Turkey's gone!

We had an exciting Thanksgiving!  I think it was made more exciting by the fact that we are probably all a little familiarity-starved.  So when Jason's mom and dad got to come it was like re-entering a home world or something.  Teresa flew in the weekend before Thanksgiving and stayed in the apartment with us.  The girls were super excited about this and even looked forward to sleeping on the floor so Monty could have Gwyn's bed.  Incidentally, Lyla and Celee are the ones that slept on the floor.  Gwyn had a bed all to herself and one bed went empty!  Then, when they got their beds back they all just went back to their respective beds.  Weird.


Anyway, Celee's troop rode the light rail down to Walter's Art Museum on Saturday before we picked Monty up at the airport.  There was an extra spot so Gwyn got to go too.  Lyla's troop went on Sunday.  The museum did a Renaissance program and the girls learned about profiles.  They got to paint one of their own too.  It's a pretty cool museum and I think they leaned a lot. The girls even got to use the "secret staircase."   And they got to have fun with girl scouts and ride the train.  All in all it was great!

We did lots of cool stuff with Monty.  We shopped, ate, played games, and went to the park.  We decided to try Oregon Ridge Park after a friend here recommended it.  What a cool place!  There are miles of hiking trails, a swimming lake in the summer, an education center, historic buildings from the 1700s, a natural playscape, a ski slope, and probably more.  They have themed backpacks you can check out that lead you on scavenger hunts for water bugs, or birds, or trees, etc.  The girls had so much fun playing on the playscape that we didn't even have time to do the backpack activities.  But in the educational center the girls lucked out because the lady came to feed the turtles while we were in there and the girls got to help.  She even got one out and let it "run" around on the floor for a while.  One little guy was very hungry and kept trying to bite fingers through the glass, so he didn't get to come out and play.

We picked up the turkey from the Amish market and picked up Pop from the airport Wednesday.  (We all got to get a "coffee" at the airport *hot chocolate)  Since I didn't have room to cook the turkey I ordered a BBQ one.  It was yummy, but I'd still rather have had the injected fried ones we're used to.  We did have all the fixins' though, complete with cornbread dressing!  We ate our fill and more.  I actually got rid of the last of the leftovers today.  Celee re-enacted the "It's Thanksgiving" song from YouTube for us during our Thanksgiving feast.   So it was a good time.  I don't know whether to thank the friend that posted the afore-mentioned Thanksgiving song on her facebook or not, This post prompted my girls' "What is that?  Can we watch it?"  Now we get to hear it covered quite often.

Saturday we all drove down to DC.  I must say that it's pretty cool to be an hour's drive from Washington.  We might just ride the train next time though because parking is a doozy!  After some anxiety and barely-suppressed cursing, we did find a parking garage and walked over to the Natural History Museum.  We saw lots of fossils, many that I had never seen or heard of before.  We watched a tarantula get fed a cricket.  Celee and Lyla had the opportunity to touch a tarantula's exoskeleton, but they declined.  We all got to feel the rocks that many minerals we eat and use come from like talc and aluminum.  It was a beautiful day so when we were museumed out, we walked down the mall to the Washington Monument.  Celee was especially excited to see it.  It is pretty cool to stand there because you can see the Capital, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, WWII Memorial, and the reflecting pool from there.  We were all pretty spent by then so we didn't walk any where else, but the girls and I are anxiously awaiting our next DC outing.

To wrap up our Thanksgiving festivities we celebrated Celee's birthday with Monty and Pop.  Her birthday isn't until Dec. 5th, but this has become a sort of tradition as we are usually with family on Thanksgiving and not the following few weeks when her actual birthday falls.  So we sang and ate cupcakes and she got to open a gift.  I feel like Celee gets the shaft a little with her birthday in the winter and smashed between two major holidays, so I hope the extra celebration helps her feel special.  Especially as this year she isn't having a party.  We will have to make her special day fun in other ways!

I was dreading going into the "storage room" to dig out Christmas decorations, but it turned out well!  Since the apartment is small, I only have room really for the tree and one little tree on the bar, so that all went up pretty quickly.  And in the process of getting out Christmas boxes, I found the document box that had our car titles, birth certificates, etc. in it.  Thank you Jesus!!  Once that was found we made our first attempt to go to the MVA to get our driver's licenses and plates.  I say first attempt because even though we got up way earlier than usual, drove 40 min. though morning traffic, got there right after it opened, I still didn't have everything we needed.  We will make a second attempt in a few days.  Maybe this time I will have that 2nd piece of mail and not leave our car titles on the kitchen table.  Such is life, mine anyway.  We always joked in Champaign about how many times I would get to the stop sign at the end of our street only to back up and run inside to get something I forgot.  That's not so easy to do in this metropolitan area we have moved to.  And I will give Champaign credit for gridded street planning.  I can find my way in a square world, but curvy roads are a little more difficult.  Thank heavens for google maps!  We are learning to navigate this strange new place.  Maybe I will get my sea-legs soon.  :)