"Friendsgiving"...

this was the first year that we were "home alone" for Thanksgiving, but when i say alone, i mean we had no family come in town and we chose to stay at our own home for the holiday, but by no means were we alone. we have, what i like to call, a very extended family (of friends), some of which we've known for almost 20 years and some for only a couple of years, but we've all become a family of sorts.

i opted to host "Friendsgiving" at our house, and i was dreading it the moment the offer came out of my mouth. i have a lot of anxiety over the appearance of my house and having 15 people in there to look at it...on top of preparing the house, i had to prepare food?! i will say that i was lucky enough to have my very own personal chef preparing most of the feast (see K is for Kitchen). i pretty much had it easy as far as food was concerned, sweet potatoes, ham, bread, beer, and some cute ass cupcakes for the kids.



just a recap of how much food we had: 2 turkeys and a ham, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, 2 kinds of stuffing, Brussels spouts, jalapeno corn casserole, gravy, fresh cranberry sauce, devilled eggs, and pumpkin bread pudding...did you get all that? my belly sure did! all in all, it was a fabulous time (even with 15 people)! did i mention that those 15 people were only 3 families? yes, everyone we know has 3 kids, so anytime we get together it's always a party. just imagine what it's like when ALL of us get together...

(cheers to the "chefs")

(the table...)

(ahhh...cheers again...a lot of wine was consumed in the making of this event)

(the kids like to play Apples to Apples and this was the card that C picked)

after an all day eating affair, what a better way to burn off the calories than with an all day shopping event. and by all day i mean literally all day! we were gone for 10 1/2 hours!! i came home with two feet full of blisters. what was i thinking? next year the cute shoes are out and the tennis shoes are on! still not sure what i was thinking, because i totally forgot that i had signed up for a 5k the next day. so, i took my blistered feet and ran the heck out of that 5k. proudly i finished 3rd in my age group (which is pretty damn competitive) which also happened to be yet another PR for me 24:49 is by far the fastest i've ever run anything..."run like you stole it!" luckily i did not run alone, but was joined by my other running family. so excited that my little buddy JD also got third in his age division (he's definitely a very fast 7yo!).

to cap off the very busy week, we decided to go hunt down a Christmas Tree. not sure we could fit any more into our crazy schedule...

(more pictures to follow once we get the darn thing "put together")