Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from our home to yours!

Thanksgiving

As is our tradition, we celebrated Thanksgiving on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  This holiday is not celebrated here and many of us must work on Thanksgiving.  We had a huge crowd with lots of food.  If my count is correct, we had 28 people  (including kids).  I can not think of any traditional Thanksgiving food that we were missing.

This picture was taken after the turkey and chicken had already been picked over.  Also do you see the little girls hiding under the table.  They found a cozy spot to eat their dinner.

Good food and good company!

Sometimes the holidays can be hard and we miss our families and American traditions.  But on good days like this we wish you were here instead of us being there!  We are very thankful for our many, many blessings.

12 years old!

On November 9th, 2000, I met one of my favorite people in the whole world.  Now, twelve years later, that tiny 7 lb. 13 oz chubby cheeked baby is almost as tall as me!  

She had a good birthday.  She had her friend Bliss spend the night, and they stayed up until the wee hours of the morning.  

She requested a plain cake with chocolate icing.  The cake looked great, but I do think it was lacking something in the taste department.  It was made from scratch.  However, Hallie loved it and I guess that was the most important thing.

She is growing into a lovely young lady and she makes us very proud.  Happy Birthday Hallie!

Voting

As you know, this November the United States had a presidential election.  Four years ago right after we did not get a chance to vote.  We thought that we would not be able to get all the paperwork finished in time for us to vote in that election.  This time, we made sure that it happened.  We wanted to vote in the Primary, but that did not happen (we got some wrong information, and missed a deadline).

We even watched all (but one) of the presidential debates.  We voted by absentee ballot and Jake carried our  ballots back and mailed them into our county.

This is a picture of Jon filling out his ballot.

If you look very closely, you can see the book that Jon is using as a desk is "Put me in the Zoo".
We are grateful that we had the privilege to be able to vote, even when we are so far away.