So Grateful

How can you not have a smile on your face this time of year? It's the start of the holiday season, where we spend quality time with our friends and family, indulge in high calorie meals, decorate the house for the holidays and start crossing off names on the Christmas list. It truly is the best time of the year.

4 years ago we started a family tradition of our own, and have now have a formal title for our Thanksgiving day event - the Helleen Family Fun Run (or the HFFR). It's also become a custom to make your very own race shirt the night before, so that's exactly what we did. Everyone came over Wednesday night to decorate their 4th Annual HFFR t-shirt and chow down on some pizza. I look forward to this night every year. It might sound dorky to decorate a t-shirt for a family fun run, but it's an excuse to get everyone together. This year we were even able to spend a little quality time with Matt and Jen in California via FaceTime. Our group was pretty creative this year when it came to the race shirts. Amanda went to North View's art department for supplies, Mike made Jennie a cape, Harper join in on the fun with her first HFFR onesie, and everyone was required to use a hashtag in their design. I'd say our pre-Thanksgiving tradition was successful once again. 

We asked everyone to head to our house Thanksgiving morning around 8am to get ready for the run. The youngin's moaned and groaned a little about the prompt start time (I've found your idea of "early" changes after you have a baby!), but everyone arrived ready to rumble! With their HFFR swag, and tennies we headed to the lake and started our Turkey Day 6k. It feels great to start your holiday with a run, and it helps when the weather is beautiful. After completing 3+ miles, we started pouring mimosas and preparing breakfast. After monkey bread, egg bake, and fruit we were all suffering our first food coma of the day. 

Since my parents go to Missouri every Thanksgiving, we always celebrate the holiday at Bob & Deb's. My brother has stayed back the last few years and celebrated with us, according to him he has a "good thing going." We headed to Helleen's to watch some football before Thanksgiving dinner. Harper immediately headed for her bin of toys. She insists on tearing out every single toy, even if she doesn't plan to play with it. So that's a warning, if you ever come to our house... it often looks like a tornado went through our living room.

Dinner was terrific as usual. Isn't Thanksgiving food the best? Turkey, potatoes, gravy, cranberries, and let's not forget PIE! Unfortunately I heard a stat on Wednesday that the average Thanksgiving plate has 4,700 calories. Yikes! I tried to keep that in mind when piling food onto my plate, but I can't pass up Bob Helleen's apple pie. After dinner, we headed to the living room to lay around since we were now experiencing food coma number two. Harper showed us how her and Auntie Jennie were working on her walking skills. In the last couple days, she is walking more and more. Thanksgiving night she showed off her latest trick by walking across the room! I grabbed my camera a little too late, but was able to catch a few seconds of her - I'm sure I'll have more "proud Mama moments" to share soon!

As I've shared in the past, I love Black Friday. It's a family tradition of my Missouri family, and we've started our own here in Minnesota. This year we had 7 of us out in the chaos that is Black Friday with our BINGO cards in hand. Harper had her first sleepover at Granny and Pop's house while we headed out to get deals, deals, deals! We started our night off at Target around 10:30pm. It was a successful first stop, and Paul even kept with the tradition and got his Target hotdog. 

After Target, we headed to Best Buy since their doors opened at midnight. The line to get in was insane, but since we're Black Friday veterans - we knew what we were getting into. Unfortunately the weather took a dramatic turn within a few hours, so we were stuck outside in the snow and chilling wind chills. Call us crazy, but it just adds to the fun! Best Buy was a complete mad house, and wiped out most of our energy. 

We finally got out of there around 1:30am, and made our way to Kohl's. Yep, you guessed it... another overly crowded store. After seeing the line to check out wrap around the entire store, we did a quick walk through and opted to leave and head to Wal-Mart. Since Wal-Mart had already been open for 6 hours, there wasn't much of a crowd. However, we did see a lady sleeping inside a cart waiting in line for the 5am TV sale... and no, I'm not kidding. We made a few more impulse buys at Wal-Mart and finally made our way home around 3am to catch a few z's before breakfast. The alarm buzzed at 8am, which seemed entirely too early. We all zombie walked out of bed, got ready the best we could on a few hours of sleep and decided on 3 Squares for breakfast. It totally hit the spot, and was the perfect way to end another successful Black Friday!

After a night full of shopping, we did exactly what you would expect the rest of the day Friday... shopped some more. Everyone looked a little sleepy, and had their comfy clothes on - but the only way we were going to stay awake is to keep going. We finally came home around 3pm, and we were all ready for a nap. The rest of the night was low key, and Harper helped us put up the 1st tree. I've come to accept that the top half of our tree will be ornament heavy, and the bottom will have to be bare. Harper really loved taking the ornaments off and playing with them. It'll be interesting putting up the rest of our holiday decorations.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, we're having Harper's 1 year pictures taken by Kristen Anne Photography! We've worked with Kristen for years, and she always does a terrific job. We have her to thank for our engagement, wedding and maternity pictures! We have our outfits planned, and I'm hoping Harper is willing to show us her pearly whites! Hopefully I'll have a few shots to share within the next few weeks!

Hope everyone had a terrific Thanksgiving!

Until next time...
The Helleen's