Happy Thanksgiving

Every Thanksgiving we take turn with my side of the family and Jon's side. This year we had Thanksgiving dinner at our house with Jon's parents, and brother and his family. I think I got off pretty easy this year with the food assignments so I decided to bake a few more things for fun. I made the sweet potatoes, pomegranate jello salad, mashed potatoes, and chocolate silk pie. The great thing about this is that all these things except the mashed potatoes could be made the day before and just popped in the oven (except the pie of course). So I decided to make a pecan pie and Paula Deans gooey pumpkin squares (I like this better than pumpkin pie) just because I felt like it. Everything was yummy and as always I wish I had way more room to eat more. After we ate and cleaned up a little, we played a game and watched a movie. It was a nice non stressful day.
Of course this time of the year, I always reflect more than normal about things that I am thankful for. I try and think of things other than the normal everyday things I am thankful for like family, health, the church, a nice place to live with a roof over my head, Jon's job things like that. This is what I have come up with. I am thankful for personal revelation. Jon and I have been wanting to start our dinning room/basement storage room addition for over a year now. We have even started by adding dirt to our backyard to make it level where the dinning room will hopefully be and Jon cut off a portion of our deck that will be in the way of our new dinning room. We like to take out the most we can on our taxes so when tax time comes we get the most back we can. For us we would rather have a big chunk of change at one time and use it for something big than try and save it throughout the year. It works for us. Anyway, this past Feb when we got our taxes back we were so excited to finally have enough money saved to start our dinning room with just a little to spare in the savings. The more Jon and I thought about the dinning room the more we thought now was not the time. We felt impressed to set aside more in our savings and build up our three month food supply. So I made a list for our 3 months worth of food and subtracted from it food we already had stored and one month I focused on breakfast food, the next lunch, and the third month dinner and in 3 months I had our 3 months worth of food. Shortly after we had it all we had to start using it. Jon's electrical business was very slow for about 3-4 months this year and slow for 2 months. During the slow times, his business barely had enough for materials, payroll for his employees, and the business bills. We were so happy to have enough food in our home so when Jon didn't take home a check all I had to buy was milk, bread (I know I should be making this which I do just not all the time), and fresh fruit/veggies whatever was on sale that week. I was smart enough to take the advice of the church on what to store in my 3 month supply, food that we liked and eat everyday. We had things like fruit rolls/fruit snacks, chips, crackers, brownie mix, chocolate chips, candy, canned fruit and veggies we would actually eat, cereal. Our kids loved having to go in the closet (which they call a grocery store) to pick something new to bring up. When Jon would get some checks, then I would go to the store and restock it as much as I could. We were also blessed to have our big mother Yukon paid off in June and money saved in our savings to help pay the bills. I am thankful that Jon and I listened to our personal revelation and followed it. It would have been no fun and very stressful with a big fancy dinning room eating mac and cheese and top roman at the table and not being able to pay the bills. Luckily, the past 4 months Jon's business has been very busy so busy Jon has been seen working out in the field which is something he doesn't like to do to much of because then he gets behind in his office work, but hey after the slow months he is happy to be out there working and being able to get regular paychecks again. I am told we are almost booked toward the end of January. So I am very Thankful for this. I guess you really don't really realize how thankful you are for something until it is gone.
I am also thankful that we could get gather together with all of Jon's immediate family. It looks like this will be the last year all of us will be together because Thomas and his family have plans to move back to Idaho. So I am thankful for all the time we had with them and all the time the cousins go to play together. I'm still crossing my fingers in hope that they will stick around, but at the same time understand why they want to move back. Probably pretty much the same reasons why I wanted to move back here after living in Michigan for 4 years.