Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jog

Wow the past five days have been intense with travel, family, food and fun!

Wednesday we packed up the vehicle in the early am and headed out of town for Iowa and Nebraska to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my children. We arrived at my daughters about 5:00 pm, quickly unpacked and called my other daughter to make plans for supper.
It was then off to the Spaghetti Works for supper with the grand kids and to catch up with all their news. When we got back to Tuta's her other house guests were there and we all settled in for the night.

Thursday morning after everyone was up and had breakfast, we started the Thanksgiving dinner preparations. This was my daughters first time hosting the holiday so she was a little excited and had some questions but over all she had most things under control. Carrin and the kids came over about 11:30 and we started putting things together. Once the food flowed everyone dug in and and ate til they couldn't move. Then the pies came out and we ate some more.

Friday,we met my sisters and niece for some after Thanksgiving shopping. We had to pick up stuff for the big Family Thanksgiving we were having on Saturday. Yup that's right, we were doing this all over again on Saturday. Later, we all went out to Mom and Dad's for supper and to hang out. The decibel level in the house is probably well over the legal level when we all get together but we have a great time. There were adults, kids and dogs running around all over the house. The only one not having a good time was Thomas, the cat who was banished to the basement during all this.

Saturday morning we got up and carted the stuff for our big meal to our church. We decided to have it here for two reasons, it was bigger, they had all the stuff we needed to prepare it and we were having a surprise open house for my dad's 80th birthday and this was a great place to have it. It is really fun to work together with family when we do something like this. Everyone is doing what needs to be done and having a good time dong it. It all came together like a well oiled machine. Everyone had way more than enough to eat and then we had lots of time until the open hose so we stalled a little doing dishes, then had pie, then stalled a little more and then finally people started coming. We had put together some pictures from over the years and everyone had a great time and many laughs looking at them and asking: "who is this?"

Sunday morning it was crawl out of bed at the crack of dawn and hit the road for the long trip back home. It takes about 7 1/2 hours not including the stops for gas and meals. We ran into a little snow through all three states (IA, MN, and WI) but the roads were pretty good so travel wasn't bad.

Once we got home we had to go to our grand daughter's birthday party, so it wasn't until after 7:00 pm last night before we finally got the chance to sit down and relax. Toady it's back to work and back to normal. Thank goodness for that. It's nice to visit but nicer to come home.