Thanksgiving

I thought I'd post a few pics from Thanksgiving. Just like last year we joined our next-door neighbors for Thanksgiving. We really enjoy celebrating with their family. We do have to make a lot of food as our neighbors always invite all the singles in our organization to join us. We still had to go to work and school on Thanksgiving. I happened to be at a seminar held at a large restaurant which caters to foreigners so the smells of cooking turkey and pumpkin pie wafted up and made us all very ready to leave at noon to prepare for dinner. The picture here is of Pii La helping me cook green bean casserole. Of course, we don't have all the ingredients here so we have to figure our subsitutes. Canned beans cost an arm & a leg so we cooked fresh beans until they were soggy. The beans at the market were so green and fresh and particlularly delicious that I was depressed to find that once they've been boiled for half an hour you can't tell whether you started with good beans or bad beans. We had no Durkee fried onions so I had Pii La tempura fry some onions. That turned out to be a good substitute as tempura frying (unlike deep-frying) is stir-frying and makes for a very light taste and texture. You can see the big pile of onions next to her. They were so good that it was hard not to eat them all. The next pic is Eric & some of the guys taking our tables an chairs to our neighbors' house. It was a lovely day and we set up some of the tables outside. After the dinner (during which we at almost no pie or sweets of any kind) (see last post for the reason) we hung around and talked and thought about how we'd miss our friends and neighbors next year, but how excited we were to being looking forward to the next Thanksgiving with family. There's no substitute for family on a holiday.

Birthdays

We are now on the other side of a couple of weeks of non-stop parties and are looking forward to another month of non-stop parties. November & December are full of celebration for the Wolthuis family. We started off with me and and about 4 times of celebrating my birthday in a week. That meant that we already had lots of leftover cake going into Gabe's birthday. Nevertheless, we had to make a Lego cake for Gabe's birthday party. In past years, I have invited a few children over for a low-key party. However, with Gabe now in school I was worried about esprit de corps so I invited the entire class-all 15 children. As the date for the party drew closer, I wondered if I'd been insane to invite all the children over. Eric couldn't come home until 12:15 and Pii La would not come until 1:00 so I had 45 minutes of the kids all to myself. Thankfully, my friend Bronwen offered to help and I'm so thankful that she could come. The kids were perfectly well-behaved (kudos to the parents & teachers) but they inhaled the food so quickly that Bronwen & I were hard pressed to keep the food stocked. Within 30 seconds of putting a plate on the table the food was gone. I was amazed it was how easy it was to keep the kids occupied and we ended with a treasure hunt in the long-jump pit at the school.

Gabe also greatly enjoyed the presents from family. Here's Gabe in his Superman costume from Kev & Jen and playing with his Contraptions Balloon Vehicle from Sam. Only days later we had a little family party for Eric. Gabe planned and performed most of that party with help from mom. He did all the decorations and planned a treasure hunt, science experiments (the picture is from Gabe's experiment), pass-the-parcel and snacks. Eric's students also outdid themselves with presents and treats then on Sunday night we also had friends over to play games and MORE treats were brought. On Monday our small group celebrated and we brought home even more treats. By the time Thanksgiving came we had a refrigerator stuffed with cake, cookies, brownies, bars, candy and we were tired of sweets. I guess it'll help with acclimating ourselves to the season of non-stop sweets:)