Well hey my friends! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I love this time of year!
I love how Thanksgiving is so much about family, memories and gratitude. What a beautiful holiday! I feel thankful we get to celebrate it.
I have so many fond memories of Thanksgiving. It’s so interesting how so many sounds, smells and just the little things are so nostalgic to me! It always brings me back to being a kid and reminds me of the innocence of childhood.
Love it.
This year we spent Thanksgiving with my family. We trade off going up to Oregon to be with Kev’s family every other year. We do the same thing for Christmas. So, we’ll spend Christmas with Kev’s family this year!
This year, we decided to head up to my mom’s house the night before Thanksgiving and stay the night up there. I am very much aware of how quickly my kiddos are growing up AND how quickly our parents are growing up as well! Ha ha. I just want to maximize the memory making and time spent with them as much as we can while we still can!
I was also so happy to spend the night at my mom’s and wake up Thanksgiving morning in the home I grew up in. There are so many memories there and I just want soak it all up. I love seeing the bread my mom laid out to make stuffing with. I love waking up to the smell of turkey cooking. I used to love helping my mom by setting the table, brushing the rolls with butter and filling all of the glasses with ice water.
This year, she employed the help of my big kids and my niece to do all the little jobs I didn’t know I loved until I got older.
I also always loved how my mom would rearrange the furniture to accommodate all of the guests. My mom has always been the one to host Thanksgiving for her family, so for as long as I can remember all of my aunts, uncles and cousins on her side would come and enjoy Thanksgiving with us. I love that tradition so much.
Sadly, over the years the numbers have dwindled a bit, but I cherish each and every Thanksgiving I get to spend with my beloved extended family.
This particular Thanksgiving was especially nostalgic and a little heavy for me because two years ago (the last time I spent Thanksgiving with my family) my sweet dad was still with us. In fact, ALL of my siblings were there as well. It was the first time we’d all been together at Thanksgiving for 20 years.
It was really special and I think we all knew it would probably be the last with our precious daddy.
It was also the last Thanksgiving we spent with our beloved uncle as well. He was in his 90’s and hadn’t been in good health for quite a while, so I think we all knew it would very likely be the last with him as well.
And it was.
But, ya know what? As hard as it is to celebrate Thanksgiving without them and as heavy as it weighs on my heart, I also feel a very deep and profound feeling of gratitude that I had them in my life and that they will forever be a part of me.
I feel so thankful to have such beautiful people in my life. My parents, siblings and extended family are not perfect, but they are perfect to me and I love them all with every bit of my heart.
Thanksgiving truly is a season of giving thanks and there is so much to be thankful for!
In fact, I also want to mention that two years ago at Thanksgiving was a very hard time for my little family as well. Kev had been very sick and in the hospital a couple times with complications from Chron’s Disease/Colitis. The next week after Thanksgiving he was back in the hospital again with pulmonary embolisms in both lungs.
It was one of the scariest and hardest times in my life. But, I have since gained a deeper gratitude for my sweet husband, for his health, for my health and for family. I’ve also become a lot stronger person and gained compassion that I know I couldn’t have learned any other way. There are just so many things to be thankful for and a lot of them I don’t even know I’m thankful for until hard times happen that TEACH me to be thankful.
I’ve just learned to love with my whole heart and not take any day or any person for granted. Life is a gift.
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Well, back to this year! I woke up Thanksgiving morning to the smell of turkey in my childhood home. Bliss.
I decided I wanted to go on a “Turkey Day run” in my hometown. If you’ve read my blog this year, you know I haven’t been much of a runner the past 5 months. We ran a relay race in June, I injured my IT band and it’s still not 100% healed. I’ve gone on a few short runs on the treadmill the past few weeks, but I hadn’t run outside for a long time!
And MAN, did it feel good to run outside again! I loved every second. I loved running in my hometown, tons of memories flooding my mind, listening to good music, knowing it was Thanksgiving morning and the weather was perfect too!
*I put a heart around the “B” on the mountain. I’m from Bountiful.*
I also loved that my body cooperated and my IT band didn’t hurt!! Huge WOOT! I ended up running four miles, which was so awesome. My little runs on the treadmill had been 2-3 miles, so I was stoked to do four AND feel good! I actually felt like I could go farther, but knew that would be stupid since I knew I needed to ease my body in.
Nonetheless, I felt thankful for a healthy body that could run and enjoy the beautiful weather and holiday.
I love starting Thanksgiving with exercise!
Well, later on we enjoyed a yummy Thanksgiving dinner, of course! I’m sure many of you agree, but there is nothing like Thanksgiving dinner! It is the best! I just love ALL of the flavors and ALL of the food!
My absolute favorite thing is the sweet potatoes! Not the healthy sweet potatoes, but the ones topped with butter, sugar, pecans, coconut, all the good stuff! They are so good!
I also LOVE that salad you see on the right side of my plate (the white fluffy stuff.) My aunt made that and she’s brought it to Thanksgiving dinner as long as I can remember. It’s just a fruit salad (including maraschino cherries, yum!) with large marshmallows cut into pieces.
I know that sounds weird, but it’s so good and so sentimental. My mom said that her mother made that same salad while they were growing up. She said she remembers cutting the big marshmallows into pieces with scissors that they’d dipped in water so they wouldn’t stick. My aunt still likes to cut up big marshmallows for the salad (instead of using miniature ones) because that’s the way her mother (my grandmother) always did it.
I’m so glad she still does it that way as well!
I also have to mention that the silverware you see in that picture is “special” silverware that was a wedding gift to my parents from my mom’s parents! I believe it’s actual silver. It’s kept in a “special” box and we only used it on Thanksgiving. That was another one of the things I loved about helping my mom to set the table on Thanksgiving when I was a kid.
Again, I’m so grateful for traditions and memories.
After dinner, we were able to take a quick pic of our family….
I’m always so grateful when we get a picture of our whole crew since it’s a hard thing to do! I think we’ll end up using one of the pictures for our Christmas card this year too. Check!
I gotta tell ya, it absolutely blows my mind how quickly my family is growing up and how big my kids are getting! So darn crazy! I don’t feel any older! In fact, I gotta show y’all somethin’ trippy….
My dad took this picture of us the end of 2007. I was very pregnant with our #4 baby. This picture was taken in the exact same spot in my parent’s front yard that our picture was taken this year (the landscaping has changed a bit!)
It is just weird to see how much our family has changed and how many more people we’ve added and how BIG those people are!!! So crazy.
The older I get I realize what a gift life is and how I need to cherish every day! It makes me want to have more courage and live my life to the fullest!
I also just gotta say, OH how much I love these kids! Looking at their sweet little faces makes my heart swell.
Well, as you can tell I’m full of nostalgia, memories and gratitude today!
- I’m just thankful for a wonderful family; my own little family, my immediate family, my extended family and the family I married into!
- I’m thankful for a healthy body. I’m so grateful my body is able to run, move and exercise. I’m grateful I can set goals for my physical health and my body can keep up with me!
- I’m so grateful for holidays, for memories, for good excuses to get together and live life together!
- I’m so grateful my husband is healthy, I’m healthy and my kiddos are healthy!
- I’m thankful to live in a free country, in a good safe community and in a place that I love!
- I’m so thankful for all of you! Thank you so much for taking the time to read my little blog, to comment and to be my friend. Even if I don’t know you, know that you’re my friend and I’m thankful for you!
Well, thank you for going down my trip down memory lane today. I’m a sentimental sap.
I didn’t talk too much about health and fitness today, so I just want to say that I also decided to cut sugar out of my diet from November 23rd (the day after Thanksgiving) until Christmas Eve. I know that sounds crazy because there is so much good food this time of year! But, that is EXACTLY why I want to cut it out!
Quite frankly, I’m sick of working hard, but not getting anywhere. Sugar is always pivotal for me, for better or worse! When I include it in my diet, I just want to eat more! It increases my appetite and just makes it harder to live healthily. On the flipside, when I cut it out, my entire healthy living gets moved up a notch. With sugar out of my system, I eat better in general. I eat less. My body responds well and it just makes it so much easier to live a healthy lifestyle!
Healthy living really is all about evaluating life, making changes as necessary, setting goals and just enjoying the journey….because it never ends! Healthy living is a lifetime commitment. I know there will be times I will struggle and times I will be doing great! I love it all! I love the things I learn when I’m struggling and I love how I feel when I accomplish my goals and do hard things.
Oh, and I gotta say that it’s now been over a week since I started my no sugar thang and it’s going great. I always think the first week is the hardest. It’s quite a bit easier now and I’m determined that I will not quit. In fact, I’m happy to cut out sugar right now because I know how much better I will feel! I can already feel and see ever so slight changes. My weight is down a bit and I’d like to think my clothes fit just a little better. I’m hoping by Christmas I will be able to see a BIG difference.
Heck, I might not even end on Christmas! Once I have a good thing going, it’s sometimes easier to just keep going and NOT quit!
Well, I think I’ll end this here. I hope you are all enjoying this holiday season and I hope each of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I love you all!
Glad you’re back to running again, and had a great holiday.
We were missing a couple of people this Thanksgiving (my husband’s nephew and his partner were killed in a car accident in Nevada this summer, and my sister’s husband died unexpectedly after a short illness in April), and our son doesn’t get a Thanksgiving break since he’s going to university in Austria, so the holiday was a little hard on everyone.
I guess it just underscored for me the need to appreciate the blessings in your life while you have them and let everyone know as often as you can that they are loved! Thanks for the reminder.
Oh Beth, I’m sorry to hear about all of this. So, so sorry. So tragic. Life can be so hard. I think the older I get and as I go through more trials, I become stronger and more grateful for what I do have. It definitely makes me feel a lot more vulnerable though. It can be so hard to see and feel the blessings as you’re actually going through the hard times though. Hang in there!
Hi, Mel. This post brought up all kinds of nostalgia for us readers too! For me, it was both personal for my own family Thanksgiving memories, but also for you and your blog. I have been a faithful reader of yours for years, never missing one of your posts. I’m sure I speak for many of your other readers too in saying how much I enjoy your blog. Your bright personality shines through each piece, while you give us good common sense health advice and encouragement. It’s easy to believe that we are your real friends, as you wrote here, and that you care about our struggles too. Following your sweet children and family through several years, watching them grow, I feel like I love them all too. I hope you continue to write for many more years to come and bring your uplifting personality and words into our homes and hearts.
Oh Deborah, I have missed you! You are the sweetest friend and your comment made me cry. Thanks for always being so kind and supportive of me. It really means so much. I hope you are healthy and happy! I miss reading about your life. I’m sending much love your way!!