I'm Thankful for Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving we had a lot to be thankful for. We were even lucky enough to have TWO delicious dinners, one with the extended Goates bunch and one at my grandparents' home with my family. We're really fortunate that our families live close together so we're able to see them both on holidays, but I'll be honest, this always causes a lot of stress for me. In some ways I think it would be easier if they lived far apart so we would have to just switch off. Anyway, my point with this is that we were so busy rushing around and catching up with everyone that I didn't really take very many pictures, and I'm really sad about it because Nolie looked SO cute in her little Thanksgiving dress. But here are a few that I did manage to snap:

Nolie and Daddy having a nice turkey nap.

I made my first apple pie! My grandma was ashamed that I used Pillsbury crusts, but whatever, it was way faster.

"M" is for Magnolia. I felt like Snow White when she makes that pie for Grumpy. Only no birds scratched the slits in my pie. That would be absolutely disgusting.

Here's Baby Magnolia in her Alice in Wonderland jammies with my grandma.

Also over the weekend Nolie got to meet her new cousin Molly! They are just five weeks
apart and it was fun to see them together. Little Molly is tiny compared to Magnolia and she was a good sport to put up with Nolie jabbering away and flailing around while she was trying to sleep :)

And seriously those are the only pictures I took. We had a really great weekend with family, and I've really been reflecting on all of our many blessings. Since we had Nolie and I'm no longer working, things have been really tight financially for us. We're much poorer than we've ever been, and trust me, we were pretty poor before. I don't mean to complain or sound ungrateful, it's just been kind of a stressful and scary time for us. But this Thanksgiving even though we're in this situation, we still have so much to be grateful for. This year has brought so much to us.

I had a very healthy pregnancy, and we have a healthy and beautiful baby girl. She is such a good, sweet baby and we wouldn't trade her for anything. Rob is doing so well in school and will be finished in just one more year. We have wonderful families who love us and have always been so good to us. We've been able to make ends meet somehow even when we thought there was no way we'd be able to. There are so many people in this world who have so much less than we do. I think of them and I realize how very blessed I am, and that I've never really had to do without the things that really matter.

We had TWO huge Thanksgiving dinners for crying out loud.