This past Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving), Otis was off and there was no church service that night because of the holiday. Wednesday is my normal night off, so we had an entire day open. This never happens.

So what would you do with an entire free day?

My first instinct is of course– sleep! Then comes the guilt of a wasted day! We had a fabulous, unscripted day. The only thing that we had planned was to meet some friends of ours for breakfast. They had come into town to fly out of our airport on their way to NYC for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I am not ashamed to say that I was/am still totally jealous!

We met them at Chick-fil-A and had  breakfast with them. We had just seen them two weeks ago at youth convention, but when there are teenagers that you are responsible for and organizing…it does not leave a lot of time for catching up. So, it was nice to chat with them. The other bonus perk was that since we met them for breakfast… it got us all up, ready, and out of the house first thing.

I knew that regardless of having an wide open day, I still needed to spend some time in the kitchen prepping for our Thanksgiving Feast the next day. We stopped on the way home and picked up our Christmas tree. Our tradition is to decorate the day after Thanksgiving and we wanted to give our real tree a day or so to ‘fall’. Now, don’t judge us– we always buy our tree from Food Lion. We have always gotten beautiful trees for $30! Some of the tree lots around town want $120-$150 for the same tree.

We went home and let the kids jump on the trampoline, while taking Jasper outside. I spent about 3 hours just doing some prep work- some chopping, boiling, mixing, etc. After that, we loaded up and went downtown to the Aquarium.

We are members of our aquarium and go down there quite a bit, especially since we started homechooling. They have homeschool days with different themes that our kids always enjoy. The fee for a family membership pays for itself within two visits, and so we try to take full advantage of the investment. Our kids never get tired of the exhibits. The Aquarium has  a couple of touch tanks and usually have educational stations set up.

Everyone had fun. They also have a theatre where they show 4-d movies. We have access to that through the membership. They are showing polar express ( well, a 15 minute version) and the kids loved that with the snow blowing around the theatre and everything 🙂

We left the aquarium and of course the kids are “STARVING”….more specifically, Gary who is always starving, wants to know where we are going to eat! haha! We drove around and tossed some ideas back and forth. We ended up going to a place that we had never been to before and enjoyed a delish dinner. I may not be very daring as far as trying bizarre foods, but I do enjoy trying new places!

We made it back home after dark and I spent a few more hours getting these organized for Thanksgiving. Allie started out helping me and then she faded into the living room and ended up beside her daddy like this….

It was a fabulous day!!!!