Thanksgiving

I spent the first half of Thanksgiving working while my boys stayed home and watched football.  After pau hana time, I drove down to Waikoloa and met up with the crew, who were already busy deep frying the turkey.  We spent Thanksgiving with our friends under the promise of being fed "hippie food".  It was a far cry from Tofurkey, but I did bring them a Venti dirty chai to split for good measure. 

Why is it so hard to take a good family photo?  Probably because there are 8 pairs of eyes to worry about.  It just impressed me that families, larger-than-mine families, are able to take Christmas card worthy pictures together.  I find it almost impossible.  Like how I find Ikaika's baby shaka impossibly cute!

After the agave-sweetened, mac nut, sweet potato pie, we all started to feel it.  Deeply.  Karen passed around the digestive enzymes, we cracked open some more Pipeline Porters and things slowly began to settle (I already said this was a "hippie food" Thanksgiving soiree) 

Then Ikaika started eyeing that Holy's Bakery Buttered Pear pie...

Apparently, Koa was content until I arrived then he remembered that mom had been gone for 7 hours and started bawling.  It took about 2 hours before he trusted me enough to be out of my lap for longer than 30 seconds.

As the night went on (and we began ignoring the kids so we could battle royale, Chinese Checkers style) Ikaika gave me this frightening glimpse into the future.  It's a 'play phone' so there wasn't even anything on the screen, but he sat there "texting" like a bored, sullen teenager for almost 20 minutes.

The boys and their homegirl Malina played in the yard, snuggled in front of Elmo, and fed eachother leftovers.  We had a blast but by the time 9pm rolled around everyone was zonked.  No matter how badly I wanted that Kindle on sale at Target (bust through the doors at midnight...I promise I won't get anything else...we can sleep for a couple hours in the parking lot...no big deal, right?), I just couldn't do the Black Friday thing.  I only wanted one item, so it would have been a huge time/gas/sanity expense and Karen put it sharply in perspective when she reminded me "a Kindle isn't going to change whether or not you are happy tomorrow."  So here we are, home at 10pm and ready to snuggle up, watch X Files and digest.

FYI: I'm thankful for, among other things, people who actually read my blog.  Thanks!