So apparently when I decide to lose NaBloPoMo, I decide to lose hard. I've been home the past three days and haven't had to work my online job, so I theoretically should have had time. But instead, I think I've mostly been recovering (and working my other job, and doing solo childcare today, so maybe it hasn't been much of a spa trip).

Thanksgiving turned out to be lovely after a rocky start. I woke up to discover two fractious children, a fed-up husband and a pumpkin pie that needed to be made again. As it turned out, Alec is taller than I thought and I left the pie too close to the edge of the top of the stove, so he pulled it off and then grabbed the crust to pull it half out of the pan. At least he was finding it tasty before other inconsiderate people came along to ruin his feast. Our plan had been to go see an early afternoon showing of Tangled, then come home and do a relatively simple Thanksgiving meal, but after I took in the general mood, I suggested we go out after the movie.

Tangled was just great. We accidentally went to the 3d showing, and while it wasn't worth the extra $9, there were parts that were lovely in 3d. It was also nice to find out that I can handle 3d all right. I've always wondered about that because I'm Magic Eye-impaired (really, I'm pretty much the guy in Mallrats who spent the entire movie trying to see a Magic Eye. Every once in a while I can start to see shapes starting to move, then I lose it). I'm also prone to headaches if I ask too much of my eyes or from motion that's too quick or weird. But this movie, at least, was fine.

It was also just a great movie. Really funny, good action, an evil witch who managed to be incredibly evil but in a way that didn't terrify K, which I think will put this movie high up on our Disney Princess rotation. She's of the Cinderella's stepmother school of honeyed barbs and psychological warfare instead of the Maleficent over-the-top cackling and shrieking evil (what Terry Pratchett called "hearing the clang of the oven door" when talking about witches going evil). I think K will always be a Cinderella girl, but Rapunzel is going to be a close second. For me, I enjoyed it just about as much I did Beauty and the Beast, which is one of my favorites, for a lot of the same reasons (I admit, I've never actually been much of a Disney Princess person at any point in my life, but I've liked the new wave of Disney animated movies that started with Little Mermaid).

Alec slept through 90% of the movie, so we were all much more chipper leaving the theatre. Then we discovered the restaurant we wanted to get dinner at wasn't going to be serving dinner for another 45 minutes, so we decided to go home and take a crack at cooking after all. I made another pumpkin pie* and then an apple pie, then we cooked a turkey breast with dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans and gravy. Along with some spiced cider, it made a nice meal that didn't overwhelm us with leftovers or require anyone to stick their hand in a very personal area of a dead bird. And then, of course, the pie.

So then I worked Friday and B worked today, but not only do we both have tomorrow off, my best friend and her husband are visiting tomorrow! Hooray!

* Previously, my only experience with Thanksgiving food getting pulled off of the table was one year when we were eating with family friends who had a large irish setter, and the leftover turkey had been left on a table that was just about at his eye level. Really, who could possibly blame him? I hadn't thought of toddlers posing so many of the same dangers as dogs, but maybe K actually knows what she's talking about when she calls Alec "Puppy" and tries to make him heel and fetch.

I guess toddler pumpkin pie will go down in the rich family history of holiday meal disasters that nobody will ever let die. There was the time we had rubbed the turkey with oil, which meant there were very few drippings for making gravy and what I could get had a lot of oil in them, resulting in a tasty gravy that nonetheless was very off-putting for its tendency to separate into a ropy, gluey mess. Or the year my mother forgot the sugar in the cranberry relish, or my father put the dough for the rolls into the oven to rise and my mother came along and turned the oven on to preheat it for the pie, resulting in one very very large and burned roll. I know those two incidents couldn't both have happened the same year the dog stole the turkey carcass, but somehow it's all melded together in my memory as one very disastrous Thanksgiving when I was about eleven.