It's Over Already? TURKEY Can Make You WHAAAT???? (And Some Bits About Our Visits With Frieda.)

Whew. It's Sunday night and I'm whooped. Let's see...last post...the night BEFORE Thanksgiving! Tonight, it's kaput. Fini. Over. Done. (Like some turkeys, perhaps?) Whew, I say again.
The TV gabs on and on about how much weight we are all going to gain over this ONE WEEKEND, heck, they even narrowed it down to one day. Well, for what it's worth, I ATE. I ate MEAT. I ate veggies, I ate snacks, I ate shrimp cocktail, I ate all kinds of wonderful stuff. And I'm not ashamed!
I ate pumpkin AND pecan pie. Half slices of each, so wasn't that smart? I had one slice of pie total. As if I cared.
This Thanksgiving, I ate round two with full abandon too! I thought, what the heck! I've been on such a crazy regimen of late in terms of when I even eat. Many times (which I know, I know!) is not a good thing, I may only have dinner in the evenings. But, Thanksgiving was different. I had an agenda and as soon as I walked into my mom's house and put out the things we brought, we set about eating round one. We were waiting for my uncle to arrive, so phase one took place. It was lovely! Ham rolls, crab dips, shrimp cocktail...lots of fun things that would make a great meal to me. Then we went and spent a couple of hours with Frieda...then back to Mom's. My folks had a spread out and it was something else. We ate, once again, like piggies...and with full abandon.
After all was said and done, it was a sad state of affairs. I didn't even have the strength to do my normal complaining about the football game hogging the TV. I simply didn't care. I was definitely in the throws of a tryptophan coma (that I mentioned back when I was "waxing poetic" in my last post!). My cousin was asleep, Marah was talking non-stop to Wayne about school, her students, and getting him up to speed. My crazy uncle was busy being crazy. Marah was the target this year. He called her "Laura" incessantly for the entire afternoon and evening. It was hysterical. I laughed until big tears rolled down my cheeks as I listened to his relentless banter.
It was a perfect Thanksgiving. I was thankful for everything and everyone around me. I was thankful for our togetherness. Yes, I ate like a complete nut...but, had we had only PB&J sandwiches and milk, it was the TIME we were sharing that was important. Not the sweet potato casserole. Not the deviled eggs, not any of the totally delicious things we indulged in this past Thursday. It was the fact that we were together. We had made it another year. We were laughing, smiling and loving one another.
I pray that next year, things will be just as good as this year.
As an aside, Buddy, Kelly, Jakob, Wayne, Marah and I went to visit Frieda. It was very emotional, but it was WONDERFUL. Frieda is doing AMAZING THINGS!!! She knows what she has to do and SHE IS DOING IT! Don't be confused by all the rumors going around. I don't know why or how they're being so negative. Isn't getting someone BETTER the object when a friend or family member is as ill as Frieda has been? In my world, the object is to get BETTER...and guess what? FRIEDA IS DOING SO MANY THINGS ON HER OWN! Thanks be to God for giving her the strength and the courage to keep right on! I never even had to look at Frieda's leg to see if she was shaking it. Between head shakes of "yes" and "no," shoulder shrugging, hand squeezes and eye expressions, we needed no words. I know she was shaking her leg. But honestly, she was communicating so well with her face and body, I forgot to even look! We spent time outside getting fresh air. Frieda loved that. There were some tears. She had a lot of questions in her eyes and I answered them as best I could. She saw a Range Rover commercial on TV and knew exactly what it was...and that was emotional.
Later in the evening, after the big food fest, Wayne and I went back to see Frieda again. In order to keep things normal on Thanksgiving night, we went to watch a movie. Frieda was ready and she was SO happy. We watched a dvd that was there in her room. Things felt "normal." We were together, we were happy and we were watching a movie. She kept looking at me, then looking at Wayne and breaking into a big grin. Yep. It is all SO worth grinning about Frieda. And my God, it's so good to see you grin that great smile of yours again.
THAT, my friends, is "Thanksgiving."

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