A Sunday for relaxing

Last night was the birthday dinner for Michael's mother. We had the immediate family over so there were 11 of us for dinner. We had a brined turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, seasoned carrots, rolls and my SIL brought over a chocolate bundt cake. Everything was really delicious. (We served turkey because we never host Thanksgiving here, so we never have an opportunity to cook turkey. We always host Christmas because a few years ago Michael set the traditon for serving prime rib at Christmas and the family now always votes to have Christmas dinner here. ) We followed a recipe in Fine Cooking for a brined turkey with herbed butter stuffed under the skin. The only downside was the gravy turned out very very salty. All the preparations were exhausting not only because it was time consuming, but neither one of us had much sleep. Mike had to respond to a traffic incident Friday night at 11pm, so I made cookies while he was gone. I'm glad I did because we had something to snack on while he tried to unwind from a very difficult call. We went to bed at 2am and 2 hours later Patch was whining that he needed to go out. He never usually does this, so I got up, donned my sneakers and bathrobe and took him out. Then at 6am, Michael had another medical call to go to. He was very nice to me and took the dogs out to the dog park as soon as he got back so I could get more sleep. When they got back we got to work cooking and baking and cleaning.
Today we slept in.
Michael mowed the lawn while I brushed Spinner. We're still cleaning and straightening up. I think we'll take it easy today because next Sunday will be a blur because we'll be in PA. I'm blogging while the dishwasher is running and I just heard Michael yell at the TV downstairs. He's watching the Vikings game. The dogs are all crashed out and relaxed.