Thanks Again!

Well, I wasn’t kidding when I wrote in my previous blog entry that Melanie and I were considering doing our own, second Thanksgiving. We did just that, and boy oh boy, am I glad we did. The food was amazing. Seriously, some of the best Thanksgiving food I’ve ever eaten. But I’ll come back to that. First, let me start with Saturday night. On Saturday night, the kids built gingerbread houses. This was a tradition in Melanie’s household as a child, and she has carried it on as an annual tradition in our home as part of the Christmas season. The boys all made their own gingerbread houses, as you can see here:

Eddie’s house.

Peter’s house, in its early stages.

Peter’s house, a bit more deocorated.

Creegan’s “parking garage.” I kid you not, this was entirely Creegan’s idea. He called it that, he put the car inside, everything. I didn’t know he knew the term “parking garage” in particular, but apparently he does. I don’t know whether this is amazingly cool, or something about which to be terrified. He’s very obsessed with cars, if you haven’t caught on.

With the garage door closed.

Taking the car out for a spin.

We set aside Sunday for our second Thanksgiving. We knew Sunday would be a good day for it because we were all on doctor’s orders to stay away from the general public, due to Creegan’s staph infection (or whatever it is/was). So, we planned and prepped a modest (by Thanksgiving standards) meal that ended up being amazingly delicious. I snapped a photo of my first plate full of food, and I think most it will be easily identifiable. Here it is:

Everything tasted so good. Like, shockingly good. Melanie and I stared at each other in bewilderment, wondering what we had done right. We’ve made mashed potatoes many times in our life. But these potatoes were AWESOME. We’ve made turkey before. But this turkey was FANTASTIC. Melanie made the stuffing, using the same recipe she had used to make stuffing when we went to our first Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago. But the stuffing this time around was about a million times better than it was on Thanksgiving. And the yams … super yum! That was a new recipe for us, which we made with actual sweet potatoes, shredded coconut, and more. A lot of sugar in those things, I’m sure, but probably the best sweet potato / yam dish I’ve ever tasted. Melanie and I have happily eaten all of the above food for three days straight now. It’s always a pleaser.

To conclude, here’s our most recent picture of Creegan. You can still see pink areas around his mouth, but he’s looking immensely better than he was a couple of weeks ago. The medicine seems to be working, thank goodness. Sadly, the colds don’t stop around here. Every time I think I’m getting better, I start to go back downhill. Right now, my throat is dry, sore, and scratchy. The kids are hacking their lungs out and dripping snot all over the place, yet again. It’s been weeks of this, off and on, off and on. It’s tedious. Anyway, here’s Creegan:

The end.