Mish Mash O Thanks

My family has arrived from Africa!!!

Well, one cousin and her Dad, the other cousin and their mom (my aunt) come in about 10 days!! I'm really excited that they're here for thanksgiving..even though I had to work all weekend, and am as per usual am throughly exhausted! It's just so nice to have them here...it really just puts a lot of things into perspective and gives me so much more to be thankful for.

Out of ALL of my cousins, they're definitely the ones that I'm closest with..even though we've actually never lived in the same city...It must have something to do with being close-ish in age, having very similar morals/beliefs/values and being the only girl cousins for SO long.

It's rather lovely that they're moving back! My cousin Roberta will be staying here a looong time as her and her husband just bought a house in town but unfortuantly my other cousin, Edana, will only be here until the beginning of January until she moves to Boston for a job she took here. As much as it's impressive to say 'Yeah, I have a cousin who does research at Harvard'...I'd still rather she stay HERE! Ah well...just a good excuse to visit Boston I suppose!

I'm so excited to spend more time with them and actually have a chance to REALLY get to know them..because as much as I love them and we always spend time together when we're in the same city/country/continent..but it'll be nice to spend a lot of real quality time with them :) Although I am a little worried about bombarding them with love and them becoming overwhelmed with family always wanting to spend time with them...so I'll do my best not to do that..but there is only so much that I can restrain myself...haha!

Anyways, I spent a lovely evening with them tonight, just sitting around in my grampa's basement..haha! Tomorrow they come out for thanksgiving dinner..where it's quite possible that we will all eat until we explode. I'm not even joking about how much food we have..it's kind of disgusting..in the completely, totally and utterly delicious sense of the word. We've been joking all week about how we all need to get 'Thanksgiving Pants' like Joey does in Friends.



Ha. I love that show. Classic Joey moment..right there.

So, that's basically what we'll all be doing tomorrow. You know, eating way too much and then complaining about how we ate so much, probably eating some more..and then falling asleep on the couch. At least that's my plan...I might take a little walk and take some pictures of the BEAAAAAUTIFUL fall pictures...but then..the couch *is* pretty darn comfy. We'll see how COLD it is tomorrow. Eck.

All things considering..there is a lot to be thankful for this year...I'm not scaling the Eiffel Tower like I was this weekend last year, but I am surrounded by a mass amounts of wonderful family and friends. We have far too much food...we're surrounded by the beauty that is Ontario in the fall (which by the way...is TOTALLY giving Paris in the fall a run for it's money...) ..we have our health and more often than not, smiles on our faces. It seems like the older I get..the more I realize how important it is to be thankful for the smaller things, the things that I use to take for granted..and take whatever simple pleasure I can from those :)

Oh, and speaking of getting older...there's also that pesky little thing about my 24th birthday. Which, I've decided that I'm a little bit in denial about. It's not ACTUALLY my birthday tomorrow. Nah. Buuut...more to come on that later...for today I'll be thankful that I'm still 23 for another couple hours, and not one step closer to being a quarter of a century old (AHH!)

Happy Thanksgiving Folks!