The Day Itself

Well, we had a "thanksgiving" after all. 

It was a low key day, which started with watching all of the Thankgiving parade, for the first time in forever.

After that, I watched the dog show, which I look forward to each year.

Best in show this year was the Whippet, but my favorite part(s) of the show were first, the youngest person to show a dog:

And this judge -- I never did figure out exactly what she was wearing.

When that was over, I received an email from Brianna -- actually from HER school email address -- with a power point presentation about our book club.  Then she called to face time me and we had a discussion about the book we had just read, "Holes."  Nobody else in the book club participated, but we had a nice discussion and decided that our next book would be "Bridge to Terabithia," which is less than 200 pages and I think I can read that today.  We will gather more club members in a couple of weeks when they are here and discuss that.

We had left "dinner" open ended.  If Walt felt OK we would meet Ned and Marta at her parents' house.  Ned said it would be OK if we just came for a short time and I got the impression he would really like us to come.  By late afternoon. Walt was feeling OK, so we decided to go.

I don't know how many people were there, but I didn't recognize most of them, and of course my shyness went into overdrive.  But then some were playing a fun game called Hedbanz where you put a card of something on a band around your head and then try to figure out who you are by asking questions of the others.  It was fun watching them. Ned was having a great time playing, especially with one little girl.

I was looking at Marta's step-mom's award wall.  She raises and shows Chows and the are all big dog show winners.  I'd known that for a long time, but even I was surprised to see how many she had shown over the years.  She just lost Bronwin, the dog on the far right with the long list of awards under him.  I know he was very special to her.

There were so many guests that we were seated at three tables for dinner.

(that's Marta's stepmother at the head of the table)

(The third table was in another room and I didn't get a photo of that)

Everything was delicious, but Walt was starting to feel uncomfortable so we ended up coming home before pumpkin pie.  I might have pressed to stay just until dessert, but I knew we had a pie here at home that I had baked the night before for just this eventuality, so we had dessert at home.  We were home before Jeopardy and I spent the night watching things that had been recorded on our DVR.

It wasn't like those Thanksgiving days of old, but we had a good couple of days and I'm still so happy we were able to share it with my mother on Wednesday in a way that made her comfortable.