It has been a very long several days. As I mentioned before, we would get up bright and early and drive over to my little sister’s house, arriving there by 7:30, and then usually not leaving to return to the hotel until almost 10pm.

My sister went a wee bit overboard in the food preparation this week. She is a baker, so we alternated between coffeecakes and maple twist bars to an assortment of cinnamon rolls and fresh croissants for breakfast, all of them delicious. Desserts were several kinds of pie, including a marvelous chocolate pecan pie, and a sour cherry pie that I think Richard and my brother-in-law could have cheerfully finished off in one sitting. She baked eight loves of pumpkin bread (far too many for 11 people, no matter how much we all might love pumpkin bread) so there was a lot of encouragement to eat more bread all week. I think it is a wonder we all did not just roll out of the house every night from all the yummy food.

My sister and her family are vegetarian so we had no turky for Thanksgiving; instead they made ravioli from scratch. My sister stirred up the dough and then we all got a chance to play with the pasta attachment on her Kitchen-Aid mixer, creating thin sheets of pasta, which we would then take out to my brother-in-law, who was set up with the ravioli mold and the fillings. They made two different types of filling – one cheese, the other filled with a mixture of spices and vegetarian sausage, and they were served with homemade sauce and were absolutely delicious.

The kids did pretty good for being crammed together into one house with all their relatives for five days. We went to Seattle Center on Friday and listened to bagpipers play, and watched some highland dancers. The kids rode the carousel and tried out the ice skating rink. Saturday we met up with my mom’s sister and one of our cousins (who recently had a baby girl), and afterwards, we pulled out the box of PVC pieces and assembled enough marshmallow shooters for everyone. Last year the women didn’t get a chance to try them out because the kids and the guys all played with the shooters while we were doing the after-Christmas shopping, so this year we all got our chance. It is a lot of fun. Most of us quickly figured out how to shoot multiple marshmallows at once, and why one has to be careful not to inhale while one’s mouth is on the pipe, because sucking a mini marshmallow into your windpipe is something I would strongly discourage. When my aunt came over the house after lunch we all promptly pelted her with marshmallows, and then, because we ended up with exactly enough pieces for one extra gun, we let her join in the fun. And Saturday night we all gathered downstairs around the TV and watched videos of the nephews and niece in their respective school plays.

Just about the time Richard and I finally memorized our way to and from the hotel, it was time to fly home. We got home to a house full of cats who are *very* glad to see us. We’ve done a run to CostCo and the grocery store, and started the first load of post-trip laundry, and now it is time to settle back into the house and the regular routine and try to recover from the week of too much eating.