The First Thanksgiving

For Harper's 1st Thanksgiving, we headed to my brother's house just outside Austin.  Of course we waited to leave Dallas pretty much the same time as everyone else the day before Thanksgiving, so it took us double the time to get there.  We all were never so glad to get out of a car!  

Thanksgiving preparations started pretty early because we had tickets to the University of Texas football game later that night.   My sister.n.law and her mom had all the food pretty much prepared, so the rest of us tried to keep "the girls" - Harper and my niece, Kaytie - out of their way.  

Kaytie showed Harper where she usually eats her snack...... on the first step, so it seemed like keeping them out of the kitchen would be easy.  

 With a doctor in the house (my brother), someone always seems to say "can you take a look at this?", and this year, it was Scott.  Haha!

 Soon, the fun of eating a snack on the first step wore off, and the girls were fighting over one toy.  It's funny how two year olds can fight over ONE toy when there are plenty of other things to play with.  So, we played referee for a while.....

And there was always one that didn't agree with the outcome.  In the case below, it was Harper.  She threw herself down in protest.  At least she was screaming into the carpet.... that provided a nice little buffer :)

There is a little park around the corner from my brother's house, so we decided to leave the wrestling ring of the living room and head there with the girls....

Soon, it was time to head back and eat!  When the girls aren't screaming over the same toy, they really do love each other.   Harper can get pretty bossy with Kaytie, but we'll just call it being protective.  Harper is always watching out for her .  On the way back from the park, she stopped to grab Kaytie's hand....

and made sure she was hydrated before getting a drink herself :)

We came home to find one of my brother and sister.n.law's cats had gotten dressed up for Thanksgiving.... thanks to my mom.   Doesn't he look thrilled?

Dinner was served before we knew it, and Harper was experiencing Thanksgiving for the first time.  Of course she loved it.  She really hasn't met a morsel of food that she doesn't like.  Well, tomatoes... she doesn't like tomatoes, but other than that, food is her thing.  Thanksgiving was made for her!  :)

 Harper also got to experience another Thanksgiving tradition..... sitting at the kid table.

 Second, and a few third servings, were eaten and we were off to the football game.  UT was playing Texas Tech, my sister.n.law's alma mater, so this was a house divided.  The girls stayed back with my mom and her husband.  

Boy, was it COLD!!  We had fun, but we decided to leave the game early just so we could warm up.  On the way home, I was scrolling through my pics from that night, and found a few pictures of the cheerleaders.  Appears Brannen had taken over my camera for a few clicks!  

Kaytie turned 2 over Thanksgiving, so we all helped her celebrate.  We had been working with Harper, before we went to visit, on singing 'Happy Birthday'.  I think she ended up giggling through the whole song because she was so excited!

Before we left to go back to Dallas, we made one more trip into Austin to visit with friends that were in our travel group in China.  Their daughter, Kaylin, is almost exactly a year younger than Harper.  It was SO much fun to see how much Kaylin had blossomed.  When we last saw her in China, she could barely hold her head up, and now she was walking all over the place!   It still blows me away that just little over 8 months ago, both of these girls were in China and had no idea what was before them.

I was just slightly (ok, very)  jealous that Kaylin let Brannen hold her, and not me!

And, with every trip into Austin, we took the boys to visit their favorite place.... Toy Joy.

Harper was pretty happy with the trip to Toy Joy because Scott gave in and bought her some candy.  He seriously cannot say 'no' to her..... we're working on that!!

Down the street from Toy Joy is a statue of one of my favorite musicians..... Willie Nelson!  Of course we had to stop.

So, Harper's first Thanksgiving is in the books.  I'd say it was a good one.  We got to hang out with family, meet up with part of our China family, and ate a ton of good food!  With Thanksgiving over, that means Christmas will be here before we know it.  I cannot wait to see what Harper thinks about that!!  Knowing her, she will take it all in stride.

 That is, until we take her to see Santa....

She'll probably freak.