Your are so lucky to have a husband and family who help. I am going to train my kids to do chores for sure.

My husband is not so great about helping BUT he does pay for help. He works crazy hours as a consultant — probably an average of 80-90 hours per week. At least! He was on a 2-hour conference call this morning at 7 am — and he goes all day and into the night.

So he pays for a housekeeper to come twice a week and that helps out tremendously. Of course I work crazy hours, too. If we didn’t have a housekeeper, this house would be a disaster, the laundry would never get done and we’d have a sink full of dishes.

So I’m very grateful to have her.

But yeah, I’ll have to figure out how to do the holiday thing better…

I like how the Dutch do it. Men and women have their particular duties, but both sexes are willing to jump in and help whenever needed. That’s how it works around my house as well.

I am definitely “the cook” of the family, but my husband is more than willing to help out, when needed. (and we Paul’s-my maiden name-have a long tradition of the men cleaning up the kitchen when the women cook. My dad always did the dishes for us on holidays).

I personally think what we are missing is the community of preparation. It’s a lonely job to cook all by yourself all day. But it can be loads of fun to do with family and friends. My sister and I had a lot of fun cooking thanksgiving pies together(and a lot of other stuff), when in high school. We would turn on Christmas music and laugh and talk while our hands were busy preparing food.

But sometimes I think we get too tired, when we just try to make too much stuff! Keeping it simple can be a good idea too.

Oh, and one more thing, my husband’s family has the tradition of everyone helping chop up the ingredients for the cranberry salad (nuts, orange, apples, cranberries). It’s a fun family tradition, and doesn’t place all the work on just one person.

(Yeah, I got to leave a comment on your site *wink*. I’ll email you soon. )

It was very unconventional, but we didn’t mind! And cleanup was done by mid-afternoon. I went and took a nap. It may have been a blessing in disguise that we couldn’t eat many foods this year, since we would have gone all out and made all the traditional stuff otherwise, and nearly killed ourselves in the process.

And yeah, I cheated a little. Coconut is not on the intro diet, but I decided to have some anyway. Not a bad enough kind of cheating to feel guilty about.

My husband is not the type to roast a turkey — and probably never will be. I think I can bank on that.

I guess maybe in the future we need to hire some help. Or I need to work something out with our friends so I’m not doing so much (usually the case).

Or we will have to do something unconventional for Thanksgiving — like Anna did (sounds really fun).

We’ll see…

The camp staff cooked all the food, and it was quite good, just about all homemade, right down to homemade ice cream and omelets to order. There were lots of activities like rock wall climbing, archery, bb target practice, hiking, canoeing, crafts, evening programs with skits, etc. And no electronics! Not being consumed with meal prep and cleanup was very liberating. We are all in agreement that we should do this again next year.