Dead Birds

The preparations for Thanksgiving are underway! We've continued our tradition of dressing the kids in identical clothing on the day before Thanksgiving. Luckily for Q, this was the "boy clothes" year. Here are a couple of pictures of their outfits - check out their obvious love for the turkey:





I also like the one where they're sitting on Mongo. The turkey we're going to cook (yes, I did say "we") is a fourteen-pounder - I picked it up at Green River Farms this afternoon. It was very exciting. One of these years I want to try one of those "heritage turkeys", where they aren't the white, breast-heavy, helpless animals the modern meat factories prefer, but rather the more self-reliant and healthy breeds of farm turkeys from back in the olden days. 'Course, those tend to cost $200, so it won't be until after the bank heist. (Keep that under your hat, by the way.) As with most of these modern-bred, factory-farm turkeys, this one was born with both its neck and a plastic bag of giblets tucked inside its chest cavity. Naturally we had to extract these in order to make the broth tonight for use in the gravy tomorrow:



Here's before the broth set to cookin':



And here's after:



Following supper, the kids settled in to do some drawing. (They sometimes choose that over storytime.) T has a particular posture she likes when drawing on the coffee table:



On your mark...Get set...Draw!

Off to bed to rest up for the big day. Long dog walk with T, turkey primpin' and preppin' and brushin'...And then of course there's the cooking. Hours and hours of fervent, sweaty, ecstatic prayer (Packers versus Lions, after all), then hopefully some actual football with the wee ones...Frankly, I'm concerned. It's a lot. We might not get through it all. I'll keep you posted.