Fresh vegetable lasagna with homemade pasta sauce. Roasted green beans with toasted almonds. Homemade garlic bread. Garlic cloves baked in the oven to accompany the appetizer of fresh Dutch cheese and bread. Fresh Italian salad. Finish everything off with desserts of homemade apple pie and cheesecake brownies. Yup, that's my menu for this Thanksgiving and I can't wait to start cooking everything early Thursday morning.
Hosting the first Thanksgiving is a little stressful. I'm not stressed for the cooking part. I'm more stressed on the...gulp...two families meeting each other! Marijn's parents is flying in from the Netherlands for ten days. My parents are driving up from Los Angeles. My grandparents are driving up from Arizona. And my lovely sister is staying in Los Angeles, she knew that it was smarter to let me enjoy this all on my own.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about seeing my family and my (future) in-laws but it's natural to also feel a little stressed. The two set of parents are meeting each other the first time which is great, except for the small detail of the language barrier. The (future) mother-in-law's English is limited. My mother can also be shy on her English and will speak Vietnamese. Of course, my Dutch is super limited and my Vietnamese is pretty Americanized. So these three languages in my home will be a little overwhelming. I'm thinking of only speaking Spanish during Thanksgiving so then there will really be four languages floating throughout our home!
All in all, I'm really excited about this Thanksgiving, it meant a lot to Marijn and I to have our families meet each other before the wedding. It takes a huge load off the stress parts of the wedding. Although I'm not even feeling any of the "stress" or "bridezillaness" that comes with wedding planning (yet), especially since we've successfully crossed off a lot from our daunting to-do list.
We've booked our wedding location, we've found a wonderful husband and wife photography team, I found my dress (heehee, there is no way I'm linking to my dress!), my super talented Aunt is hand making my jewelry, the wedding party has been assembled, our website is almost ready for launching, our friend has offered his graphic design services for our printing needs, we've picked out the invites and another friend is taking the challenge of marrying us off!
So all the big items are off the list and it's now down to the little itty-bitty parts of the wedding. Like taking an evening floral arranging class so I can see if I can do my own flowers and seeing if I can actually bake enough cupcakes so we can have that be homemade (still not sure about that challenge, that's a lot of work just before the wedding but it just might be possible).
Anyway, it's going to be a wild ride for the next couple of days (and months to come) but it's something that excites me but with a sprinkle of stress. So on that note, whatever your adventures are for this Thanksgiving, have a good one!
