Thanksgiving Recap

Thanksgiving was a big whirlwind again this year! It's so fun and crazy and amazing to have so many families to celebrate with, but oh my goodness - I'm not sure how much longer we can keep up the Triple Dinner thing on Thanksgiving Day (in addition to the other random family events we attend on Wednesday and Friday!!).

We drove the four hours to McKinney on Wednesday morning, stopped at In n Out Burger for lunch (yum!), and made it there in the early afternoon.

I spent the afternoon helping my mom, Grandmom, and sisters finish up some Thanksgiving dinner preparations. Jeff chilled with my dad and Grandad.

This year, I started teaching my littlest sister, Karoline how to make pumpkin pie. She was a big help!

I made four pies this year, finishing them all in record time!

Wednesday night we drove another hour to get to Jeff's grandparents' house in Fort Worth, where we had dinner and spent the night.

On Thursday morning we woke up bright and early so I could finish the flower arrangements for Jeff's family's Thanksgiving, then we drove another hour to Plano, TX for Thanksgiving #1 with my dad's extended family. I contributed a pumpkin pie.

I love making flower arrangements!! :)

This is the only photo I have from Thanksgiving #1 (Plano, TX; Dad's extended family). The food was delicious, the entire family of 19 was there, and we had a lot of fun catching up with everyone!

A couple hours later, we drove back to Fort Worth for Thanksgiving #2 with Jeff's family. I contributed a pumpkin pie.

The delicious food at Thanksgiving #2 (Ft. Worth, TX; Jeff's family)

Jeff's mom and grandma!

More pretty flowers

More flowers!

Jeff and his dad relaxing

After another couple hours, we made the one-hour drive back to McKinney for Thanksgiving #3 with my mom's extended family. I contributed two pumpkin pies.

We saw a lot of this on Thanksgiving Day.

I was SO happy to get to make it to our last Thanksgiving Dinner and get a glass of wine!

We stuffed ourselves full of turkey for a third time, and then watched the Texas A&M game. It was a sad, sad game. I don't want to talk about it.

You can kind of see the giant long table in the background - the entire family of 28 people was there!

As soon as the Aggie game was over, it was time for Black Friday! I think we went more for tradition than anything this year... there wasn't really anything in the ads that we needed/wanted, but we did Target at midnight and Kohls shortly after and picked up a few things.

Maps of Target and free energy bars!

My sister Kristen and I have been doing Black Friday for four years now, and this year we brought our little sister Karoline with us! She was excited. We made it home and into bed by 1:30 (a giant improvement over last year's Black Friday, which had us arriving home at 6am).

Friday morning we got up and went to a Christmas tree farm with my mom's extended family. We've been going as a big group ever since I was really little (my Grandmom used to make us all matching sweatshirts - haha!), so it's a fun tradition.

Jeff and Kristen

On the hayride!

My parents

Christmas trees!

Chopping down the tree...

Watching them chop down the tree...

It's a pretty tree!

Since we weren't cutting down trees of our own, we decided to take a photo with this baby tree instead. I have a thing for baby trees.

Family photo!

My grandparents

Picnic lunch!

Friday night was my cousin's graduation party (he just finished his fireman training), and Saturday morning we drove home!

Like I said, it was a hectic few days, but worth every second! We made it on time to all 3 Thanksgivings for the second year in a row. That's no small accomplishment! We spent the entire day enjoying the company of people we love, and it was just great.