Thanksgiving Weekend

We spent Thanksgiving day with David's mom's side of the family in Knightdale, NC (just outside Raleigh) We of course stuffed ourselves with a delicious dinner and then drove back to our house with David's mom, Jane. It has now become a Thanksgiving tradition that she comes back with us after dinner to spend the weekend in Greensboro. And what has also become a Thanksgiving tradition for us is to go to the movies Thanksgiving night. This time we saw such a cute movie. It's call August Rush and it's all about how this little boy in an orphanage becomes a child music prodigy and "follows the music" to find his family. It has a great score and was a really "feel good" movie. I would definitley recommend it.

The following day, known as Black Friday, also the biggest shopping day of the year, most people I know elect to stay out of the crowds and don't go into town that day. But not us! We braved the mobs in all the stores and shopped for 9 hours! Yes, I was getting very weary halfway through the day, but Jane just seemed to get more energized with each store we went in. Although we did have fun and got some really great deals too. She bought both me and David all our Christmas gifts in that one day! But one other thing she bought for us that I am excited about is a cute little pre-lit Christmas tree and decorations to go on it! To understand why that would be exciting for me, let me give you some perspective. When David and I got married 3 Decembers ago, I bought us a tiny little tree just to have something for our first Christmas since we were moving and things were so unsettled for a while. Here's that tree that we have made do with for 2 years. Now that's all that I was going to have for the 3rd year until Jane so generously got us the perfect sized tree for our condo. We set it up in the window, so from the street below it actually looks like a really big tree, but even inside it is very pretty. Here it is in all it's glory!So we stayed up and put up the tree and decorated it after shopping all day. But as you can see, it was definitely worth it.

On Saturday, in the past we have done some sort of tour, exhibition, museum etc. This year we decided we would try out the Reynolda House in Winston Salem. Honestly it was ok, but I wasn't very impressed. The house I didn't think was very pretty and wasn't really preserved as a lived in house all over on the inside. The living room was preserved, and the basement with game rooms and bar, but the bedrooms were just turned into art museum rooms. Here are a couple of pictures from it. The prettiest part was the greenhouse.

So since this excursion didn't make the top of the list, I will post a few pictures of where we went last year. We had a blast on our tour of the Chinqua-Penn Plantation last year. The house was very pretty and it was decorated nicely for Christmas (which the Reynolda house was not) Also the grounds were much prettier and there seemed to be much more to see. We had a guided tour around the house and all the rooms were preserved just the way that it had been long ago. Hopefully next year we will find somewhere as nice as this to go for our annual excursion.

But besides the Reynolda house not meeting our expectations, we had a great time anyway. After we left Winston Salem, we went out for a nice dinner followed by tea and dessert at my parents house.

The 3 of us went out for a big breakfast on Sunday morning just before Jane left to head back to the beach. The weekend seemed to fly by, but we definitley had a great time with her. Thanks, Jane! You're the best mother-in-law a girl could ask for! We love you!