Thanksgiving week

I just noticed that in the last post, other than just the little mention at the end, I didn't talk about our Thanksgiving. That's because, although it was written on Thanksgiving Day, that was old news for me. Since Ben and Kelli were leaving on Thanksgiving afternoon so they could catch an early flight in Seattle the next morning, we had our Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday this year. A small affair with just Ben, Kelli, Nicholas, Louis, Lou and me, but we got the job done. The only thing missing was the Boston brown bread (which I didn't get around to) and fudge, which I made the next day when I woke up and saw the trees covered in frozen fog out the window. Sights like that always make me want to make Christmas candy and cookies :o) Now if I could just be that easily inspired to go shopping (ick).

Nicholas is staying with us while his parents are in Hawaii for a week for a well-deserved and long awaited vacation following the long hours of chopping and harvest seasons. Actually, with travel time it comes to 8 days and 9 nights. Tonight officially marks the 1/2 way point -- night 5 -- and I have been pleasantly surprised, to be honest. Nicholas is quite an easy kid to watch and is happy all the time, it seems, unless he is denied something he wants to do (play in the refrig, stay outside forever, run through the mud). He keeps himself occupied in the kitchen mostly, counting sweetener packets, working in the dishwasher, and stirring stuff in the pots and pans,


unless someone is willing take him outside (no matter how cold it is), which is his preference. He has ridden the Manitou with Great Papa enough to see it parked in the shed and say "Papa" now and he likes the 4 wheelers a whole lot too. We generally go outside twice/day; a trip outside to (literally) run around for a while wears him out and makes him cold, so that when he comes into the warm house he is ready (and willing!) to go to bed in just a few minutes. He is a good eater most of the time -- I even got him to eat scrambled eggs on Sunday night. And so, except for maybe Saturday afternoon, he hasn't missed Ben or Kelli at all. I don't know what happened that day, but when he woke up from his nap, I was not the person he wanted to see at all. About 20 minutes of kicking, stomping, and hard crying, and then he got past it and settled back into the routine. Maybe it was a bad dream ... I was concerned he wouldn't want to go back to bed that night, but he did fine and has done just fine (and even better) since, so I'm not sure what the problem was, and he doesn't seem to be permanently scarred by it. And his grandparents are adjusting OK too. This is not something that would have ever worked with our first child... not sure about the other two, but we never tried overnights for quite a while. For Nicholas, not a problem. Funny how kids are all different.