Day: November 23, 2005

Today was a day of cooking. I am truly amazed at the amount of baking I did today. 3 pumpkin pies, 1 apple pie, 4 loaves of pumpkin bread, 1 big batch of candied walnuts, and a chocolate cheesecake. All of this is in preparation for the feasting tomorrow. Chalain & Chaliren are coming to spend the day, help cook food, and help devour food. I’m really looking forward to it. During a preparatory pow-wow where Chaliren and I divided the list of things to be cooked, we agreed that we’d eat ham rather than turkey. Tonight at dinner Kiki expressed disapointment with this decision. She really wanted turkey. Or to be more accurate, she wanted a huge roasted bird so that she could peel the cooked skin off and eat that.

For anyone who doesn’t know, cooking a Turkey starts about 4 days before hand when you pull the beast out of the freezer and use up your entire fridge to give it room to thaw. When the bag the turkey is in starts leaking, you know it’s ready to cook. In short, it’s too late to acquire a turkey and expect to be able to cook it tomorrow. Besides, I baked all day I don’t want to go shopping. Howard was sporting a vicious headache and didn’t want to go shopping either. In hopes of heading off the looming Pout of Doom, I rummaged in our freezer and discovered a frozen turkey breast left over from last year. It was small enough that if I used the defroster in my fridge I might be able to cook it tomorrow. I triumphantly carried the partial bird up to Kiki expecting excitement and thanks. She took one look at it and sat back pouty again “It says turkey breast. Will it have skin on it?” sigh. I’ve no idea, but at least I attempted to not ruin Thanksgiving for her. If our sacreligous decision to have ham instead of bird does ruin her holiday, then she can add it to her store of character building memories.

In unrelated news I’ve got a new game at the top of the “We will never rent this again” list. It features a cartoony alien creature who runs sideways across the screen while violently slaying and infinite supply of identical FBI agents. It is repetitive and annoying and my kids love it. As I was baking I got to listen to them howling with laughter while shouting things like “I bit his head off!” “Die FBI!” and “I cut him in half!” It was rather disturbing, at least to me. I did discover that there was a feature that allowed you to turn the “gore” off. This meant that when you sliced FBI agents they spouted flowers instead of blood. I hoped that would be better. Instead I got complaints. “Mommy! The blood is all gone!” If I really believed that it was harming them, I would take the game back right now even though that would make me into the super bad guy for days. As it is, I’m going to work really hard at finding them more interesting things to do. It just feels wrong to hear those things coming out of the mouths of my beautiful little children. Yuck.

If you haven’t already, got read Howard’s Open Letter (http://www.livejournal.com/users/howardtayler/137093.html). It makes me cry to read it and so grateful that we’ve come to a place where he could write it.

We’re so lucky.