Thanksgiving

We celebrate Thanksgiving every year on Saturday since Thursday is (obviously) a normal working day here. This year Jan and I were invited to the Middlebury Thanksgiving on Thursday evening. Middlebury is the program where I did my Masters degree in '01-'02. I have remained friends with the Director of the program in Germany, Heike, although I don't get to see her very often. She is extremely busy commuting between Mainz and Berlin (not exactly around the corner) and just finished her PhD last year. We finally were able to make a coffee date last week where I surprised her with my Baby Tummy. She invited us to the Middlebury Thanksgiving, which normally takes place at her apartment; however, due to her schedule this year was planned in a restaurant. Dinner was super good and it was nice to spend some time with Heike and meet some of the new Middlebury students.

We had 22 guests on Saturday for Thanksgiving Dinner. Six of our guests were unable to attend, so we actually had a smaller crowd than expected. How did we have room for 22? We moved our couch out of the living room and brought in 2 picnic tables - those 2 tables plus our 12 place dining room table worked out great. Our turkey was 32.45lbs!! Over-sized turkey + under-sized oven = chaos :) We had to take the grates (is this the right word?) out from the sides and the turkey was still touching the sides of the oven.

Everything turned out alright, though it took a bit longer to cook than I thought.

Everything else went well and everyone went home with full bellies. I didn't take any other pictures except a few of Adrian watching the older kids playing Uno. He was so fascinated with them!

Oh, and one picture of the youngest family member, Leela, who was born in May. The picture is a bit blurry because I didn't use flash - I felt bad flashing her!