Thanksgiving and family traditions

Ever since we moved to Arizona we have always had Thanksgiving here. Last year was the first time that we decided to host Thanksgiving and things went so great that we had an even bigger gathering of our Arizona family this year. The total guest list topped out around 20! We are lucky to get to share this special time with Gigi (Great-Grandma Grant) since she lives here 6 months of the year. We also have Grandma's good friend Dorothy who is like an adopted grandma to my girls, I am a firm believer that you can't have too many grandparents! We also had 3 families of the Mortenson family join us and it was a wonderful day. The kids played outside, the boys fried about everything they could think of in the turkey fryer: funnel cakes, snickers, reeses peanut butter cups, and donuts (AKA tubby toast). All the girls shared their favorite Thanksgiving recipes and nobody went home hungry!


One of our family traditions at holidays is to make bread from scratch. My mom learned from her mom, my mom taught me and now Josie has become quite a good helper.
She helps knead the bread and she has become very good at it. So much so that I don't really have to take over when she's done. She is building up her muscles and she doesn't ever seem to get tired! She pulls and pushes and pulls and pushes until I tell her to stop.
Ellie is thinking that maybe next year she will have to get in on this action too. Lucky for me, we have always had to make 2 batches so there can be a bowl for each of them next year and we won't have to fight.
One of Josie's favorite parts of making bread is to watch it rise. Here she is with her bowl over flowing! She asks about every 10 minutes to check on the bread to see if it is getting bigger. I keep trying to tell her that if she waits a little longer she may be able to actually tell the difference in size! Josie loves helping in the kitchen no matter what I am doing. I am so glad that she has really taken to making bread because it was one of my favorite things to do with my mom at the holidays and now it becoming one of her favorite things too. Hopefully one day she can share this tradition with her kids.