Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Really, the fall holidays are the best in my book. But Thanksgiving! It’s just like Christmas only with a fraction of the stress, no gift guilt, and you aren’t expected to drive all over creation and see every person you’ve ever been related to. Could it be any better? I think not. Plus, the focus of Thanksgiving is on the food and if you’re a piglet like me, any event centered around food is a good one. The end.

Here are a few photos of how we do Thanksgiving in my family:

We decided to do Thanksgiving day at my parents house because they have the most room. As soon as we got there I tried to get the kids organized for a picture. Here’s the thing about taking a picture of four small children–it’s difficult. Here you can see Charlie is upset because we put him next to Louis. Also, Rex has a mosquito on his forehead that hung out there for–hand to God–twenty-five pictures. We had four adults watching us do this and not one of them noticed the bug on my kid’s forehead. This is perhaps proof that everyone’s eyesight goes when they’re older.

Even tickling the kids didn’t really help with the whole attitude thing–they were clearly not into it. I guess some days it works and other days it doesn’t–luckily my self-esteem isn’t caught up in whether or not I can get a good family photograph. If that were the case, I’d have none left by now.

I had a fleeting idea that maybe if I were taking the pictures I could get the kids to cooperate a little more, but that was actually more disastrous than the family shots. The look on Rex’s face is priceless, though.

After the picture-taking “fun” was out of the way, we got down to what Thanksgiving is really all about–the food! It was so delicious. So delicious that I took a picture of my plate to remember it. Yeah, I love Thanksgiving.

Seriously, how good does that look? Why can’t we have Thanksgiving like once a month?

And like every holiday with small children, there was there was the skipping of naps, which leads directly whining and general unpleasantness. Except the baby–sweet Rexy still naps anywhere.

We put the twins off for a little bit by letting them rock on my parent’s glider–nothing soothes these two quite like a moving chair. Also: so glad I didn’t spend a lot of money on their new shoes because they are so against shoes.

As for me, I ate the aforementioned delicious food, and had lots of people to help me with my kids. A day like that is pretty much perfection.

I hope your holiday was lovely as well.

This is how you take a picture of four small children in their Halloween regalia.

You get one decent shot, but decide they should all be on the same level.

So you put them all on one level.

You get a pretty good shot–takes like twenty shots to get this one, but it’s worth it.

Louie decides that no, actually, it is not worth it.

Mom moves in to wrangle the the crazies.

Probably THE shot

One more, but the natives are definitely getting restless.

And then Louie makes a break for it. Picture time is done.

Hope you all had a lovely Halloween (if you celebrate it)!!

The twins have this adorable habit: they ignore the seven bajillion toys that we own and instead wander around our house in their drunken way grabbing random objects and appropriating them as teethers. With three kids one and under, I’ve given up even the semblance of housekeeping, so I do very little to stop them. I mean, I take the bottles of whiskey and cleaning supplies out of their hands, but that’s about it. The lazy side of me keeps thinking I should just start cleaning with vinegar and baking soda and that would cut my work load in half.

So when I found a small velvet box in Charlie’s room, I wasn’t surprised, but I did assume that it belonged to my husband. Little known Mr. Bird fact–he has a think for cuff links and owns many, many pairs. We even check out the cufflinks when we’re shopping in thrift stores just to see if we can find anything special.

But I was talking about that box. I opened it up and expected to find some vintage cuff links and instead I found my grandmother’s watch. My aunt sent it to me several years ago and I’d meant to have it looked at to see if I could get it working, but life gets in the way sometimes (oftentimes), and there I was probably three years later having not done a thing to get the watch in working order.

I don’t remember a lot about my grandma at this point, but two things stand out: one, I thought she was completely nuts, and two, people loved her. As a young person, your sole goal in life is to blend in with the crowd. My grandmother was a lot of things, but she was never a blender.

She arrived in New Orleans from Honduras as a young woman with the intent of learning secretarial skills. Instead, she met my grandfather and got married. She danced to salsa music in her living room and loved her children fiercely. She tried to make me eat green beans when I was seven and I ended up sitting at the kitchen able for a very long time. We were both pretty stubborn.

She was a working woman long before it was fashionable and she was also the type of person who would try to barter down the price of a purse at Dillards. She volunteered, and cooked, and laughed, and lived life to its outer edges. When my grandfather had a stroke, she cared for him without a second thought. I remember her breaking down at Thanksgiving dinner one year when he was in the hospital. I was shocked. Surely she needed a break? Surely she was glad to have one less thing to deal with? Nope. Not her. She loved that man to the end.

When she passed away, her funeral looked like a keg party. It was crammed full of all the people whose lives she had touched. Her French teacher showed up! At seventy-plus she was learning her third language. Also of note: my grandmother had lied about her age for so long that when she passed away, no one was exactly sure how old she was.

I could write about her for days and not mention half of the things that I intend to.

Her dainty gold watch is mine now it fits perfectly on my wrist. I think I’m going to get it working–for real this time. It can serve as a reminder–to live life to the outer edges, to dance in the living room, to love fiercely.