But instead, I watched way too many episodes of Gilmore Girls (only five more seasons to go before I can watch the new ones, ha ha), finished a book (The Light Between Oceans–my heart is still recovering, thanks for asking), spent a lot of time with Matt’s family (mine was out of town), and passed many an hour solo just thinking about things. About life. About my dreams for the future. About the past, and how time changes things. About how even though this isn’t where I thought we’d be right now in life, how I’m still so grateful for everything we have.
So today, you get a photo-and-brain dump of our weekend.
(And in black and white too, because everything looks better in black and white.)
Here we go.
Thanksgiving Day
It’s so funny to me how absolutely different each Thanksgiving is from year to year. We never seem to know who exactly we’ll be seeing or what exactly will be happening or what exactly we’ll remember.
This year, we spent Thanksgiving not just with Matt’s family (we do the on year/off year thing for Thanksgiving between the two families), but with most of his extended family on his Dad’s side, too. Every time we get together with them, I am reminded anew of the dire need to make a family tree with photos and names so that this can finally be the year that I get everyone straight and in the correct family in my mind.
It’s still a work in progress.
(Should I even admit that after five and a half years of marriage? What a slacker I am!)
Fun with the In-Laws (Pictionary, in this case)
Just one of the many kinds of impromptu things going down at the Meidell house anytime people gather together.
Raven Gets Another Haircut (& has another meltdown)
My sister-in-law Katie, an experienced cutter-of-hair, had brought Oreos to bribe Raven into submission (a wise move, considering her distinctly unsure-slash-slightly-negative impression of the whole haircutting business the last time around). And for awhile it totally worked…until we moved Raven around to the other side of the sink. Who knew that such a simple act like switching directions would cause such a complete and utter meltdown?ˊ
In the beginning of our marriage, Matt and I used to have his mom take some pictures of us right around Thanksgiving so we could have some shots of the two of us together that weren’t just taken by a stranger or by one of our hands extended out as far as it could reach. (Click here for some outtakes and here for our real card from 2013 and here and here for ones from 2012.)
Well, we apparently stopped doing that when I was pregnant and then for Raven’s first Thanksgiving the year after, but I missed the tradition and wanted to remedy that this year. So on the day when we were scheduled to go to the Capitol building to get family pictures with Matt’s whole extended family anyway, we ended up having my mother-in-law get some of just the three of us (and then we took a ton ourselves too of the other spouse with Raven).
Be prepared over the next three weeks or so to be bombarded with the family in black as I share some of the (several hundred) images we took.
Hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful!
P.S. Even though it sounds all sorts of cliché, I just wanted to say that I am so grateful to all you readers out there–it has been nothing short of incredible how many people I’ve been able to connect with because of this little blog that I started way back when, and you all make it worth coming back to the blank page, week after week. Thank you!
