I am taking very seriously your recommendations to try a food service; it won’t happen immediately, and of course I have to get my husband on board (though he’s typically amenable to logic), but I have been looking at different options and trying to get my head around whether it will truly be helpful or not. I TRUST you, strangers of the Internet, who say it help ease the dinner-planning pressure, so I am really, really considering it.

But. This week it will not happen. And this week is also the Family Thanksgiving, so there’s that to plan for.

I have a multi-page document for Thanksgiving that includes every recipe and a detailed grocery list and when and where to go shopping. And of course I ALSO have a minute-by-minute schedule of Thanksgiving Day, so I remember to shower and wash the roasting pan and which serving dish I use for the sweet potatoes etc. And… I am completely stumped this year by how I am supposed to update the schedule for this year. I NEED my schedule. I made it YEARS ago, and it’s been my Thanksgiving Religious Text for all those years. But now we are having Thanksgiving on a different day of the week AND at a different time and it has thrown me for a real loop whatever that expression means. Just picture me doing dizzy cartwheels instead of updating my schedule which is basically what’s happening.

It SHOULD be easy, right? You just… figure out when you want to eat, and then… adjust the times from there. RIGHT? So why can I not figure this out?

Part of it is that we will have two Major Interruptions: 1. Someone will have to go pick up Carla from school right about the time when I should be shoving the turkey into the oven and 2. Someone will have to go pick up my sister and niece at roughly the same time. Because of the number of cars we will have at our disposal, these two someones will be different and one of them will likely have to be me. I could have my mother-in-law do the turkey, yes indeedy. But I am not ready for that. I will relinquish the stuffing and the sweet potatoes but not the mashed potatoes or the turkey or the gravy, no sir.

Part of it is that my husband will be coming home from work… and we can’t eat until he gets home… but we have only a general idea of when that will be.

ALSO, my sister and niece will be arriving right as the cooking is getting going so… that’s not really going to work, is it? A) I will want to greet them and offer them drinks/snacks when they arrive, but I will of course ALSO want to be making the dinner and B) I will NOT want everyone to be in my kitchen while I am cooking. It is seriously giving me palpitations just thinking about it.

WELL. I have gone to a dark place here, Internet. I am just about ready to throw up my hands and say IT CANNOT BE DONE LET’S GO GET THAI FOOD.

(You know the problem with this perfectly reasonable suggestion, right? My mother-in-law will kindly and generously offer to do the whole Thanksgiving meal herself! And then I will die of the tangle of neuroses that make me so stubborn and ridiculous and unwilling to LET GO.)

Let’s rein it in here. This was not supposed to be YET ANOTHER food-related panic session. In fact, I have made the meals this week Very Easy, on purpose. Let’s skip straight to that so I can go do some deep breathing in a dimly lit room.

Dinners for the Week of November 19-November 25

• Thai Red Curry
• Burritos
• Crockpot Wild Rice and Chicken Soup with Miracle No-Knead Bread + Everyday Salad
• Turkey etc., presumably, if I can get over myself
• Leftovers
• Out
• Out again, or takeout

Now, per my only-partially-updated schedule, I need to go make salad dressing and cranberry sauce.

I am going to take a break from posting dinners next week – you’ll probably be gearing up for your own Thanksgiving food and I will be watching movies with Carla while recovering from being around people for multiple days in a row. And maybe subsisting on leftover mashed potatoes and gravy as long as they last.