Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is Thanksgiving and also my mom’s birthday. As a gift, I had Matan’s and Joseph Harry’s name written in the sand and photographed. Here are links to the website:

http://namesinthesand.blogspot.com/2011/10/matan-zaks.html

http://namesinthesand.blogspot.com/2011/10/joseph-harry-zaks.html

I purchased the images and had them blown up and mounted on a nice backing for my mom.

My dad and I discussed it and I took care of the details. She was completely surprised. She never heard of the Names in the Sand project and didn’t know that we were working together to get something for her birthday. I hope she found the surprise good, rather than bad. Happy Birthday Mommy!

Now on to Thanksgiving:

I have much to be thankful for this year (as I do every year). The first of course being this:

I am also thankful for my wonderful family, both here and abroad (Hi Canadians!), my friends, my job, John’s job, health insurance (not sure if I mentioned the hospital bill I got for $74,000 recently, but I did not have to pay it – yay insurance!), everyone’s health, the weather, my warm house and full fridge. In fact everything. I am thankful for everything.

We intended to go to the zoo yesterday but didn’t because we took Fiona to the doctor instead. She has some sort of rash that will not go away and is not caused by a virus. It is probably allergic, but we don’t know the trigger. We got cream to put on it and hopefully it will clear up so we can start looking for causes. Our chief suspect is her bath tub.

So what did we do today? Today we planned to participate in the Ventura Turkey Trot 5k race, but the night was a little awful (Fiona up for a long time), and we all overslept and I did not feel well (long story short, I ate too much bean stew last night, delicious, but I paid for it later). So instead we played at home, went for a run alone, and then went in search of lunch, only to learn that everything that was close was closed. So we returned home (to a nice clean house, thank you cleaning ladies) and prepared to make the three mile trek to my parents’ house for dinner. Along the way Fiona fell asleep so arrived later than planned, but still early. We ate a delicious meal and I’m still full several hours later. Great dinner conversation with my uncle and Ronit and Chen. We returned home and put Fiona to bed. Soon we will watch the rest of “La Vie en Rose” a biopic about Edith Piaf.

Tomorrow we attempt zoo trip number two! Wish us luck!