Taking Advantage of the Relatives at Thanksgiving

I can't believe it has been a month since I have posted on my blog....actually, I have only read a couple of blogs in the last month. What happens to the time? Well, here I am, back from hiatus with a couple of stories.

We hosted Thanksgiving again this year. I guess it is becoming a tradition for us to have Thanksgiving now that John's mother is getting older and had her hip replacement. We had John's brother and his wife (Alex and Cindy) and her parents (Chuck and Lois) from Lafayette, and this year my brother and his wife (Terry and Leslie) and my nephew (Nigel) were here from Wisconsin. It was great to have everyone here....Terry, Leslie and Nigel were here from Wednesday to Saturday, and we just had non-stop fun with them. We had a small party on Friday after Thanksgiving, and it was just a really nice way to kick off the Holiday Season 2010. The above photo is all of us on Wednesday evening....that's me, Nigel, Leslie, and Terry's arms....




These are pictures from the get-together with friends on Friday evening.... These 2 nice looking young people from the right in this photo used to help us with hay when they were youngsters growing up in Otis.

But, I have a confession to make....we did sort of take advantage of the relatives. Here is a picture from Friday morning of me with my brother Terry....







You see, we had not yet gotten our supply of hay to get us thru the winter. The time just slipped by, and here it was November again and we did not have our hay loft filled. (The same thing happened to us a couple of years ago, and I swore I would nver let November arrive again without our hay loft being full.)



So, unknown to Terry, Leslie and Nigel, we arranged to have our hay delivery on Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving!! We thought, "well, we have people herre to help, so why not have it delivered when we have extrra folks around?" So that is what we did. Except, we did not tell them about it until after they arrived and had a couple of cocktails. Really sneaky and underhanded, I know. But you gotta do what you gotta do, right??

They were really good about it, and it turned out to be fun. Terry has some major back problems, and just had his 3rd surgery in September, so he was assigned the job of "water boy" -- literally...he brought us all water as we were working. Luckily the weather cooperated -- not too cold, and we actually enjoyed it. And John and I were so grateful to them for helping us with this HUGE task!!