Life of Leisure: Thanksgiving

I always look forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays filled with good food to eat. When I lived in California, I looked forward to drinking holidays, here in Arizona I look forward to eating holidays. Thankfully through diet and exercise or possibly just the heat in AZ, I weigh less than when I was in California.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my sister and I picked kids up from school, packed popcorn, licorice, bottled water, and hit the road to meet my parents at our baby sister’s house in San Diego. Just a side note, we stopped in Yuma to feed the kids real food at Texas Roadhouse, we also had the homemade pumpkin pie my daughter made at school that day, yummy! Otherwise, the road trip was fairly uneventful.

We were excited to get to San Diego to catch up with my baby sister and her husband, see their newly built home and of course sit around the dinner table for hours eating and talking. (Note: priority level is eating before talking.) We got there shortly after 8 pm, unloaded the SUV, and had some of my mom’s machado, chicken affritada, and my dad made balsamic chicken. It seemed my insomnia disappeared the minute we crossed into California because all I remember of that night was unloading, eating, showering, and going to sleep fairly early, meaning before 10 pm.

The next day we hung out at home while my sister and brother in law went to work. My kids, niece, and nephew played with Mikey and Julie’s dogs; Teeny and Burger. Mikey and Julie are my sisters roommates and fortunately were very nice about letting the kids play with their dogs. I think my niece might have aggravated Burger because Burger nipped at her pant legs and thereafter had to be on separate floors because they were afraid of each other. My mom surprisingly fell in love with Teeny who is the calmer, gray dog who looked like a stuffed animal and loved to lounge around sleeping while you petted her. If I could take care of a dog, I would have put her in my duffel bag and brought her home, which I’m sure the kids would have loved. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t last a week at our house because I would forget to feed her or forget we had a dog and it would probably run away.

This Thanksgiving, instead of waking up early to watch Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, football, snacking all day while waiting impatiently for the Thanksgiving meal to be cooked, we decided to do something different. On Thanksgiving morning, we still woke up early, had breakfast, and then we all jumped into the SUV for the hour and a half drive to Knotts Berry Farm, which turned out to be about 3 hours because of the lovely SoCal traffic.

It turned out it to be lot of fun, there were hardly any lines so the kids were able to go on their favorite rides several times with minimal waiting. By kids, I mean the little ones not me, my older daughter, and brother-in-law who rode all the roller coasters which were open. Mental note: you shouldn’t go on roller coasters that flip you around and around when you have a migraine. I stopped at a vending machine and got a sugar-free No Fear energy drink because I thought the caffeine would help the headache go away. Before it had a chance to kick in, we started going on the rides, I had to close my eyes on the first one to diminish the nausea. I’ve never done that on a ride before and it was a really cool flying feeling because we were on the ride where your feet dangle. The caffeine finally kicked in about the second ride, then I found a candy shop that sold Advil so I bought that and got the kids some spiral pops. When I looked in the bag to take the Advil, I found a $20 bill so it turns out I made about $10 on that transaction, score!!

My mom is obsessed with Knotts Berry Farm fried chicken saying it’s the best EVER! Well, I’m a fan of Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles in Crenshaw so I had pretty high expectations of this chicken. The wait for the restaurant was about an hour and a half, we decided we were too hungry for that and went to TGI Fridays instead. Not to disappoint my mom, I went to the take out portion of the restaurant and ordered some fried chicken to go. We had the chicken as a snack when we got home from the park that evening and it was good, I wouldn’t call it the best ever. It probably made my mom’s weekend so we were happy about that.

When we go to my baby sisters’ house shes usually waxes our eyebrows, she went to school for that, she even held off waxing her own brows until we got there so she can do it all at once. While I was getting my eyebrows done, my 2 year old niece was watching and kept saying me too, me too! She is completely adorable and doesn’t need to fix a thing about her except sometimes she has a tendency to get a unibrow like her dad. Not cute for a girl of any age. Her mom actually said she can get her eyebrows done and we took a video of her first brow grooming experience and uploaded it into Facebook. If you are one of my friends you should be able to view the video. I was really impressed at how well she was able to handle the pain of waxing and although you can see she wanted to cry, we were cracking up so she started laughing instead. She even let me sister wax a little bit under the brows and do a little bit more cleanup after the initial waxing of the unibrow hair in the middle of her two eyebrows. What we didn’t expect is for this “bald patch” slightly above the brow line because apparently she has a hairy forehead. My sister had to wax a little bit to the left and to the right of the center just to blend the bald patch a little better. This was more hilarious because it reminded us of that scene in the 40 year old virgin when he was attempting to get his chest waxed. Parents, you’ve been warned, don’t blame me for your toddlers eyebrow mishaps, should you try to give them perfect eyebrows before kindergarten.

We went home on Saturday, it was pouring rain in San Diego when we left. When we got to the mountains there was snow, then when we crossed into Arizona it was sunny and warm. In the space of a few short hours we were able to experience all the seasons and if we weren’t on the freeway, we probably would have stopped to let the kids play in the snow.