Thanksgiving

It wound up being a quiet holiday for us: Faye was ill and didn't come up; Greg came home sick with strep on Wednesday, so he nor Kristen came up. Just the five of us. On top of that Gloria had to take Bud to the hospital Wednesday evening because of a bad bout from his COPD. He's still there today getting straightened out. So what might have been our usual busy family gathering was pretty subdued.

We ate about 4PM on Thursday afternoon. Eli set the table, as is his wont. He actually does a good job, and seems to enjoy getting out the nice china and flatware and stemware. He likes to give himself a wine glass. Yesterday his contained diet Pepsi! After the meal the older boys wanted to check out the leaf piles. I had blown leaves on Wednesday afternoon for just this purpose. Here's a link to the leaf plunge and all our photos of the day. Yes, that is our small trampoline they brought out, "to see what would happen." It was not my idea to get it, absolutely not! We may get more over the rest of the weekend. We're going to Martha's Saturday.

Today we went to Montreat and hiked from the gate to the kid's playground, about a mile in each direction. I was able to carry Calvin in a new-to-us baby backpack that Libby got for free from another AshevilleMama. Calvin fell asleep on my chest at the park; he slept most of the way back to the car after the older boys had grown weary of the playground. On the way back we saw Mike B. from church with a metal detector and several bags of leaves. I joked, "looking for someone's retainer?" (Doubly funny because he's an attorney.) Not a retainer, but his own wedding band! Slipped off while he was packing leaves into bags yesterday. He and Tom D. were going through 25 bags of leaves, ripping them open and searching for the band (they opened each bag on top of a blanket). What an ordeal.