What a busy week we had!  With the Thanksgiving holiday this week we headed north to Mansfield for our annual Hosta seed planting tradition with my parents. Around the first week of November each year my dad lists his hosta seed offerings on his website www.hostaworks.com. Last year Kevin gave it a face lift complete with the addition of the Seed Shoppe, an automated shopping cart type sales function. It is so much easier than the manually tallying of years past! So early in November Kevin got he site up and running for 2013. Then, every year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, my dad and I plant the seeds in the basement “seed room” while Amy and Andy package up the seeds to be shipped to those who have ordered them. With the addition of two more kiddos this year we weren’t as productive in the seed room as in the past, by the end of the weekend we had only 27 trays planted – that is about half! But we had fun nonetheless!

On Thanksgiving Day we woke up and had a nice breakfast at my parents. Graham helped Beepa make strawberry pancakes. Finn had his first taste of both bacon (see first picture below) and pancakes.  I mean, it is Thanksgiving after all, right?! Check out the video – Finn is pretty good at chewing these days 🙂

Then we headed south to Enon for the Armstrong Thanksgiving at Uncle Steve and Aunt Cookie’s home. We had a fun visit though Griffin was rather shy for the better part of it. He enjoyed some butternut squash and some of Grandma Armstrong’s corn dish. Yum! We enjoyed seeing all of the cousins, aunts, uncles, and kiddos! Then we returned to Mansfield for dinner with my family. The kids had some play time while dinner the turkey was getting prepped.  Finn is very observant when he’s around other kids. He and Graham had some fun play time together as G was showing him how his toy worked. At dinner Finn tried turkey and peas.  I know, they say to introduce foods gradually!! Thanksgiving was the exception on that rule…..but Finn did great with everything – no tummy aches and no reactions.   

Yummers. Turkey and peas! Finn is getting good with his pincer grip!

Yet another family tradition going back to when I was a little kid is Black Friday shopping with the family! Here we are starting out for breakfast at Bob Evans, and then by the end of the day Finn was tuckered out and fell asleep on Grandpa in the store! It was a fun day complete with lots of food and shopping success. And here is a final pic of the week along with a video of Finn dancing and laughing.