Being Truly Thankful and Changing the Countdown...

We have so much to be thankful for this year, as always! Here is our spread - between us and our wonderful friends the Wilsons and Buis, we filled the kitchen for the meal and the entire table for dessert.....

We had turkey, dressing (thanks, Angie!), gravy, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, potato casserole, salad, cranberry sauce and homemade rolls.

For dessert, we pulled out sugar cookies (which the kids decorated themselves, and in fall shapes thanks to Aunt Brookie), peach cobbler, pumpkin cupcakes (in fall liners, with another big shout to Aunt Brookie), fudge mint brownies, oatmeal chocolate no bake cookies and pumpkin pie.

Now to those of you in America, this may just sound like the normal holiday meal, but to us it was a FEAST. We planned for months to have all of these things available, since cranberry sauce, stuffing, pumpkin, andes mints, brownie mix, french fried onions, and occassionally even butter and cheese are difficult to come by and sometimes even impossible to find. We splurged on spray whipped cream for the pie and coffee this year, too, since we could find it! Even when you can find these things they are dreadfully expensive - Case in point: The turkey that fed our 6 adults and 6 kids cost $75 US when according to my sister in law it would have been 49 cents per pound in America!

We also drowned ourselves in sweet tea and coffee, thanks to some of you guys who have sent us decaf tea bags and coffee from America, as well as flavored creamers (yes, I'm talkin' to you, Angie). Yum Yum :)

We had some beautiful paper products, due to the generosity of Albert's sister, and we had my wonderful spiced pumpkin Yankee Candle burning bright, sent with love by my parents - seriously, the whole apartment just looked and smelled like home!

Here are my pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese icing (another shout out to y'all who sent me cake mix and frosting!) - I decorated some of them like turkeys! Aren't they precious? I got the idea from Family Fun magazine online. The only negative was that I had to save some of the precious candy corn that my parents sent us, which was a feat of will power, indeed.

We also played a few games of Settlers of Catan between wanting to sleep and eat again. It was an even race: Jasper won once, Aaron won once, Brooke won once, and Albert, Brooks and Kendall played close races each time. I never played because my brain was half comatose from food overload, but I am not complaining whatsoever. It was a day full of not thinking of anything but doing fun stuff with friends and all the things we were thankful for. It was incredibly awesome :)

We are also incredibly thankful for something else. You may have noticed that our countdown clock has changed. Your eyes are not decieving you. We have cut our countdown in HALF, and for that we are very thankful! We will arrive in SC on the evening of April 6th, 2010, and we cannot wait to see you. The earliest date that we would leave to return to Asia would be the end of January, 2011, but much regarding that is yet to be determined. What is already determined is that we will be living in Columbia, SC, for our time in America during 2010 and we are beyond excited - More details to come :)