Thanksgiving Week

I have made it past my low number of posts from last year, and then I seem to have stopped.  I feel like my mind is too full. Two major things, one of which I would rather not talk much about, and the other of which I can't talk about just yet. (The first one is remodeling my grandparents' house in hopes of making it more marketable. Spending evenings and weekends steaming wallpaper in order to desecrate a childhood shrine is not a pleasant task.) The other thing is good but a little scary and should be ripe for revelation before the end of the year.

One other major accomplishment of this month was hosting my first large-scale Thanksgiving. It started smallish and grew to 16, but we managed tables for everyone and I only slightly overcooked the turkey. In anticipation of the meal, I had made up a bunch of post-it notes stuck all over the windows of things that needed done.

I figured I should get my grocery shopping out of the way early, as grocery stores would be crowded on Wednesday. (They were pretty crowded on Monday, actually.) But I figured we could easily get it done in the morning and be done by lunch. We stopped at Store A first and on our way out some people in the checkout line bought the kids a box of sandwich cookies. I wasn't too thrilled, but the kids were and I figured I would give them some in case we were a little late for lunch.

Then we finished up at the second store and were heading out to the car when Dash, running full-tilt through the damp parking lot, slipped and landed on his forehead. I rushed him back in to the bathroom where a very kind lady volunteered to bandage him, even though there was blood everywhere and the store people took awhile to find gloves. Dash tends to be very vocal about pain, let's put it that way. Or possible pain. Anyway, when I finally got him back out to the parking lot I discovered the other kids had unloaded all the groceries and were waiting for us in the car.

It was definitely into stitch-worthy territory, so we headed straight to Urgent Care. It turned out to be kind of crowded, and there were no interesting magazines and I hadn't brought anything along, but we survived on sandwich cookies and memory games. Later people asked me why I hadn't called to have someone else get the rest of the kids, but I kept thinking that it would only be a few more minutes, and continued to think so for all of four hours. It was only three stitches, but it was plenty of drama for all that. Dash is hoping for a Harry Potter-style scar, but I doubt it was quite enough to be lightning-shaped.

That would have put a crimp in Thanksgiving preparations, but I ditched wallpaper steaming instead.

Also I had a birthday on Wednesday and DOB got me a haircut and a new outfit (including a pair of jeans that I think qualifies as non-mom jeans, not that I approve of that terminology because why should it be a fashion offense to have children?) and we hung out at the mall on the day before Thanksgiving, which was curiously quiet and pleasant. My birthday is a boring square number this year, but next year it's my all-time favorite prime number. (BTW, given that I am an adult human under 100, that's enough information to figure out my actual age.)