It's been a whirlwind couple of months. Mom and Dad were here for six wonderful weeks. We feel like we barely scratched the surface of things to see and do in Japan, but they got a good taste of my life here, and that was what I wanted for them. Mom kept a record of their visit that I'm not going to duplicate, but you can see all our adventures on their blog.
Besides having Mom and Dad here, I was busy with preparation for the PTA food fair at the kids' school. I helped coordinate the annual garage sale, which was huge project, but we pulled it off and made over 900,000 yen for the school. Hooray!
Just after Mom and Dad left, we made a kind of spur-of-the-moment decision to invite people over for Thanksgiving dinner on the 30th. Since it was rather late notice, I didn't really think everyone would be able to come, but they all accepted and suddenly I had a Thanksgiving dinner for 28 people to plan! So, I spent all of last week shopping, cleaning, cooking, and preparing for Thanksgiving - except for Friday when I spent all day at the school serving a barbecue for a futsal (soccer) tournament. I made my pumpkin pies Friday evening and wrote up my schedule for the next day. With the help of our guests, everything came together nicely, and we had a lovely Thanksgiving, complete with the BYU/Notre Dame game playing in the background after dinner. I didn't take any pictures of the food, but it was all absolutely delicious. I even passed out the words to "Come Ye Thankful People, Come" and entreated my friends to humor me by singing it before our meal.
I was perhaps overly proud of my centerpieces. I took Mike and the kids with me around the neighborhood to poach branches from maple trees. I planned to just have them alone in the glass vase, but they weren't staying put, so I added popcorn to hold them in place, and I think it turned out very autumn-like!
I decided it is high time I start investing in entertaining ware, so I bought table cloths, three serving platters, three serving spoons, and commercial grade, stainless steel cutlery to serve 36! We should never need to buy plastic utensils again.
The extra maple leaves went in little vases on the kid tables, so none were wasted!
I neglected to take any pictures of our guests, but I was pleasantly surprised when I downloaded the pictures to find that Mike took some!
Bear must have ducked under the table when Mike showed up with the camera.
I thought that once Thanksgiving was over, I would be able to relax a little. But now there are all sorts of Christmasy things that need to be done, plus a trip to Palau to prepare for, in the next 16 days! So far all the time I thought I would have once Beaver started school has failed to materialize.
Still, it was a happy Thanksgiving, and I would be happy to do it again next year!
1 comment:
It's fun to see all the people we so enjoyed meeting! The center pieces look like you have been influenced by Japanese style. Good work.
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