Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving Day was wonderful.  As always, it was great to be together with everyone.  I guess we'll just go by the pictures...

Some of us prepared the meal.  I made Strawberry Pretzel Salad, homemade Mac 'n Cheese, and arranged the vegetable tray.  

Some of us played games...

Some gathered around the computer.  (Nice, Evan. Jack says with so many boys, you're bound to catch at least one of them picking their nose.)

Here's the spread.  Everything really was so delicious.  It was a great meal!

Dishing up and digging in!

  Some of the kids...

  It was so nice to have an "adult table" and to all sit down together to eat and talk!  That doesn't usually happen.

 Jackson was so excited to find this number "3" pepper!

After the feast the men took the kids to the park to play football while the women cleaned up from dinner and enjoyed a quiet house.  We had just barely finished the dishes and thought about sitting down when the crews returned.

 

Jackson and Addie had fun playing together.

Story time with Grandma

The whole Shirts clan was together at the same time for about 10 minutes...just long enough to get this group picture. (We saw everyone more than that, just not all at once.)

 We did a sandwich cracker taste test between Austin crackers (which are made by Kellogg's in the plant where Jack works) and Lance. Jack had to be blindfolded because he'd know the difference by the looks.  To his satisfaction, Austin beat Lance by a slight margin in both the peanut butter and the cheese crackers.

After another long day of cousins playing together we finally turned on a movie for everyone to settle down.

And it worked :)