My Thanksgiving Story

For Thanksgiving, my family drove to Porterville (about an hour away from Fresno) to celebrate with my husband Brad's side of the family: Thanksgiving on Thursday and Brad's and his mom's birthdays on Friday. Thursday morning was a little crazy getting everyone up and going, plus packing for everyone for our overnight trip. (For anyone who hasn't traveled with a baby: Babies require lots of stuff. It doesn't seem like they should need so much, but once you get everything together that they might need, it somehow easily fills a mid-sized SUV.) So around 9:30 we're walking out the door a little rushed and frazzled and I say to Brad, "Well, if we forgot anything, we can buy it when we get there... Well, tomorrow since everything's closed today." "Yeah, right. The busiest shopping day of the year," Brad reminds me. "Well, then we'll just do without," I say, confident we have everything. Little did I realize at that moment, that the bag with Brad's and my clothes and toiletries was sitting on our bed, packed and ready to go nowhere. We didn't realize this until about 7:30 that night. I was filled with disbelief, blame, panic, and laughter in that order. Brad drove around Porterville and found one gas station mini-mart open. He found one of the four items on our list of necessities that my mother-in-law didn't have to offer us. It wasn't deoderant. Then we changed into funny, borrowed clothes and washed our own. (This was pretty necessary since I had been spit-up on several times that day.) The next morning we showered, put on our clean clothes, and found a Long's Drugs that wasn't filled with Christmas shoppers and bought deoderant (Happy Birthday Brad). I wish I could say that somehow through all this I learned to be thankful, but it just isn't that kind of story. It is funny, though. Now.