Turkey Chase

Oy vey.
This whole weekend has been one big blur of turkey and cranberry sauce. And pie. Waaay too much pie.

Thursday we began by waking up way too early to get all ready and finish making some side dishes for lunch/dinner before the time black hole baby woke up. Shockingly, we were ahead of schedule which is not something that happens often in this house now that Baby Bee has joined our ranks. Prior to Bee, I was known for always being early to events. T-Money even got worried and was going to call us to check on our welfare when we failed to arrive precisely at a party's starting time once. But now, even though I plan for the extra 10-billion hours it will take to get Baby Bee ready and locked/loaded in to her car seat, we are still late to...everything.

But not Thursday! We headed over to my folk's house for Thanksgiving v.1. Bee had even taken a morning nap, so we were geared up for a fantastic time. Bee did have a great time playing with her cousins. But when time came to eat our delicious meal, complete with a ghetto green bean casserole that I made (I still have a lot to learn from Martha), Bee decided to morph in to this:So instead of enjoying a nice, sweet lunch/dinner with my family, I got to practice my WWF moves with Bee at the dinner table.

Side note: Some popular forms of torture include water-boarding, electrocution, and flaggelation (that's whipping for those of you that didn't look up "forms of torture" on Wikipedia just now). My favorite form of torture is inviting a mother with young children to hang out for hours at your non-baby-proofed home. This makes for a vein-bulging, stress-induced headache kind of day when you can't let your child roam freely without worrying about falling down stairs, electrocution or accidental water-boarding.

After we ate a lethargy-inducing dessert, we headed over to Thanksgiving v.2 at Mr. Bee's mom's house. Even though we were only a bit behind schedule at this point, we arrived to everyone finishing up their meals (which was fine by us as the Mister just helped himself to more food anyway and I was looking for any reason to not have to eat a whole other meal!). Bee, despite not having an afternoon nap, chilled out by the time we got to Grandma's and keep herself busy playing with puzzles and a magnetic alphabet set.

Sidenote #2: We're not talking some totally 2008 baby-safe magnetic alphabet set. This was old school, it'd only take Bee about a minute to figure out how to dislodge said magnets from the letter, have her own magnet-ey Thanksgiving Feast and die a painful death. Therefore, Mama Hawk Eyes was on duty the rest of the evening.

We had a good time, though, and even got a few photos of Bee giving her Uncle some love:Sissy and I decided that we are a little shopping crazy and therefore attacked Black Friday with a vengeance. 5:00 am? That's for pussies. Sissy and I drove up to the "Seattle" Premium Outlets in the middle of fucking no where Marysville for Midnight Madness. That's right, bitches! MIDNIGHT madness.

Sidenote #3: Seriously, why the fuck are they called the Seattle Premium Outlets? For those of you who do not bleed rain, you'd think that said outlets would be, say, near Seattle? Well, you'd be wrong! They are actually about an hour north of Seattle. Really, though, you couldn't just call them the Tulalip Premium Outlets? Or the On-The-Way-To-Canada Outlets?

So despite my looming tryptophan coma, I left the house around 9:30 p.m. to meet the Sis up in NoWheresVille around 11 p.m. See, there were a couple stores that were going to open at 10:00 so we figured we could waste a bit of time before all the other big stores opened up.

But wait! It turns out that most of the stores decided to randomly open at 10 instead of midnight! Thanks Seattle Asshole Outlets! I really enjoyed pumping vats of coffee down my gullet and sitting on ass watching Survivor reruns when I could have been shopping already and NOT staying up until 3 o'clock in the morning!

Sissy and I were really there for the Coach Factory Store, but when we turned the corner, this is what we saw:While Sissy and I don't have any issues with standing in line for 2 hours, we'd much rather stand in line for hours and be first in line than stand for hours and watch 5 trillion people buy up all the good shit before us. So instead we headed over to Gymboree where we ended spending 40+ minutes in line trying to buy 2 things. Ever seen the movie Falling Down where Michael Douglas goes postal in a McDonald's? Yeah, that was almost me in a Gymboree on Friday night. I shit you not.

And, finally, yesterday we drove way too long with a 19-month old to visit Mr. Bee's Dad and family (Thanksgiving v.3).The visit was actually okay except that Bee refused to sleep during the 2-hour drive there and was cranky cranky cranky by the time we had to leave. But there were lots of animals to scare the shit out of her play with.

This was a long and productive weekend and I'm excited to start the Christmas holiday season, but I'm gonna need this next month just to gear up for another round of family celebrations!


Song title: Turkey Chase by Bob Dylan