Thanksgiving Eve

Many things to do today: errands to run, things to bake, stuff to pack. The plan is to be ready to hit the road as soon as The Spouse gets home, hopefully by 4 at the latest so we can, hopefully, get to Dame Judi's by 6. Tonight the family will gather for a belated celebration of Judi & Sean's 50th wedding anniversary and then we'll have our traditional Thanksgiving show. Turkey and such tomorrow.

It gets a little Walton's Mountain when we're all together for Thanksgiving. It started years ago, when we put on an improptu show. The menfolk sang "My Girl". The womenfolk dressed like church ladies and sang a warbly hymn. The children dressed The Child, the youngest girl cousin, as a mermaid and they sang "Under the Sea" while The Child wiggled her hips and made fish faces. Good times. That was also the year that my sister, Audrey Hepburn, greeted me in the morning with, "What's your name?" and we all started inventing other personae for ourselves.

Now it's tradition. Every family shows up with a new identity and each family does some sort of riotous (to us) skit or song or other mayhem. I can't tell you who we're going to be this year until after, because some family members lurk on my blog. I can tell you that we think it's funny. Although, to this day the best bit we ever did was the year we were Fat Angus, Margaret and Wee Bit McShagg. We put on our Scottish accents and for our entertainment we were a human bagpipe. You had to be there. Some of the neices still call The Spouse "Uncle Fat Angus".

The whole alternate personality thing has taken on a life of it's own. No longer content to make up funny names, people now include costumes and props. That Czarina video? We made that the year we were Russian immigrants. I dressed up as the Czarina. The Spouse...I forget his Russian name but he was manager of a borscht factory. And The Child was Ludmilla and danced in the Bolshoi. We dressed her in a tutu and big heavy workboots and she'd do this stomping plie thing all over the room. And the video was my pilot for a cable access program. We crack ourselves up.

But back to more serious matters. I'm tired because The Dog was throwing up last night. It sounded a lot worse than it was but it made me get up to tend to him. Which involved cleaning up so no one else would have to and petting him until he seemed ready to come back to bed. And then, because I'm a mom, I kept worrying that something was wrong and sitting up to pet him some more until I was well sure that he was sleeping again. He's fine now. He was chasing The Cat at 6:30am, just like always.

Oh, big news! It is The Dog's birthday today. He's 2. Happy birthday to him. He's coming with us to my sister's because none of the other plans I tried to make for him came through. We probably need to come up with a name for him, too.