Going Medieval All Over Thanksgiving

In full knowledge of the fact that feudal England and the Mayflower are separated by a few hundred years historically, we decided to have our Thanksgiving feast at Medieval Times! We had so much fun!

I should start out by saying that for lunch we did have turkey and avocado croissant sandwiches (turkey of course for turkey day), chips (for the mashed potatoes), olives, jellied cranberry sauce, and pumpkin cheesecake for dessert - that counts, right?! Then after a nice Thanksgiving nap for Adrian and Ben, (it wouldn't be Thanksgiving unless all the men in the house take a nap!!) we all got ready to go to Medieval Times. Sophie wore her Renaissance princess costume from Halloween '05 (courtesy of her cousin Kaitlyn - thanks!) complete with tiara. We tried to get Ben to wear his prince costume that matches Sophie's but he was not into that ("nope..DON'T LIKE IT"). So we let that one go, Adrian and I are firm believers in carefully picking battles with our almost 3 year old and that one just wasn't worth it.

Medieval Times has a cool castle like atmosphere with a big fireplace and faux stone lions and knights all over. The kids especially liked the shiny coat of armors, but did not like the executioner that wandered around with a big double headed axe, and rightly so. He was pretty scary looking! For our Thanksgiving feast we had 1/2 a chicken each, vegetable soup, roasted potatoes, ribs, garlic bread and apple turnovers. It was a lot of super yummy food, but I think the kids only ate the bread and pastries, and well the Pepsi too. We were really glad that kids were free on Thanksgiving - if we would have paid full price for them we might have been more miffed that they weren't in the mood for medieval food (well mock medieval food - I'm sure they didn't have garlic bread or Pepsi in the 1300's).

The show was great! There were jousts, sword fights, performing horses, and a falcon that swooped over the audience (the kids loved that). Nina was perfectly happy the whole night and didn't mind the cheers and bright lights at all. At one point during the performance a knight threw a flower to Sophie and it made her so happy - it was very sweet and made her evening. Benjamin being Benjamin took a while to warm up to the whole event. He was little leery of the whole spectacle at first, but by the end of the night he was jumping up and down and got near enough to the "king" to have his picture taken with him, and even gave the king a high-five, which is pretty much as good as it gets for Ben.

While we missed having a big traditional dinner with our families this Thanksgiving, we did have a great time and didn't have to do any dishes, yay!!