You may have read that title and assumed I’m talking about teens, but I’m not. Well, maybe not entirely. NaBloPoMo can take a toll on a family.

Here’s the deal. As most of you may know, our holiday celebrations traditionally begin on Thanksgiving Day. Boxes are pulled from the attic, holiday music is queued up, and the stash of holidays DVDs is pulled from the collection and piled by the TV. Throughout the weekend, we are relaxed and playful as we begin dressing our home in the holiday spirit.

Except this weekend, our plans were slightly derailed.

Our plans went south before the weekend even started. With not one, but almost every room in a state of chaos from the massive decluttering I’ve been doing, I was opposed to even one box of decorations being brought into the house until I cleaned up. What I thought would take only one day has taken 3. Additionally, my husband planned on spending only one day on a contract job, before it went south and cost him two additional days. My daughter, A, has been a trooper and has hung out without fuss, but she’s also been fighting a cold. Makes it easy to keep her in one place to ask the “love it or toss it” questions.

In some ways, like our appetizers and holiday movie kick-off, this has been a traditional Thanksgiving for us. However, in more ways than not, it’s been very different. Therefore, it wasn’t too difficult to stray further from tradition and ditch tonight’s holiday movie in favor of the film A was assigned (by me) for her Paleontology class. “Jurassic Park” is on the marquee so she can write a paper about the scientific inaccuracies in the film and how/why they are inaccurate. She’s been looking forward to this assignment all semester. She loved dinosaurs when she was little, and her curiosity only grew from there.

In particular, she loves raptors. I hate raptors. They’re vicious, but they are what fueled her desire to learn more and I, in turn, have been taught more than I ever wanted to know. But we’ve bonded over prehistoric creatures, making it worth ever last piece of trivia. And, as she sits engrossed in her movie, occasionally blurting out a falsehood, I sit grateful for this family time and, especially, for the fact that it’s only raptors that will eat you while you are alive and not teens, unless we’re talking about a juvenile raptor–then all bets are off.

Who knows, maybe this is the start of a new holiday tradition? Few things say festive like death by dinosaur when you live with an teen passionate about paleontology.