Thanksgiving 2021 With the Reardons

This first picture just about sums up our time with our friends the Reardons. They came to visit us for Thanksgiving. It was the first time in a long time that we were able to spend the holiday with family! We were so overjoyed to have them.   Julie and I divided up the Thanksgiving day meal.  I purchased some things for her before they came. They really wanted to do the turkey so they had a turkey in a brine in a cooler. The evening they came we just talked and went for a walk in the evening to show them around our neighborhood.

Before they got to our house Madelyn and I made a pumpkin pie and a chocolate cream pie together. Scott and the boys were on cleaning duty. 

Thursday- I was up at seven with Brian and I helped him prepare the turkey. He chopped up apples, an onion, some cinnamon and some apple cider vinegar and stuck it inside the bird.  I was intrigued. He also put some spices in there. Next, we played the dancing game in our small two-person max kitchen. We organized it so we could make all of our favorite things and we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on my laptop while we cooked.

We ate at 1:00 PM, I printed off some gratitude questions that we talked about a little bit. We FaceTimed with their two adult kids- one lives in Arizona and one lives in Utah. The one in Utah was Emma and she was nearing the end of her Covid quarantine. She’s been pretty sick but when we talked to her she was feeling a lot better and some of her extended family members in the area brought her a Thanksgiving dinner plate. We FaceTimed with her while we ate and she was involved in our conversation. It was super fun.

After the food settled a little bit and the rain stopped we took them to Freeman Lake to go on a little hike. Scott and Brian were talking about a lot of army stuff. Brian was sending an application for his next assignment and since Scott has been a branch manager before he helped him know how to phrase things and make himself look like he deserved the position he wanted. In the evening we played games and watched Elf.

On Friday we made plans to go to the Kentucky Derby museum and Churchhill downs. They are right next to each other, first, we hit up the museum and then we went to the races. It was a lot busier than when we went the day after Thanksgiving a couple years ago. But still not uncomfortably busy. We had terrific seats about one row up and right along the finish line.

 They did a race every 30 minutes so we stuck around to watch about four races. Afterward, we split up.  We took our kids to an indoor Christmas light display through a cave system. And the Reardon‘s went thrift shopping and they stopped at a huge gorgeous Catholic church to ask if Charles could play their organ. Charles is obsessed with organ music, he’s been learning for the past year or so, and every chance they get they try to play different organs from churches if they are allowed. They said that they walked in and found a cute little nun and she gave them a tour of the church and let him play their humongous organ. He was so excited.

On Saturday we wanted to go to the mammoth cave state park but all the tours were booked so we looked into going to the Indiana Caverns which were only about an hour away close to where we went to girls camp last summer. It was a much smaller venue and the people were so excited that we showed up and bought tickets.  The tour was very fascinating and we kind of liked it more than the mammoth cave ones because we were in a smaller group and we got to do both a walking tour and a boat tour inside a huge cave.  

Ian and I started the Christmas puzzle on Thursday after Thanksgiving dinner. Ian worked on that thing like crazy. He probably did about 75% of it. I had to tell him to leave me some to do

On Saturday night we watched two Hallmark movies, one with kids and one without. The one we watched without the littles was hilarious. Brian and Scott went to bed but Julie, Caitlin and I were laughing so hard at the plot.