Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Chip and I went down to Corpus to celebrate the holiday with his mom Sue, stepdad Don and brother Dale. To prep for Thursday’s big meal, we spent Wednesday afternoon and evening doing some baking; by the end of the night, we had our green bean casserole, pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie ready to go! We left Wrigley here in San Antonio at Lucy’s Doggy Day Care for some dog socializing. We don’t go to the dog park as often as we would like, so it’s really good for Wrigley to be boarded every now and then to wear out his energy and have some bigger dogs put him in his place.

We drove down to Corpus Thursday morning and got in by lunch time. We had a great time hanging out with Dale and catching up with Don and Sue on how they’ve all been doing. The best part of the day was doing a gingerbread decorating contest with some kits Chip’s mom got for us. So while she worked on some more of the cooking and final turkey preparations, the three of us set up our kits at the dining table, keeping in mind that a $10 itunes gift card would be given to the winner of the best creation. Chip and I each got a train set to decorate while Dale got a pretty complex gingerbread village. While some of the instructions weren’t very clear, we were all able to put our pieces together and do some decorating.

Gingerbread train: before

Dale working on his village

Probably copying one of my ideas…

Dale’s completed village

Chip’s decorated train

My gingerbread train

In the end, we were all declared winners and each received an itunes gift card.

Once we cleared the table of all gingerbread pieces, frosting and candy we got the table set for Thanksgiving. There was plenty of good food to go around! We were all pretty full after eating, so we spent the afternoon relaxing and watching the Cowboys game (maybe not the best way to relax… :)).

Lots of food!

Chip carving the turkey while Don supervises

Dale has been working at WalMart for about a year now and had to do the black Friday shift. This meant being at work at 7:30 on Thanksgiving evening, which was a bit of a downer. Since we wanted to spend some more time with him, we decided it would be fun to stop by the store at some point to see him in action. Little did we know that it would be madness trying to find him! I know people take their Black Friday shopping seriously, but we really didn’t expect this many people would be cutting into their Thanksgiving family time to go do some shopping. WalMart was so crowded that we were barely able to find Dale. We’re glad we did and felt pretty proud watching him answer so many questions about different game systems!

A very crowded WalMart

Crazy shopping!

Walmart was pretty exhausting (have no idea how Dale managed his shift until 4AM!) so we called it a night when we got back to Chip’s mom’s house afterwards. We are very thankful for her hosting us and for organizing Thanksgiving dinner!