Thanksgiving 2009

I love being a mom for many reasons but one of my favorites reasons is because it teaches me so much. At Thanksgiving, I always try to be grateful and remember the reason for the holiday but often I get too wrapped up in planning and cooking. This year I wanted to teach Hannah about Thanksgiving and what it really means. Of course, we talked about food, turkeys and football (thanks Brian) but I really tried to focus on being grateful.

We started by talking about what blessings are and making this thankful turkey.

We also talked about how we give thanks to our Heavenly Father because all of our blessings come from him. I don't know how much Hannah learned but I know it made me focus on my blessing and I felt more grateful to my Heavenly Father this year than I have in many previous Thanksgivings.

We spent Thanksgiving at my parent's house and had a great time.

The dinner was great but in my family the dessert has become the big thing. I don't know when it started but I assume it came from the days when we had Thanksgiving with my cousins and grandparents and had over 20 people, but we would have a pie bake-a-thon the night before Thanksgiving and make a ton of pies. The number of people attending Thanksgiving have decreased but the number of pies have not. It's now become tradition that we have about one pie per person. This year we had 14 people (5 of those being kids) and 15 pies. (Don't worry, we don't eat it all in one sitting.)

Thanksgiving just isn't Thanksgiving for me unless I have made some pies. My contributions this year were a blueberry pie (Brian's favorite), apple-blackberry pie, and a raspberry white chocolate cheesecake.

The favorites this year were my sister Kristin's Toffee Pecan pie and my cheesecake. Hannah however liked the chocolate cream pie.

We always top the evening off with games. Here's my brother Michael's reaction to the girls beating the boys at cranium.

We missed my brother Dane (he stayed in Provo for a wedding) and my brother Mark and his wife Jasmine (they were at her family's house) but otherwise it was a wonderful Thanksgiving.