Thanksgiving Eve

We enjoyed sleeping in this morning but managed to get piano practice finished and the younger kids did a lot of reading time before 11 so that we could have some time to go to a local family fun place before lunch. We had passes the kids earned for summer reading, so we went, and they bounced and ran and climbed and had a ball while I studied my MoTab music for an hour. While we were driving home from the fun center, Jack finished the book he started this morning, which he was very proud of! The book was I Survived the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

After lunch, Luke went down for a nap and the girls helped me make pies. Jack was helping for a little while, because I'd told the kids that they could choose to help with pies or clean the house. But Jack's interest in baking soon waned and he managed to do a little bit of cleaning before sneaking off to play. I wasn't too upset though because the girls were really into pie-making. Cat made both of her pies pretty much independently. The first was a family favorite, peanut butter fudge. The second was a not-from-scratch apple pie using canned pie filling and frozen pie crusts, but she assembled it very well, even cutting out little leaves in the top crust. The leaves don't show up well in the picture, but they were there. Eliza helped me with pumpkin pies and chocolate pecan pie bars. 4 short hours later, the pies were done and the kitchen was clean.

While we were waiting for the pies to bake, the kids had some friends over to watch The Muppet Movie and eat popcorn and pie crust cookies.

Then right before we ate dinner, we got a short but exciting thunderstorm, complete with hail, which soon turned to snow. Jack exclaimed, "I KNEW we were going to have a white Thanksgiving!" The snow came down pretty heavily, and I had the pleasure of driving in it to pick Cat up from basketball practice. But it melted pretty quickly, so Thanksgiving might not be white after all.

After the kids were in bed, Luke got up, as has become his habit, and got to watch Ben perform major surgery on my computer before I put him back to bed.

Alas, the surgery did not achieve the outcome we had hoped for. Which means that the pictures for this post will have to come later.