Thanksgiving is always a day of reckoning for me, a time when I have to acknowledge that all the things I complain about don't stack up against the things I should be thankful for, like two kids who pore over the sale ads as they make wish lists.

This year, I decided that we should shake things up a bit and accept that we're lucky because even some of the things that seem so ridiculously wrong about our family can at least provide some comic relief.

I had my son take notes and laughed at the incomplete list, because No. 2 was our absolute inability to exhaust a topic of conversation without ending up on a different tangent.

The top of the list was the fun in playing Hangman with a 6-year-old who's just learning how to spell. Usually her creative spelling makes her the champ, but she was crushed in a recent game when my son and I teamed up and solved "I don't like" by accident and didn't realize we'd won until she said that was the whole thing because she didn't know what she didn't like.

For instance, fifth on the list is that my daughter does not like that everyone is fancier than she is. When I suggested that it might help if she stopped resisting having her hair brushed, we were onto another topic.

Which, incidentally, my son left off the list, but is one of my personal favorites: My son avoids haircuts as long as possible, only to have it become a crisis because someone (like me) mentions his hair in the same sentence as the name of a tween idol.

Tying that all together, we ended up back at Hangman, where my daughter solved a puzzle about her brother being cute, but misread "cute" as "cootie." My son laughed when I told him to add it to the list, but his sister and I were the ones laughing when, chagrined, he asked how to spell "cootie."

As someone who loves words, so much of what I enjoy about having kids is tied into words, whether it's arguing over whether Skippyjon Jones is a cat or dog (he's a cat); debating the merits of "Brisingr," which my son goaded me into reading and never finished or letting the kids talk me into making lame Scrabble plays against formidable opponents because I'd rather lose than not share their pride in having discovered a word.

I'll post our whole list on my blog at http://familytree.honadvblogs.com.