Having a baby during the holiday season isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are the silver linings, such as having your husband home more often than usual and getting vacation time when it is needed most. However, as I discovered this Thanksgiving, holidays can be a lot of work when all you want to do is stay in bed.
After a few glorious days of lying around with Steve and Rowan, playing old school Mario thanks to some friends loaning us their Nintendo, I realized that Thanksgiving dinner wasn't going to cook itself. I admit, KFC looked really enticing the night before, especially since we had decided to go with doing a barbequed, rotisserie chicken because it was just going to be the three of us. I woke up the morning of Thanksgiving and proceeded to feel sorry for myself for a few hours. Ironic, considering I'm supposed to be celebrating things that I'm grateful for, but honestly all I could think about was how I immobilized I feel these days. The last thing I wanted to do was spend all day in the kitchen making a meal and then dealing with the clean-up afterwards. Thankfully, (see I really am grateful!) I have a wonderful, caring husband who let me cry and then proceeded to help me follow family tradition. All in all it turned out pretty well, the usual bird, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, salad, rolls and so forth. The only failure was my stuffing which was not up to standard this year- I think due to the fact that I added too much chicken broth, but it was still decent. We eat pumpkin pie pretty regularly, so this year we opted to do a banana cream pie (Steve's favorite) and I think it was the highlight of the meal. Steve's barbeque and brined chicken was also very good and I'm happy to utilize a few pounds of chicken in leftover recipes rather than 10 pounds of turkey.

You'll notice he has whipped cream on his face before the pie was even cut. Hmmmm, very suspicious.

This definitely was his favorite part of the meal too.
You'll notice I didn't include myself in any of these pictures. I managed to get the cooking done, but getting out of my pajamas and putting on makeup kind of fell on the back burner this year. I am grateful for my beautiful family though, and excited for our upcoming arrival of baby girl. Hopefully she'll come before or on Christmas so I won't have to deal with cooking that meal!