

A Turkey for Thanksgiving (Eve Bunting)

This favorite made it onto my original very short (4 books only!) list back in 2016: 
This one is so charming--Mr. Moose sets out to ensure that his wife has a turkey at the table for Thanksgiving dinner. Other guests come along on the hunt, but Turkey doesn't want to come! (It turns out happily for all involved.) The illustrations in this book are beautiful (all the animals are bedecked in their Scandinavian finest), but it's the words that really evoke the stark beauty of November: "The earth smelled of ice and moss as they crunched along. Above them a crow hung, black as a puff of wood smoke."

Thanksgiving is Here (Diane Goode)

This fun book is so evocative of Thanksgiving Day--the noise, the chaos, the million cousins and groaning tables. There's so much going on in every illustration!

In 1492 (Jean Marzollo)

Another quick rhyming book with only a few lines per page--this Blue Ribbon Book  is a great pick for younger children: "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue/He had three ships and left from Spain; he sailed through sunshine, wind, and rain." I like that this book acknowledges that Columbus actually landed in the Bahamas, traded with the Arawak, and was NOT the first American. 

This Is The Feast (Diane Shore)
Also a rhyming book, this book covers the Pilgrims' initial 18 months in  the New World, from the Mayflower through the first winter and into harvest. It acknowledges the more difficult parts of the story (the death and disease among the Pilgrims the first year; the fact that the Pilgrims took over land cleared by Patuxets prior to plague) and ends with the first Thanksgiving feast, prominently featuring the interactions between Pilgrims and native peoples. 

Oh, What a Thanksgiving! (Steven Kroll)
By the author of The Biggest Pumpkin Ever, this fun book features an imaginative boy who looks at the world around him and tries to see what it would look like if he was living in Plimoth (which then leads to some fun illustrations like a boy getting off a school bus and running towards a wattle and daub cottage!). This goes all the way through Thanksgiving day preparations so it's a fun way to contrast what it would have looked like for the Pilgrims vs. our modern day Thanksgiving. 

The First Thanksgiving (Jean Craighead George)
Lots of detail here! This one is pretty fact-heavy but still very accessible and the illustrations are BEAUTIFUL. This book focuses heavily on the contributions of Squanto and Massasoit to the Pilgrims' survival. 

The Pilgrims' First Thanksgiving (Ann McGovern)
This contains essentially the same information as the previous book, but more condensed and suitable for younger readers. If I was going to categorize these by age, I would say this book is perfect for 2nd-3rd grade readers--Nathan is enthralled by the Pilgrim children's tasks described in this book (watching the cornfield, turning meat on a spit, making mattresses, gathering grasses to thatch roofs, digging clams, etc.). 

Plimoth Plantation Live-Action Photograph series

**This entire series is SO COOL. I would recommend starting with Sarah Morton's Day, which is my very favorite, and then maybe adding a book a year. 

Sarah Morton's Day (Kate Waters)

This is one of the very first books I ever purchased for our home library. I loved this book so much as a child! A ten-year-old interpreter from Plimoth Plantation posed for all the photos; the book takes you through what her day would have been like in November of 1627. Cannot recommend this one enough!! We especially love all the details about their clothing and chores. 

Samuel Eaton's Day (Kate Waters)

Samuel is seven years old, and his day takes place in July of 1627--his first time helping with the rye harvest! (This is also one that I read to my kids when they're complaining about doing their chores.) So interesting to compare with Sarah's responsibilities and their differing households. 

Tapenum's Day (Kate Waters)

Tapenum lives half a day's walk from Sarah and Samuel, with the Wampanoag tribe. I really like that the book works to introduce Tapenum's vocabulary with Wampanoag words, just as it did with some of the more archaic verb forms that Sarah and Samuel use. This is SUCH a great complement to the earlier two books and I wish I'd had it when I was a kid!

On the Mayflower (Kate Waters)

Set a year earlier in 1620, this story talks about the experience of Will Small, ship's apprentice on the Mayflower, and Ellen Moore, a passenger on the Mayflower. As with all of Kate Waters' Plimoth books, this text is honest about the death toll among the Mayflower pilgrims (it's noted at the end of the book that Ellen does not appear in colony rolls after the Mayflower landed and it's likely that she died. Samuel and Sarah both have new step-parents as well after their parents' deaths). 

1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving (Catherine O'Neill Grace) 

This one is not actually a story--it's more for older kids who are into "fact books," but I include it with the other four because it includes photos from the actors at Plimoth Plantation. This is fairly extensive (still a picture book, but broken into chapters) and also includes an appendix about the actors who recreate the past at Plimoth, as well as a chronology of European contact with the Wampanoag people over the last 1000 years. Total wealth of info here and one that gets heavy use at our house every November!

Happy reading, friends!!

Fall

 

My favorite season is fall--I love the cool air and the glorious leaves. And when I say "favorite season" what I mean is "completely obsessed; hate summer because it isn't fall, start pulling out harvest-themed decorations September 1st, and take pictures of every colored leaf I see." 

So here's a smattering of those pictures. Above--the first good fall run I had on September 26th. It was such a beautiful day and the leaves were just starting to turn.

And let's also watch the progression of our backyard! Good golly isn't it beautiful? 

Inside, Matthew and I made a fall tree for the dining room & wrote all of our favorite fall activities on the leaves. As we finished each activity over the next few months, we moved the leaf from the tree down into a pile at the bottom. 

More backyard time...I took this picture from the hammock swing one night thinking about the gift of time with each other that the pandemic is giving us. 


Morning walk with Matthew

On General Conference weekend (early October) we went over to Fort Harrison on Saturday morning and hiked around before the first session. It was the loveliest morning!

Love this guy with every bit of my heart.

Matthew and I did a morning walk almost every day between July 27 and October 12 while I was doing 75 Hard. And some days we did hikes!

One night we went to Conner Prairie for Headless Horseman. The staff did a fantastic job on safety (I LOVED it this way! So much less crowded and timed entry for everything!) and we had a really lovely night. 

The sunset over the corn maze was pretty glorious. 

Abigail, Luke, Nathan, Matthew, Neil, and I did the haunted corn maze while Juliet and Isaac rode the tube slide down the hill over and over. All of us did the regular corn maze earlier. 

The little boys loved this trail! Look at that built-in social distancing!

Matthew wasn't quite sure about this picture...

Another morning walk, still in his sleeper! 

Another back yard shot bc I'm obsessed with how vivid these bushes get in late fall...

A walk in the woods by the high school with Neil in late November, squeezed in between Sunday Zoom meetings. 

Solo morning run 

Another morning run--the Monon always brings the drama!

Some days the older kids joined us on our walks and Matthew LOVED it when Abigail would push him while rollerblading. 

This one was from a morning when Isaac forgot his chromebook and I decided to make the best of a bad situation and run it to him--multitasking and I got in a 4 mile run! 

Another big drama pic from the Monon. 

And from the top of the hill on my long run one day...

Some pics from the lake in Central Park

And a quiet morning watching the swans in the neighborhood next to ours. 

Same trail as up above, just a few weeks later. 

Backyard really going for it now!

A morning in Cool Creek with Matthew, above, and cleaning out the garden with the kids, below. 

Another pic from a long run through a nearby neighborhood. 

Matthew "helping" with the leaves

I pretty much never get tired of taking leaf pics on the Monon. 

And to take us out--the sun lighting up the trees when I was out on a long run and my phone blew up with the news that the election had FINALLY been called for Biden. I just stopped and cried and said a few prayers of gratitude. Such a beautiful moment.