Dinner was fabulous. I'm so glad I didn't go ALL the way over the top. We had plenty of food and everyone was about to pop afterwards as it was!

Due to family AND budget sizes, I had to keep it kind of small. Guardian did their usual Butterball turkey $20 gift certificate, which got me a whole turkey and a turkey breast, so that was a good portion of the cost gone right there. I saved the whole turkey to cook up some time on my weekend.

I made:

Turkey breast
Glazed ham
Mashed potatoes
Stuffing
Gravy
Green bean casserole
Rolls

I let the kids make the pumpkin pies. In spite of all the bickering and the "I wanna do it"-ing, they came out great.

Corey watched football, and cleaned off the table. After about the TRILLIONTH time I asked him to do it.

We took a walk after dinner and stopped by my co-worker, Vivian's, house. She fed me cheesecake and a glass of some kind of exceptionally tasty wine. We let the kids run around with her daughter and grandkids. It was so warm that even at 7 p.m., Mercedes was running around without her coat in a TANK TOP. That's even pretty darn warm for Thanksgiving Day here in the desert. This is one of our few snowy-weather times, and it was upwards of 75 degrees today.

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So, here I am, it's officially The Day After Thanksgiving, and I am LAUGHING at all of the people that have to clambor out of bed to hit the sales early. I think it's funny as hell. Because I'm ALREADY awake, after a nice 2-hour tryptophan-induced nap. I'm not all antsy, or confused, or even tired. I'm downright REFRESHED. Because I had a nap, and it's something like late-afternoon in MY head. I still have some pretty serious budget constraints, we're still trying to recover from that couple of weeks when Corey was getting short paychecks, but there are a couple of things that I can pick up, anyway.

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Poor Pretty Boy. He KNOWS yesterday was Thanksgiving, and he's a little mortified that he hasn't had his Thanksgiving dinner yet. I would have gone and bought him a nice fat mouse, but pet stores aren't OPEN on Turkey Day.

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the last trail...the next path