Thankful...

Our last Thanksgiving on Dexter Road was a good one. The placemat seen above is one of seven Zoe and Sonja put together Wednesday night (amazing what you can create out of contact paper and glitter, isn't it?)... one for each of us, Busia and Dziadzia, and Aunt Steph and Jason.

It's also one of only two pictures we took the entire day, so -- unlike most of our posts -- this will be mainly of the written word variety. Fortunately, there's a pretty good story to tell!

Some background: Busia and Dziadzia were already part of one Thanksgiving feast (a photo courtesy of Emily and Zachary's mom!) and we had a pretty stressful couple of weeks, so all parties involved decided to keep Thanksgiving a low-key affair. Busia learned of a grocery chain that was advertising an eight-person Thanksgiving meal -- turkey, potatoes, dressing, rolls -- for $30. Sounded ideal. We'd round it out with a few more side dishes and desserts and have ourselves a shindig.

We ordered. When do we want to pick it up? How 'bout noon. Eating by 1:30 p.m. Sleeping on the couch by 3 p.m. Perfect.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving. Sonja and I promptly walk up to the deli at exactly noon and give them our name. The kid at the counter nods, checks our name off a list and opens the door to a giant walk-in freezer. Uh oh.

Going into the day, Busia and Sonja were convinced -- apparently by the grocery chain advertising of a "cooked" turkey -- that we'd be picking up a hot meal. I doubted this claim, but figured we'd get a refrigerated "heat and serve" turkey that would take an hour or so to warm up.

We got home, opened the box and found a rock-hard, frozen turkey. The directions: Thaw for seven hours in cold water, cook for three hours. Hmmm. Dinner at 10 p.m.!

We've been having too much good luck recently to let a little frozen turkey let us down, so Sonja and I hopped back in the car and headed off to a different (and now decidedly better) grocery chain that also happens to sell hot, freshly-roasted Boston Market turkey and chicken. We got one of each.

After all that... Eating by 1:30 p.m. Sleeping on the couch by 3 p.m. Perfect. (And Busia has a big turkey in the freezer for Christmas!)

Anyway... back to that "we've been having too much good luck recently" comment. As we said in the last post, we got an offer on our house from the very first person to visit. That offer is now an all-but-done deal. A few days after that offer was made -- and probably still too early in the process to act on a purchase of our own -- we got word from our realtor about a house in nearby Chelsea that was too good to pass up. We gambled and acted anyway.

We showed the new house (we close on both sales on Dec. 17) to the family Thanksgiving morning. Here's a picture of Zoe in front of her new fireplace:



More on that later, I suppose... especially since planning and executing this move will be taking up most of our December.