Thanksgiving re-cap before Advent's over!

Quick! Before Christmas gets here, let's rewind to turkeys and pumpkin pie. And indeed I did intend to say turkeys. We had the roasted turkey for dinner, of course - hats off to Nana! - but we also had a "snacking turkey" around 10am that was fried - hats off to Pappy! Why that's necessary, surely it cannot be, I have no idea, but I do know that I enjoyed it immensely ... as did tiny, hollow-legged Ada. Here are some fun ones from Thanksgiving in Houston:

Mimosa cheers!

Paul @ 6mos - Jack @ 5mos

Dylan & I cleaned and packed everything up on Tuesday night, and we set the alarm for 2:30am. Yep, we did. We hit the road at 3am with 2 of 3 kids asleep, and the oldest whispering how excited he is to be going to Texas in the dark! In his pjs! Paul finally fell asleep about 30minutes away from the Brauds, and everything went so smoothly - both with traffic and children - that we'll be repeating this next week for Christmas. Papa needed a nap midday, and Mama just went to bed at Jack's bedtime. We did not go red-eye for the ride home, however, which made things much nicer for saying g'bye in Houston but much rougher for arriving early evening, but we made a stop at the state line to stretch our legs, which wasn't possible at 6am:

Overall a lovely first Thanksgiving for Jack! He even got to meet Uncle Pete, which was special. There was lots of catching up, eating, drinking, and bonfiring.

Then we had a few non-holiday-related shenanigans, too, over the few weeks surrounding Thanksgiving but before going gung-ho Advent!

Big bro and lil bro!

Big Sis loves pushing the baby in the swing ... in fact, all babies: she's a big helper at the playground!

public hands-on music display on Spanish Plaza on our way to get beignets

 One of the hazards of Advent calendar candy...

 3 Nola Knolls