Day 785 - Happy Thanksgiving

The time of the year has come again when we give thanks for all we have by overeating, complaining about our health, and sitting on our asses the entire day watching parades and football. Happy Thanksgiving!

Our day started off watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with the kids. Emma and Andrew took quite a bit of interest watching the festive floats, marching bands, and gigantic balloons. What shocked me was how many balloon characters they recognized by name. They knew Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, and Kermit the Frog. I thought the size of the balloons might've scared the kids, but the only thing they ended up being scared of was Al Roker.

For the past two years since the kids were born, we ordered the Thanksgiving Box Feast at Marie Callender's. The turkey has always been pretty tasty, but the sides have always been a little disappointing. So this year, we only ordered the turkey and a pumpkin pie; we decided to cook everything else.

When we thought about it, the sides for Thanksgiving are not very difficult to make. We made sweet potato casserole, garlic mashed potatoes, string beans, oven-roasted corn on the cob, stuffing, and rice. That's right. I said rice. America has Miracle Whip, and the Ichikawas have rice. Live with it.

Since the kids have grown accustomed to eating food that we eat (i.e. fried foods, fatty foods, and more fried foods), it was the first Thanksgiving since they were born that we were all able to eat together at the same time as a family. Emma and Andrew really enjoyed their dinner, and everything went smoothly except for one thing.

While Emma was eating her dinner, she wiped her face and something went up her nose: a piece of corn. At first it was pretty funny, and Emma didn't seem to be too bothered by it. The corn was still sticking out so I thought it would be pretty easy to pull out. It wasn't.

Each time I grabbed the piece of corn, it went up a little farther up her nose. I started to panic. I tried to massage the corn down her nostril. I also plugged her other nostril and asked Emma to blow which was a bit of a disaster because she ended up spitting food on me. To make matters worse, everyone was telling me what to do.

"Get tweezers," shouted Lisa.

"Don't use your fingers," shouted Crazy Grandma.

"Tell her blow into kleenex," shouted Auntie Anne (pretzel maven).

"Where's the remote control," shouted Lazy Grandpa.

Through a combination of nostril massage and finger manipulation, I was able to get the piece of corn out of Emma's nose. Thankfully, Emma did not cry or whine even once. This whole episode was especially embarrassing for me because I've had a lot of practice picking my nose so I felt like I let people down.

And with that, our Thanksgiving was over. I hope you had a great holiday, and hope it wasn't as corny as ours.

"Dude...we got fat."