Thanksgiving 2017

Thanksgiving 2017: Welcome to my first post on Life Lately. This is an area of the blog for me to share a little more about my life, my family, & for you to get to know me! 

Visiting my parents for Thanksgiving meant a 3:30 am wake up for a 6:oo am flight with two little kids, plus a layover & 2nd flight before we arrived at our final destination in Colorado. And it was soooo worth it! We had a wonderful time being together as a family… talking, cooking, eating, praying, laughing, & having fun.

My Mom and I cooked a lot, which isn’t out of the ordinary. But this time we also did some recipe testing and then ran it past the kids to see if they liked it. Adalynn, our 15 month old,  absolutely LOVED her Grandma’s Super Fudge.

And Avah was eager to help us trial the Dark Chocolate Toasted Quinoa Bites (recipe coming very soon!). She loves to do “pho-graphy” with Mom & Grandma.

The food photography thing actually became a whole family affair with multiple people to hold reflectors, help from my Dad on making food look “artsy”, & input from Owen (my 16 yr old brother) on making our photo’s more visually interesting with “messiness” (he literally saved us when were stumped on the new Super Fudge photos).

Adalynn thought Grandma’s new stove was the coolest climbing place E.V.E.R. And being that I am such a good Mom, I snapped a picture before disciplining her for the up-teenth time. I wish you could hear her say the world “hot” though (one thing I’ve made crystal clear to her about stoves), she says it over and over and it sounds like “OUGHT”, “OUGHT”, “OUGHT.” 15 months is such a fun & busy stage!

You may have read that our family is into raw milk. I know. I know. At first it sounds crazy but I promise it’s not. I wrote about exactly what kind of milk we purchase in my post on What Our Family Eats. However, I may have gotten my attitude about raw milk from my Mother, Shelly, as she has a whole heard of goats that she raises for both meat & dairy. Our children absolutely love helping Grandma milk the goats!

Collecting eggs was also a big hit with the kids. And you can bet that these eggs are top notch! Spoiled chickens get to roam, eat inspects, have local corn-free/soy-free feed when needed, and all the organic table scraps they want. We actually made my Sausage Quiche with a Yam Crust on the last day and wrapped the leftovers up for the 6:00 am flight. It was great travel food!

We did have a turkey for Thanksgiving. It was, in fact, a 36 pound bird that my Mother grew & butchered herself. The thing was ginormous!

The funny thing about Thanksgiving though was that our kids were so exhausted from the week that they completely lost their cool around 11:00 am. And I mean completely LOST. IT. We snapped a picture of the whole family after our meal so I’ll share it with you …. but it is sad that the kids were napping for it (although dinner was VERY peaceful).

And this is us: Owen (my youngest brother), William (my husband), Rashele, Fred (my Dad), Shelly (my Mom), Adam (my middle brother), Rayel (Kyle’s finance), & Kyle (oldest brother).

Want to know what we ate with our turkey on Thanksgiving? Here are a few of the side dishes/desserts we enjoyed: