Tis the season....

We had a great Thanksgiving. It was rather low key, but a nice and relaxing time spent with family. We spent about 5 hours at my parents house, along with my oldest sister, her boys, her boyfriend, and his boys. My adult niece was able to stop by the last hour or two, which was nice. She now lives in Niagara Falls, attending college, so we don't get to see eachtother as often as we would like. My mom goes all out for any and all meals that she makes. She baked a great turkey, and Craig, my sister's boyfriend, deep fried one. We also had sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, squash, corn, broccoli/cauliflower cheese bake, homemade cranberry sauce, rolls, etc. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but the table was loaded. Then, for dessert she made chocolate pie, dutch apple pie, and two pumpkin pies. YUM! I washed it all down with some hot mulled cider. A complete turkey dinner has to be one of my favorite meals!

The middle of the night found me waking, at 3:00 AM. Yes, that time does come around twice a day. After thawing out my very frozen and icy minivan, I picked my sister up at 4:00. We were bundled up in our gloves and scarves and heavy coats. Its not easy finding a coat that I can actually button around my growing tummy, but I found one. It was so strange to drive the several miles to her house, without ever seeing another car. It was over 10 minutes into our trip before we even saw another vehicle. We made it to Walmart by 4:30 and waited in line with all the other "crazies" who wake up at an ungodly hour to catch the best deals. We were in Walmart by 5:00 and done by 5:30. People seem to really lose their manners when there are deals to be had. That's why it helps to shop with someone else. You can laugh about it instead of getting really ticked off at people's rudeness. The crowds were probably even larger than past years, so hopefully that helps our sluggish economy. We had quite an experience at Kmart. We don't really care for Kmart very much because it seems customer service and sales staff are always lacking big time. Its often worse than Walmart which doesn't always have the best reputation. After waiting in line for 25 minutes, we spent another 25 minutes just trying to get our dozen or so purchases rung out correctly by the cashier. She was a woman in her mid 50's, and really seemed to have no clue about what was on sale or even care if it rang up correctly. Everything we bought was on a significant sale, often a buy one, get one free sale. (That is the point of getting up so early is to get these great sale prices, you know!) The manager ended up coming over about 8 times to fix the cashiers mistakes. In the end, she had to void the whole transaction and ring in everything herself with the correct sale prices. She apologized to us (too bad the cashier didn't) and even said, "Wow....this new total is a big difference from the other total, huh?" Yeah, $45 DOES make a big difference in a total. We apologized several time to the people in line behind us for it taking so long. They were so kind, and even joked, "Hey,you are trail blazing for us!!", which made the situation so much better. Its so nice when other people are understanding. We finally left with our great buys. AFter hitting another 6 stores, we were back at my sisters house by 10:00 AM. My brother in law had kindly offered to have our kids spend the night Thanksgiving night since Matt had to leave the house at the same time I did so he could go salt sidewalks for work. I felt horrible to learn Noah had woken up crying at 4:30 AM, waking the other kids up also. They were all up until 6:00 AM when my brother in law made them go back to bed. That lasted until 8:00 am. Thankfully, he was a good sport about it all. He had even made the bed that morning....wow!

My purchases yesterday allowed me to get about 1/3 to 1/2 my shopping done, which was wonderful. Hopefully, I can catch some other great sales for the rest of my list. When you have large families on both sides, good deals are a must!

I'm off to try our new 450 thread count sheets that I bought at a huge sale at Target! I truly love this season, even with other people's rudeness and all the commercialism that seems to overwhelm the true meaning of the season.