Memories from the Kid Tables

I loved this video by It's a Southern Thing about moving up from the kid table!

I think as a very small child I was fairly content to be at the kid table. At one point I had a discussion with my Glenn cousins about who belonged at which kids table (in my mind, the cool table or the baby table), and the older cousins agreed that the deciding factor was how your juice mustache looked. If you were mature enough to drink juice so that you only had a couple of "vampire teeth" lines on your lips, you belonged with the older kids, but if you had a full red moustache on your upper lip you belonged at the little kids' table. I put great thought into keeping my upper lip clean because I didn't want to be with the babies.

As I got older it made me upset to be sent to the kid table. I remember attending a dinner with my mom's family, and I ended up at the kid table. I was at least a couple years older than all the other kids at the table, and I was mortified to be with the little kids who were spilling juice and acting like babies. It must have showed on my face because my mom asked me what was wrong, and I said indignantly, "I'm the oldest one here!" To my annoyance, everyone misunderstood because they looked at my seventy-something Grammy and laughed hysterically that I thought I was older than everyone in the room.

When I was about twelve, I offered to make swiss steak for the Father's Day dinner (I was under the impression that swiss steak is my dad's favorite, although I'm not sure now if that's actually the case). So after church I lovingly filled the pan with steaks and stewed tomatoes, so excited to be doing something nice for Dad. I was very offended when I came out of the kitchen to find that there were two tables and I was being banished to the kid table while my parents and grandparents would be at the regular table. (After all I had done making him a special dinner!) Dad wasn't interested in my idea to put the two tables together so we could all sit together. I got very upset and cried in my room instead of eating dinner. I still remember that my sweet grandma came up to talk with me for a while after dinner was over.

One Christmas, my cousin brought a boy home from college, and we all thought he was pretty cool (she's married to someone else now, and I can't remember his name, so in retrospect impressing him probably wasn't that important). I was worried that I would get sent off to the little kid table (which would have been so embarrassing in front of a college-aged boy), but because there wasn't space at the kid table or the adult table, Grandma put my cousin Kira and I at our own table, which was fun.

When Ryan and I were newly married, there was a dinner at his parents' house, and I was automatically put with the adults. Ryan's the youngest of seven, and I'm five years younger than him, so I felt a little out of place. I was probably closer in age to several of my nieces and nephews at the teenager table than I was to Ryan's siblings. Not that I wanted to move to the kid table, but I wondered if I belonged with them!

Now that I'm a thirty-year-old I can understand better why the adults want to be separated from the kids. Having everyone mixed together can be fun too, but if you want to have a nice conversation with just the adults, it works a lot better to serve the kids their food and then retreat to the company of the adults where you can enjoy the food, Grandma's nice tablecloth, and conversation with substance without being interrupted by weird kid jokes and spilled punch.

This year we're having Thanksgiving at home with our four kids, so I guess Ryan and I got put back at the kid table. And Ann Marie sucked on her toes. Still, we had a good time.

Thanksgiving 2017

I'm pleased to report that I met all my requirements for a successful Thanksgiving!

I had a lot of help. The kids loved it.

Kevin worked on breaking apart the frozen pineapple. Our "special drink" for Thanksgiving is a can of crushed pineapple (opened and frozen beforehand) and a bottle of Sprite.

A little round of musical chairs before dinner:

Ryan made these beautiful rolls!

I made a lot of pie. Probably too much, but to me pie is half the reason for Thanksgiving. We had two pumpkin pies, a chocolate pie (I just did chocolate pudding in an Oreo crust), and a banana cream pie. The girls helped me make the banana cream pie using this recipe, and it was just fantastic. I'm sort of planning to make it again for my birthday. Actually, maybe I should just go make it right now, never mind that it's after midnight. It was pretty amazing how the filling suddenly congealed after cooking and stirring for one minute. I was totally expecting scrambled eggs mixed with half and half, but I followed the directions exactly and it worked out.

We had games and dessert at the church with friends. We took three of the pies to share, plus home made whipped cream, because I'm a purist and homemade whipped cream is important. I felt like I ended up wrangling kids more than chatting with friends, but it was still a nice time. I really need to figure out a way to arrange girls' nights more often. It's hard for me because I feel like my kids always want to come out if I have friends over after bedtime.

When we got back we stayed up late and watched A Christmas Carol.

What is a successful Thanksgiving?

Do you listen to podcasts? If you don't, why not? Recently I heard someone describe podcasts as "like the radio, only better." Apple phones have a podcast app, and on my Android I've been using the app CastBox, and the podcasts I subscribe to automatically show up in the app. If I'm out driving I download a few before I leave and listen to them in the car instead of CDs or the radio, and I often listen while I'm folding clothes.

I've mentioned before a podcast that I really love called Bold New Mom by Jody Moore. It's completely changed the way I think, and I highly recommend it.

Recently I was listening to one of her podcasts, and although it wasn't like her normal podcasts (she shared a recording of herself life coaching a client to show how the principles she talks about work in a real life situation), something she said stuck out to me and I've been pondering it over the last few days.

Jody Moore suggested to the mom she was talking to that she answer the question, "What makes a successful day?" The thing is, as moms sometimes we tend to judge whether a day was successful based on things we can't control: Did the kids behave well? Did I get the house clean? Did people appreciate the dinner I made? If we put ourselves in that position where how we feel about our day is dependent on our children's or husband's behavior, that means it's not in our control anymore and our feelings are at the mercy of how the kids acted or if the husband happened to notice what we did. So Jody Moore said to think about things that are within our control that we could use to decide if the day was successful. It's going to different for everyone, but her suggestions included having the kitchen clean before going to bed or having at least one loving moment with your kids.

With Thanksgiving coming this week I've of course been making plans, and that includes thinking about what Ryan and the kids and I will want for dinner and especially dessert. We're having Thanksgiving with just our family at home, and I'm okay with that and in a lot of ways looking forward to making the whole meal. But to me Thanksgiving has always meant being with family, and since distance makes that not an option right now, I've been wanting to create some new traditions to make the holiday special. (We do have a dessert potluck later in the day that we'll probably go to.) I don't want it to just be a day where I make a bigger dinner than usual. This video might give you an idea of the Thanksgiving I don't want to have:



I don't want to toil alone in the kitchen all morning and get sweaty and tired and then sit down to the feast (still in my workout clothes) to find that my kids will only eat jello and a roll. Now, I'm pretty sure I can count on Ryan to help me out with the cooking and appreciate the food because he's awesome like that, but the kids are more variable and unpredictable, so I can't necessarily count on them to be helpful (in fact, they might be the opposite).

What I'd really love is to have a lovely time making lovely food with lovely helpful kids and sit down at a lovely table with a lovely view of the clean living room and have a lovely, happy meal with my lovely, happy, well-behaved family and not have to clean up spilled milk for once. I just have to be realistic here and recognize that not all of those things are going to happen because it's too much and not all of it is within my control.

So that's where the podcast came in, and I've been asking myself the question, What will a successful Thanksgiving look like for me? Obviously I can't have the lovely, perfect scenario above, but what are some things that are in my control that I can do to feel like Thanksgiving was a success? And here is I've come up with:

• Make and eat pie with whipped cream.
• Make and eat a dinner that includes turkey, potatoes, gravy, rolls, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and a special drink. (I have to acknowledge that at least to some extent I'm choosing to do this because nobody's stopping me from just making frozen pizzas or something.)
• Let the kids help cook (but don't expect it or get upset if they won't).
• Use the nice plates and glasses and put out the tablecloth.
• Put on clean clothes (not pajamas) and mascara for dinner.
• Find some quiet time to read a book, possibly with a piece of the aforementioned pie.
• Do one family activity together (game, walk, family movie . . . not sure what yet).
• Listen to Christmas music.

I think all of these are doable and they're things that would bring me joy, and importantly, I can feel like Thanksgiving was a success even if the kids don't appreciate what I did. They get to choose if they're going to be happy on Thanksgiving and so do I.

Thanksgiving

In past years we have mostly had Thanksgiving with friends. One year we drove to Amy and David's house and another year we had Thanksgiving with Jared and Kristi because they lived close by.

I worried a lot about what to do for Thanksgiving. I thought about inviting somebody over, but I felt shy about it. But I also didn't want to have Thanksgiving alone because a lot of the fun for Thanksgiving is being with people you care about.

One day I decided to pray about it and asked that we would be able to have Thanksgiving with someone. The very next Sunday I saw the missionary calendar (which was interesting because we weren't usually getting the calendar in Primary) and the sisters didn't have anyone signed up for Thanksgiving yet. I felt like this was the answer to my prayer, so I signed up.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving I noticed that two other people had also signed up to feed them on Thanksgiving, which left me really confused, but the sisters had already confirmed they were coming. So after debating for a while I finally decided that if they were going to have three Thanksgiving dinners that was their problem, and I just planned on them coming and didn't say anything. I'm still not sure why they had three people signed up to feed them that day.

Since we had always had Thanksgiving at other people's houses, I had never made a whole turkey before. I was planning to buy one of those bone-in turkey breasts because I've done those before with good results, but when I went grocery shopping I could only find whole turkeys, so I bought a small one and got on Facebook to ask for tried and true recipes. I ended up doing a dry brine the day before by rubbing salt, butter, and spices underneath the skin (next time I'm getting disposable gloves because after rubbing all that salt in my knuckles were raw). I used the spices from the Herb Roasted Chicken recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

On Thanksgiving I started the turkey cooking in the morning because the sisters were coming around 2:00 and the package said I would need 3 1/2-4 hours based on the weight. I checked it occasionally and it was doing fine. But it ended up being fully cooked a lot earlier than I expected, and we still had a couple of hours before the missionaries were coming, and I had a lot of cooking left to do, so that put me in a bit of a panic. But I covered the turkey in foil and asked the sisters to come in an hour, then started cooking like crazy. It all worked out. I did ask the sisters to make the stuffing when they got to our house (I just bought Stove Top stuffing because I knew homemade rolls and the turkey would already be a lot of work), and while they worked on that I took some time to fix my hair because I like to look nice for Thanksgiving dinner.

It was a yummy dinner. The turkey tasted great, and it was still warm for dinner. We also had homemade rolls, candied yams (which Ryan made), mashed potatoes, green bean casserole (which I didn't like as much as I remembered), and the stuffing. Ryan made a yummy drink with frozen crushed pineapple and Sprite. I was fully expecting the kids to just eat rolls, but they all actually tried and ate a good variety of foods. It was nice to get to know the sister missionaries. After we ate dinner they showed us a video about the Church's #LightTheWorld campaign for Christmas.

The sisters left soon after dinner. I think they must have been planning on pie at another house because they didn't seem interested in taking any with them. Kevin begged me to make my berry pie, but then once Thanksgiving came around he decided he didn't like pie and just wanted whipped cream. I also made two pumpkin pies, which made a great breakfast for the next couple of days.

I think next year if we have Thanksgiving alone I won't feel so bad about it. We had a nice time together at home.

The can opener unexpectedly broke in the middle of all the cooking too. I had to borrow Ryan's pocket knife and use the can opener thing on it to open the last couple of cans.

Kevin and Ann Marie enjoying their whipped cream:

Thanksgiving 2016

This year we had Thanksgiving at the Lantz family's house with the Lantz family and the Warburton family. We have kids of similar ages and this year our four-year-old girls have been in the preschool coop together, so we've all become good friends and we had a really nice time.

I made Lion House rolls. I put a lot of work into making them pretty and buttery since it was Thanksgiving, and I think it was one of our best batches ever. I found this video that showed how to shape them the way they do in the Lion House and it worked well.

Ryan took Kevin and Heidi out to clean the car in the morning while I was working on rolls, and Ann Marie was devastated that she didn't get to come, but she was thrilled when I let her help me with the roll dough. She was pretty good at adding cups of flour, actually.

I made a double batch and this was all that was left when we came home (and then the kids finished them off!).

All she wanted for Thanksgiving was Jamie's Jello salad. (That's a big bite of whipped cream!)

It was a beautiful day, and after dinner pretty much all of us went outside. The kids played in the leaves and had fun taking turns raking.

Then we had pie. Ryan made homemade whipped cream because we're purists. I made a peach pie (which turned out weird) and a razzle-dazzle pie (basically the apple pie recipe but with a couple of bags of frozen mixed berries instead of apples) that was great. Emily brought some yummy pumpkin pies.

Thanksgiving

This year our bishop's wife (who is my visiting teacher) invited us to come to their house for Thanksgiving. Our friends the Rasmussens, who we have shared Thanksgiving with almost every year since we moved here, have moved away, so I was relieved that we had someone to join for Thanksgiving. The missionaries and another family were also there, so it was a pretty good crowd, but not way too big.

We were asked to bring rolls and a salad. Ryan really thought we needed to make a triple batch of Lion House Rolls, so he made a batch the night before and I made a double batch in the morning. Ryan was hovering over me to make sure I did it right. (Ryan makes really good rolls, by the way.) I also made a pumpkin pie and a peach pie with apple crisp topping because I like making pies. The pumpkin pie really should have baked ten more minutes, but they were still very good.

When we got there, we brought all of our food in and all the kids played with legos for a while so that the final food preparations could get taken care of. Then we ate. For the most part it was a standard Thanksgiving dinner with all the normal foods: stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, green bean casserole, salad, sweet potatoes, crackers/vegetable trays, and a fruit salad. That's how it should be. If it were any different it would feel wrong. The food was all great and so was the company.

Then the kids played and the adults chatted. After we felt a little less full we ate pie and chatted some more. Then we packed up the food and went home. There were tons of rolls left, so we left some with the bishop's family and sent some with the other family and still had a big bowl full of rolls. But we did enjoy eating rolls with everything for a couple of days.

And we didn't take any pictures, but you know what turkey and rolls look like anyway, so whatever.

Thanksgiving 2013

This is the only picture we got from Thanksgiving. It was time to make the rolls and I decided to give in to the kids' pleadings to let them help me . . . because I figure if I let them help me now, in ten years they can do it themselves. (I had been doing a lot of cooking and had just gotten the counters cleaned up some, so I was reluctant to let them help because I knew it would be a big mess.) I think there was about a cup of flour on the floor and the kids and I were covered in it. It was a good memory for them, though.

We had Thanksgiving with our neighbors the Rasmussens and the Pulsiphers. The Monsons came over later for pie. We have had Thanksgiving with the Rasmussens for four out the six years we have lived here, so it was a little bittersweet because they will be moving soon.

The kids were really excited about Thanksgiving. I had told them that we would be taking the pie to the Pulsiphers' house and eating dinner and pie there, so they were really looking forward to it and kept asking if it was time to go yet.

Unfortunately, Ryan got sick with the flu two days before Thanksgiving. He slept most of the time and could barely stand up for the first two days. On Thanksgiving, he was doing better, but he had a sore throat and thought he was probably contagious, so he decided not to come to dinner. I brought him food and pie and he spent the time making economic models on MatLab for fun. I'm glad none of the rest of us got sick (and that he can give me kisses again).

The kids all played together incredibly well. We hardly saw them the entire time we were at the Pulsiphers' house because they were playing in their son's room the entire time. (There was a nightlight in there that made it possible to play in the dark, so they were having a fabulous time.)

I ended up making three pies this year. I made a pie with a graham cracker crust and pudding in it, as well as a peach pie and a berry pie. The pie crust was my best yet. It was very flaky and it didn't shrink. I think it helped that I mixed it as little as possible. The berry pie was a last minute decision. I was remembering the razzleberry pie we used to have often at my Grammy's house, and since we had frozen berries in the freezer, I was able to do a single pie with a top crust using this recipe for the filling. It was a very good pie and turned out pretty similar to the razzleberry pie. Kevin really liked it. I think we had enough pie to last until Monday, and that's how it should be. Pie is one of the most important parts of Thanksgiving.

The day after Thanksgiving I spent the day loading my samples into Strontium columns to get the Strontium out and ready for the mass spectrometer. I was done by 7:00 pm, which was a record for me. Every other time I've done it I have been finished much later. Once I didn't get home until 11 pm. It was nice to have plenty of Thanksgiving leftovers to snack on all day, even though it was not so nice to be away from my family on Thanksgiving weekend. I'm blessed to have a family who is very supportive of my education.

Thanksgiving 2011

This year we had Thanksgiving with our friends the Rasmussens and the Gillenwaters, and also the missionaries. I volunteered to make rolls, potatoes, stuffing, and pie. I made pie crust on Tuesday and pies on Wednesday. Heidi was quite excited to taste the spoon I used to mix the apple pie filling.

I made a peach pie and an apple pie, both with apple crisp topping instead of a pie crust on top. I did this last year and loved it. Unfortunately I forgot that last year I had added the topping after the pies were about half-baked already. I put it on in the beginning this time and the topping on the apple pie was a little burned. The peach pie turned out pretty well, though:

I spent most of the morning and afternoon cooking and cutting and rolling and baking. Heidi ended up in the Baby Bjorn will I rolled out the second batch of rolls, and Kevin helped by putting the cut up potatoes in the pot. Ryan helped by taking Kevin out of the house when Kevin started thinking it was his turn to use the knife!

Even though I had tried to plan ahead and get things started early, I still ended up running pretty late. Our stoves are rigged so they don't get very hot and it took quite a while for all the potatoes to get soft. I ended up making the stuffing at the Gillenwaters (which also took forever). Ryan picked up the missionaries and I rode with Annie Rasmussen so there was room for the missionaries in our car.

We had a lovely feast. Annie made a beautiful and delicious turkey, and I was so glad it turned out to be so amazing because she certainly was stressed about it. She also brought pumpkin pie and sweet potatoes (I think she and I were the only ones that ate them--but they were really good!). Zoe Gillenwater, the hostess, had cranberry sauce and olives and she made some acorn squash, broccoli, and chocolate cherry pie.

Kevin plays really well with Asha, the Gillenwaters' daughter, and they had a wonderful time running all over the house.

What kind of parents would we be if we didn't show Kevin how to put olives on his fingers?

Heidi ended up falling asleep just before dinner and didn't wake up for three hours! So kind of her! (And yes, she still slept through the night.)

After dinner Ryan took Kevin and the missionaries home and Heidi and I stayed with Annie and her baby to help clean up. We had a fun time chatting on the way home.

When I got home my family called and we drew names for sibling Christmas presents.

So we had a really nice day!

And then I collapsed in my bed!

Thanksgiving

We had a nice Thanksgiving visiting RT's sister, her husband, and their five kids. We went up on Wednesday and experienced lovely traffic on the busiest traveling day of the year, including waiting three hours just to get through the toll lanes at the border of Delaware (which meant it took us about eleven hours to get there). RT's sister cooked some amazing food for Thanksgiving. I was amazed to watch her go--she really had the system down. I had brought two pumpkin pies, and there was also apple pie, apple-blueberry pie, and pecan pie. It seems so unfair that Thanksgiving has to include so much yummy dessert--but I guess it's okay to to eat like it's Thanksgiving once a year.

We played a lot of Dutch Blitz and visited a museum of art on Friday. We really enjoyed the museum. There was a huge exhibit of armor from the 1400s to the 1700s--yes, real armor, and just like you see it in the movies. It was really interesting to see, although it was also kind of disturbing to see so much stuff that was used to kill. There were also a ton of other exhibits of European art, furniture, and architecture. We saw several rooms that had literally been taken from the mansions they were originally from--as in, they had the wood floors, the fancy paneling, the furniture, the paintings, the oven, the chandelier, even some of the old windows. When we moved into some exhibits of Spain there was an entire plaza that had been brought to the museum. It was all just worked into the museum. Instead of modern doors they used real archways and doors from buildings made "back then." It was all quite amazing to see. I don't think I realized how much of this stuff was still preserved. We were also able to see some things from Asia before the European and Asian exhibits closed, and then we hurried through the American art because we were getting tired. RT and I thought it was interesting to see the differences between European and American art.

We came back on Saturday. K was very good through the entire trip. I had been a little nervous that he wouldn't sleep well in a playpen instead of his crib, but he took great naps and slept tolerably well at night. He mostly slept when we were in the car, except when he got hungry. It was fun for him to see his cousins a little bit. It will be fun for him to see more family in January. It was also nice to sit and talk with RT about lots of things while we were driving.

Thanks to our family for letting us come stay with you for a few days! We had such a good time!