Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope all of you are having a wonderful Thanksgiving!  I have so much to be thankful for.  I am so thankful for relationships, including both my Kazakh and American family, my friends here and back in the States, my team here, and all my children at the orphanages.  My life is so rich because of all the people in my life.

Today was a fun (busy) Thanksgiving for our team.  We spent all day cooking - minus a game of Canasta (which Jason and I won!).  Today the four of us (Ember, Ken, Jason, and myself) prepared our own Thanksgiving meal, but also began preparations for a traditional Thanksgiving meal with the staff from our office tomorrow at lunch. 

The decision on what to cook is always interesting.  We try to cook the things that each person feels are a part of Thanksgiving.  Today (for just the four of us) we cooked turkey (the biggest one I have ever had in Kazakhstan), mashed potatoes, sweet potato marshmallow casserole, green beans, rolls, mushrooms and garlic, gravy, stuffing, apple pie, pecan pie (with walnuts instead of pecans because we don't have pecans here), and pumpkin pie.  Tomorrow we will be having the same except we won't be having green beans.  Everything was yummy!  It was fun to work together to accomplish such a feast.  I got the fun job of trying to stuff turkeys and sew them up, which was a new experience for me.  We did take pictures of all the festivities, so I'll have to post those another time.

Funny Story:  Today we realized we had a lot of potatoes.  We bought 10kg yesterday (20 pounds).  Ember and I were thinking about all the office staff, but realized that we aren't going to have as many as we had imagined in our head.  With our meal today and the meal tomorrow it comes out to about a pound of potato per person.  Of course, this is before they are peeled and mashed, so maybe it comes out to 3/4 of a pound per person.  Tomorrow we will test my philosophy:  you can never have too many mashed potatoes.