Happy Thanksgiving!!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! We will be spending the holiday with family doing various activities, cooking, eating, laughing, shopping, decorating, and hopefully some crafting!! We are taking the rest of the week off to celebrate, but will be back on Monday with TONS of fun ideas for Christmas! We will have Christmas crafts and LOTS of neighbor gift ideas. Enjoy your holiday and we will see you Monday!

A Grand Thanksgiving Tradition, Homemade Pie.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I love Thanksgiving. I love the season of gratitude, being with family, and eating yummy food. For me, Thanksgiving Day has a lot of unofficial traditions, playing games with family, watching football, and my Mother's home made pie. My Mother is an excellent cook, anything she makes is from scratch and absolutely delicious. Every Thanksgiving Day I look forward to her pies. Apple and Pumpkin with home made crusts are a given, but one that has become a non traditional staple is the Sunny Banana Cream pie. I don't remember when it first was served on Thanksgiving Day, but my late older brother was sure to request it every Thanksgiving Day, it was his favorite. My Mother still serves it every year we are at her house, and my husband has grown to love this tradition as well. We are making it this week and I thought I would share the recipe, though I don't have any photos to post, I can post them after the holiday.

Sunny Banana Cream Pie

2 bananas

1- 8 ounce pkg cream cheese

2 cups milk

1- 3 ounces pkg instant banana cream pudding mix

Toasted coconut to garnish, if desired

Slice bananas onto graham cracker pie crust. Gradually add 1/2 cup of milk to softened cream cheese, mixing until well blended. (With a hand mixer or Kitchenaid mixer.) Add pudding mix and mix remaining milk; beat slowly 1 minute. Pour into crust and chill. Garnish with coconut.

Makes 1, 9 inch pie.

Graham Cracker Pie Crust

12 double graham crackers

3 TBSP sugar

7 TSBP melted butter

Put crackers in a zip lock bag and use a rolling pin to roll into fine crumbs. Combine with butter and sugar. Mix well. Press firmly into two 10 inch pie pans. Chill 45 minutes or bake at 350 degrees for 8 minutes until edges are lightly browned. Cool before filling.

I love fun, quirky, family traditions. Do you have any in your family? Please share! Happy Thanksgiving!

Easy Centerpiece for the Kid's Table: Weekend Website

If you are looking for an adorable centerpiece for the kid's table, then hop on over to One Charming Party for the tutorial on this turkey. Cute, simple, inexpensive, and a surprise inside! You will love all of Brittany and Sara's fun ideas, their parties are amazing! They have several other fun ideas for the kid's table, including some fun favors. I will definitely be using some of these ideas this year. Have a great weekend!!

Giving Thanks

I am thankful for so many things. First and foremost, I am thankful for my faith. I would not be who I am today without it. I am thankful for the experiences I have every day that help me to grow and become a better person. I am so thankful for my family. For my sweet, supportive, hard-working husband and my wonderful, silly, full-of-life children. I'm grateful for my supportive, loving, extended family and dear friends. I am so thankful to have a healthy body, and I'm thankful that all of my children are healthy and strong. I have been so blessed, and feel humbled by everything that I have been given. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Give Thanks

I am so glad Lynn from The Vintage Nest is hosting her Give Thanks party today. I am thankful for all of you in the blogosphere for your inspiration, creativity, comments, and for reading and supporting us! Please stop by and see all of the great bloggers she has listed and what they are thankful for, it is so nice to reflect on what blessings you have.

I am so thankful for family and what wonderful people I get to surround myself with on both mine and my husband's side. I am thankful that I added a new addition to our family this year, what an amazing joy he has been. I am thankful to be a Mother, Wife, Daughter, Sister, and Friend. I am thankful for the love that family gives unconditionally, always. I am thankful that on this holiday we gather together as families and reflect on the blessings we have.

Thank you, each one of you, for taking the time to read our blog, we appreciate it!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Countdown to Thanksgiving Turkey

I often feel like Thanksgiving is a looked over holiday. With all the excitement surrounding Halloween and Christmas, sometimes Thanksgiving is left out. I LOVE Thanksgiving, I love spending time with family, and I love that we have a holiday to recognize gratitude. I think that Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to teach our children about the importance of gratitude and to focus on our blessings. This past week for Family Home Evening we decided to do just that, focus on our family's blessings and on gratitude. Halloween and Christmas have their countdowns, I don't think Thanksgiving should be left out, so we made a "Countdown to Thanksgiving Turkey."

To make this craft I used:

-2 Styrofoam balls, one large, and one slightly smaller

-Brown spray paint

-Popsicle sticks

-2 red pipe cleaners

-A foam turkey face

-Colorful cardstock

-Hot glue

-A glue stick

I printed each family member their own thankful sheet for them to write down blessings. I did twenty five total (for the countdown) and the cut them into feather shapes. If you trust little hands, you can have them cut out their own, in my house Mom and Dad cut out most of them. Then we talked about what gratitude was and wrote down all of the things we are grateful for. Of course one of the things I am grateful for is food. :) After they were cut and filled out, we used glue sticks to attach the feathers to popsicle sticks.
We then let Daddy assemble our turkey while we made treats. We took the styrofoam balls outside on skewers to spray paint them, then left one of the skewers in and cut it in half. We used the skewer to attach the head and the body, you could also use a popsicle stick to do the same job. Then we flatted the bottom of the body ball by pressing it on the counter, so our turkey would sit up.
Daddy then poked the feathers into the body part of our turkey. As much fun as this part is to let the kids do, I wanted to reuse this guy next year, so we had Daddy do it.
For the turkey's face I had found this foam turkey kit for $1.99 at Micheal's. We used the face and attached it to the head of our turkey with hot glue.
We made some feet with pipe cleaner and our Countdown to Thanksgiving Turkey was complete! Starting November 1, after dinner each day we will pull out a feather and talk about the blessing that the member of our family wrote down. We will talk about why we are grateful for that blessing and what it means to be thankful.
Here is a view from the back, the feathers became to heavy for our turkey, so we ended up using an extra popsicle stick to prop him up, from the front you would never know.
Here is another front view of our turkey. I think he turned out really cute and I am excited to continue this tradition for years to come!