HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

We are sad we aren't able to be with you in Portland. I think Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It's a great reminder to stop and think of what we are thankful for. I have a lot to be thankful for (making it through this crazy adventure in the Middle East for one!) but most of all I think of family and friends and the Lord who has provided for us so graciously. We are very blessed.

Today we are having the expat community over for a Thanksgiving feast. Getting ready is surprisingly not as chaotic as I thought it was going to be with Steph and Matt just leaving. Maybe that's because I'm not in charge of the turkey :-) I'm making mom's homemade rolls (mmmmm), potatoes, and green beans.

A few hours later.... Everybody has gone home now. We had quite the group. The food was fabulous and it was fun to be among friends. There were 5 children under the age of 5 running around. They took a special fancy to Ken and when they weren't jumping on him, they wanted him to play hide and seek. We did have one "incident" with the keys in the doors. As the families were arriving Ken came to me and said, do you think we should take the keys out of the doors. I had completely forgot there were keys there but maybe the kids would find them and think it would be fun to turn them and accidentally lock themselves in. Well just after dinner we started to hear crying from the office. Sure enough there were two kids locked inside. Thankfully Ken had locked the one door shut earlier and had the key so after a few minutes we were able to get them out (those old keys are actually kind of hard to work with!). The little girl (3 yrs old) saw Ken as he opened the door wiped her alligator tears and came running towards him like he was her new best friend. Earlier she had been quite shy and not sure about Ken. It was cute. The 5 year old who was also locked in was just sitting on the couch relaxing. Interesting personality differences.


Anyway, we had a fun day... it's a little sad to think that this might be the last get-together we have with everybody before we leave. But we are ready to start packing up and heading home.

Hope you all got up early to catch those super saver deals the day after Thanksgiving :-)