Thanksgiving

This year we decided that if we were in Rexburg for Thanksgiving I wanted to make our own dinner. It sounded fun to me. So that's what we did.

We had an awesome blizzard Thanksgiving week. There was SOO much snow! Joshua didn't have school that week anyway, but we got snow days and I had no work! (Excellent way to start a new job...a week of pay with no actual work.) Check out how much snow we had:

I think this was on Tuesday.

And here's right outside our front door. Keep in mind that

we live on the third floor, and we shouldn't have snow there.

With all the snow our friend, Ryan, got stranded in Rexburg so he came over to celebrate Thanksgiving with us!

I have to admit that I wasn't a complete culinary master, and I took the easy way out on some things (like using Stove Top stuffing - really I think it's better than homemade anyway). I guess I made up for some of the time real stuffing would have taken by having the world's worst potato peeler. It took me half an hour to peel and cut six potatoes. No joke. Peeling things with a knife terrifies me, so I stuck with the peeler. In case you didn't do the math, that was about five minutes per potato. Let's just say I'll be buying a new potato peeler before we have mashed potatoes again.

We had a little six pound turkey with one of those pop-out things to tell you when it's done. Everything else was ready and we were waiting for the turkey, but the thing wasn't popping up! It had been long enough, but without a meat thermometer I wasn't sure if we should take it out anyway. Ryan called his mom and she told us to take it out. Good thing. It was done perfectly!! I was pretty proud of it.

During the week Joshua had found a YouTube video of a crackling fire. We spent lots of time cuddled on the couch by our fire, singing "Let it Snow!" Here's Joshua and Ryan "warming up their hands" while I was finishing dinner:

And here's our beautiful dinner:
My loaded plate:

After dinner we made the treacherous journey to Ryan's to watch a movie and eat our pie. We had the pumpkin pie we made and Marie Callender made us a delicious Dutch Apple Pie too! ;)

Joshua and I made a last minute decision to buy a computer on Black Friday. Joshua was in serious need of a reliable computer for school. We checked out our options, and decided with the terrible roads our best bet was just to go to Walmart in town for a computer at 5 a.m.

We dragged our mattress out into the living room and pulled an all-nighter watching Christmas movies! We headed to Walmart around 4:30. It was crazy!! I had never been Black Friday shopping before. Yikes! So many people and the store was a mess.

But we got the computer we wanted!! And I got the little 2-quart slow cooker I wanted. (Now I have to learn how to use it.) Plus, we got a few movies. It was a successful trip! Just maybe not one I want to repeat any year soon.

Joshua and his new computer: