Thanksgiving week

It begins today for us. Thanksgiving week. Much has to be accomplished! I'll bypass the explanations and concentrate on a pictorial message: of time with family in funny, and reliably familiar, sometimes convoluted, always wonderful ways.

"Family? We're a family too, no? Just a chicken family!"

Let's stick with the people family.

On a very pretty November day, where not all the leaves have left the trees yet!

Breakfast is a muddle. With Ed. Without Ed. Then with him again. It's complicated.

The task for this morning is to start in on Melissa Clark's apple pie. I'm sure one million Americans are making Melissa Clark's apple pie this Thanksgiving (she's the food person at the NYT), because she actually has a novel suggestion and after you've been baking for many years, you get excited when someone says something new about a standard dish. (And what could be more standard here then apple pie, right?) Her suggestion? Cook up the spiced apples before putting them into the pie shell. It will keep the crust from getting soggy. 

 

So, I precooked and pre-made the shell, to be baked tomorrow, so that it's bubbly hot and fragrant for our family feast number one.

The goal then was to pick up Snowdrop at school, deliver her home, and return to the farmette where the young Chicago family should be arriving. Good goal. Impossible to realize. For the first time EVER, I sat on the Beltline Highway for close to an hour, stuck in a traffic jam created by an accident up ahead. Instead of being first in line to pick up Snowdrop, I was last in line. Luckily, the first graders are picked up in a shorter line, so I wasn't terribly late. 

Quick, Snowdrop, here's your fruit snack! We're going home!

Bye, see you tomorrow! Turn around, drive back to the farmette where.... drum roll ....

... the young family has arrived.

The goal is for the parents to go off alone for a last overnight before the arrival of you know who. (Primrose will stay with us at the farmhouse.)

Once they leave, Primrose and I concentrate on serious play. It always involves dress up. Always that puffy dress pulled over her usual clothing. And eventually she settles in to do art. She has her mother's talent  and the ability to concentrate on her design until every last little space is filled in.

In the evening, we do the usual.

Like Sparrow, she insists that she no longer needs the booster seat.

Tradition has it that there will be popcorn and a movie after dinner. Tradition also has it that the movie viewing is a mess of trying to bring up a film that refuses to stream. And thus tradition has it that the sleepover child goes to bed very very late.

And so does her grandma. And that's not unusual either. However old I am, I still like to stay up nearly as late as Ed. Well, maybe not until 3 or 4 in the morning. After all, I have a little one who is bound to wake up just about the time the rooster starts crowing.