Thanksgiving Happenings

Hi, all!

We travelled over twenty-five hours this past weekend in order to be with Mr. Honey's new nephew and my 83-year-old grandparents this Thanksgiving. Thanks to the wonder of laptops and WiFi, I am able to make a blog post from beautiful Petaluma, California. We drove through San Francisco and had lunch in Sausalito yesterday. The weather was perfect, sunny and clear and in the 60s.

This past Sunday we attended church in Niles Canyon, at the meetinghouse I was raised and married in, and got to visit with all the wonderful church folks there. It is a precious thing to know beyond a doubt that there is a place where you are loved and made much of simply because you are there. The warm hospitality of these lovely people is demonstrated through love that is maintained regardless of your action, inaction or wayward thought-- unconditional and abundant. Ahhh. This is what I mean when I tell my children I will always love them no matter what. I am not nearly so good at it as my folks in California, though. A very nourishing and reassuring love. I am taking notes.

Our drive out was uneventful, unique in the fact that each contingent had its own entertainment. We had a dvd player in the car for the first time in our little family's history. I have always been adamantly against tv in the car (I really don't even like it so much in the home), but this time I reluctantly agreed, knowing that one of the kids began dreading the drive out from the moment we began talking about it early last summer. So the kids had their movies, Mr. Honey had his radio with headphones and I had The Silver Branch and How The Irish Saved Civilization, along with a blanket I am crocheting. It was a rather lonely trip, to tell the truth. And we barely sang at all.

Cornflower and I developed colds on the way out, and are still nursing our snuffledy noses and scrubbing down every few minutes to keep others from getting sick. (I wondered if we ought to call the trip off, but we were already so many hours down the road, I just couldn't see it.)

Our new nevvie is the sweetest and most remarkable boy ever (of course), and we have the whole rest of the day to play with him and visit with his parents. We are taking him to the park so he can gaze up at the light glinting through the leaves on the trees. Good times!

Tomorrow we will be having Thanksgiving with four generations of my family in my aunt and uncle's home, which they have completely redone on a large scale and barely finished in time for Thanksgiving. And then we will go home. Twenty-five more hours. I wonder if I can hide the headphones and dvd player before we start out again? I don't know if I can bear silence across four states more than once.