If you had asked me a year ago if I wanted to spend all of Thanksgiving week locked down at home with the kids, not seeing any family or friends all week, I would have said, “Uh… no.” But things have changed. The girls and I had a pretty amazing pandemic Thanksgiving to ourselves.

It was so good, in fact, that I forgot to take any pictures of the kids, so this is going to be a mostly photo-free post. 😉

For nine days, we all chilled and barely left the house. The kids got lots of rest and down time. I worked most days, and the girls settled into a relaxed groove alternating between relaxing for a while, and then hanging out for a while. 🤔

At the end of the week, I asked the girls if they ever got bored. “Yesss!” they both said in unison. “But it was good!”

A few highlights:

• Molly set up a pillow fort in her room dedicated to reading Fever 1793.
• We had some seriously crazy games of Uno. I didn’t know that game could get so crazy. 🤷🏻‍♂️
• We watched Jojo Rabbit, an astonishingly beautiful, sad, and funny movie about a Nazi youth. 🙃 I assured the girls ahead of time that it was heartwarming, made fun of those stupid Nazis, and it even had a funny Hitler. 🤔
• We played some Among Us and had some good laughs.
• I took a walk with Claire during which we exclusively discussed nuclear power and radiation poisoning. 🤷🏻‍♂️
• The girls discovered the joys of my PC and worked out a peaceful PC-sharing system. I did not have to get involved. ✌️
• Claire and I joked a lot about the “most definitely” Roblox guy on Twitch. 😆

I told Molly I was going to have to serve 81 meal portions over nine days, if you could three meals a day for all three of us. That is a lot! I told her I thought we could get that down to 54 portions if we all just skip one meal a day. “Noooo nooo! No!” Molly said. “You’re trying to trick us!” 😆

So we cooked a lot.

We made our favorite “Very-aki” chicken from memory. We made what Claire described as a “modern Mexican Thanksgiving meal”. Between the apple crumble dessert and making Claire’s apple birthday cake, we peeled, cored, and shredded 6 pounds of apples. 😮

Best Thanksgiving ever!