Thanksgiving

We had a pretty low key Thanksgiving day with our little family. Even though I'm in no mode to travel at this point, it didn't seem to feel like Thanksgiving to me without the big family gathering. Also, I felt there should be a football game playing in the background even though I haven't watched football since high school. This is our second Thanksgiving by ourselves (I wasn't going to travel close to Hannah's either almost two years ago). I realized this year that I need to focus on how I want the kids to experience Thanksgiving and to create our own traditions. So, this year I had everyone rate the food options this year. This was an idea from a preschool blog to work on making bar graphs. This was a little too advance for the kids to rank their preference. Their favorite item was the marshmallows and ham.

After dinner, we did a little "skit" about Thanksgiving. I was the narrator and when I said "pilgrim women" Hailey was supposed to say "mercy me!" Robert was the pilgrim men who said "bang, bang, bang". He was a little shy about doing it so we tried to have him bang on the table instead. Hannah really liked that part. She was the Indian women who said "sh, sh, sh". It was fun and the kids will be able to do it better next year. Then we sang Thanksgiving songs that I found off a blog, oopsey daisy. We also had a coloring page. Hailey loves to color by number now and she numbered all her feathers.

This year I finished our Thankful Tree that my mom and I started last year. All I needed to do was to sew on the leaves and put on the border but this the move (back in February) my sewing room was the last thing to get organized and set up.



Each leaf is a pocket where we put our thankful notes each day. Most of the time we were thankful for family members. A few times Hailey and Robert were thankful for dancing, spinning, jumping, and their dance teacher. We made up the things that Hannah were thankful for since she can't talk yet.  Hailey loved this tree and enjoyed counting all the numbers. We weren't as on top of it as I would like to be and ended up doing a few days at a time. I'm thankful that my mom came up with the idea and helped me work on it. It is something we will really treasure in years to come. I also saved all our notes and it'll be wonderful to see how our gratitude matures as the kids get older.