The greatest day of the year.

Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday of the year.  Does that make me a glutton?  If it does, I'm perfectly okay with it.  I love to cook, so preparing the meal is fun for me (although Steve and I have been nomads the last few years), it is a great time to have quality time with friends and family (which in our case lately has been our friends' families), you don't have to spend 100 hours decorating the house, and you don't have to go through the pressure of buying gifts for people that you aren't sure they will like and receiving gifts you may not like but have to be nice about.  Also, did I mention the food????  Turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, broccoli and cheese, rolls, pumpkin pie, and my favorite STUFFING!

This year, we went to St. Louis for the big day and stayed with one of my dear friends Amanda, her husband Ryan and their amazing, adorable, funny 11 month old daughter Collins.  Our original plan was to stay one night with these friends and then spend the rest of the time with some other friends at their parents' house so Steve could go deer hunting.  Well, the parents decided to go to Spain so that plan was a no-go.  Rude!  They could have at least invited us to join them in Spain...  Luckily, Amanda and Company were kind enough to take us in for the entire weekend and to take us home with them so we could feed our faces.

The first stop was Amanda's aunt's house to have lunch with all of her family.  This ended up being a girls only trip because Steve and Ryan needed to go set up their tree stands for hunting the next day.  Amanda and I went to town (one of us more than the other).  I had 2 heaping plate-fulls of food and didn't feel guilty about it one bit.  I just blamed it all on the baby.  These people don't know me....they don't know that I would have eaten the exact same way whether there was a baby involved or not, so they bought my excuse and didn't judge me.

At one point, I looked down to make sure my napkin was still in my lap during the feeding frenzy only to find that I couldn't even see my lap, much less my napkin.  I then relocated my napkin to the nice little shelf on the top of my belly to protect my clothes while I behaved like a little piggy.  It kept falling though, which has inspired me to invent a pregnancy napkin....patent pending.

As we sat on the couch rubbing our full bellies, Amanda said 4 of the most glorious words ever spoken, "Time for round 2."  We packed up and headed over to Ryan's mom's house to have dinner with his family.  Here I had another massive plate and some pumpkin pie.  Had I been given another hour for digestion, I bet I could have taken down 2 plates at this house too.  I take Thanksgiving very seriously.

After all of this eating, my back was killing me.  The poor little guy was probably so excited at first to have all of this delicious cuisine headed his way, and then quickly realized that his mom is a heifer, and he was out of room and was shoved up against my spine.  Also, my normally active little guy was in a food coma all weekend and hardly moved.  He's back to normal now though!

Oh, did I forget to mention that Steve's office had their annual Thanksgiving lunch on Wednesday?  Yeah, I overate there too.  Steve and I were in charge of the turkey and I decided to brine one this year...it was DELISH! 

I had a turkey sandwich today with some of the leftovers and the baby got extremely active.  I wonder if he got scared that the gorging of the weekend was about to happen all over again.....I wish!

Well, until next year...  Bring on Christmas!

PS.  I learned yesterday that Canadians celebrate their Harvest at the end of October with a day just like Thanksgiving.  I'm invisioning a new Callaway Tradition...Canada in October.