TN Thanksgiving

My allotted vacation days were burning a hole in our collective pocket, so we took the whole Thanksgiving week off and headed for Nashville.  Lots of people complain that spending time with family is stressful and exhausting, especially around the holidays.  We don't.  In fact, we relaxed a lot thanks to help with the kids and had some fun times.

We took a trip to the Nashville Zoo.  They have a fine playground near the entrance, so kids can wear themselves down a little bit before taking in the elephants, giraffes, and snakes.  The highlight of our visit was watching the cayman lizards.  One slipped while climbing a branch.  Just before plunging into the pond, she grabbed hold of the only thing in sight, by chomping on her friend's low hanging tail.  She hung there for several minutes before ultimately falling into the water.  Her friend never moved (but probably was laughing on the inside).

There was much dressing up.  Clara's favorite was a darth vader mask that talked and breathed loudly.  In the movies, he looks much taller than Clara.  Janny generally watched the 3 big kids from a distance.

Jill and I took full advantage of the available family baby sitting.  One night we went out to dinner with Matt and Lupita.  One day, we took a hike in the Cumberland area.  We hiked to 2 waterfalls.  The first was a fun surprise because we expected it to be dry.  The river bed up to the falls was dry, as in no flowing water, no stagnant water, no puddles of water.  We considered turning around and heading back (we only brought one bicycle bottle worth of water for our 4 hour hike).  About 100 yards away, we heard the falls, and then we saw them around the bend.  Very beautiful.  The stream disappears underground.

There are hills down in Tennessee.  From the valley floor to the tops is somewhere around 700 feet.  

To continue a tradition, a couple of Matt's long-time Kurdish friends joined us for Thanksgiving dinner.  They couldn't stay too long (and a wife couldn't come at all) because they had to work at Walmart on Thanksgiving night.  Boo on you, Walmart.

And now we're back home, trying to get used to cooking, cleaning, working, raising the kids, cleaning, and cleaning all by ourselves.  At work today, my office-mate hugged me.  It wasn't all that awkward.