Thanksgiving and Christmas

I just realized that I have a few photos I haven't posted. For Thanksgiving we had our friends Stephen and Laura Doyle over, along with their kids Andrew and Natalie and our friend Beth Schepens. I had never actually cooked a turkey before so I was a bit nervous. The only thing that went wrong was with the actual defrosting of the turkey. My only knowledge of defrosting a turkey is that it takes a really, really long time. Since I only bought the turkey on Wednesday and I knew it needed to defrost, I did what any person my age would do -- came home and Googled how to defrost a turkey. And that day I learned a very important lesson -- always look at more than one site to find the answer. The first site I clicked on was a British government website that said if you wanted to quickly defrost the turkey, then leave it out at room temperature, so I did what it said. Well eight hours later Kyle came home as I was happily puttering around the kitchen. He happened to click on several different sites and we quickly learned that the surest way to die is to defrost a turkey at room temperature. Since I was pregnant and we were cooking for other people we decided not to chance it and we threw away the turkey. The next day, to my complete shock, I was able to find a refrigerated turkey in the grocery store (I have never seen one there before) so the day was saved.

I made turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts with bacon, gravy, Laura brought the dressing and we had pecan pie for dessert. As I was putting everything in serving dishes I realized that I didn't have a gravy bowl so I improvised with a St. Feuillen beer glass. I am thinking that I might include that and the brussels sprouts in all future Thanksgivings as my nod to our time here.

Overall it was a great Thanksgiving with good friends, good food and only one small crisis!

This next photo is so pitiful I am almost embarassed to put it up, however I know we will look back on it and laugh. As a side note, we really had intended on getting a tree. We were out shopping on the one Saturday we had available to buy it. I had just bought a warm waffle and was waiting for Kyle as he ran to put our shopping in the car before heading over to look at the trees. Just as I was thinking, "Oh, this is just wonderful. I am all bundeled up, eating a yummy waffle and we are about to buy a tree together. We'll go home, put on Christmas music, decorate the tree, and drink some hot chocolate. What a great memory." The only part that I hadn't factored into my great memory making time was that all of this was taking place in Belgium. Just as Kyle walked up to me, the sky opened up and and it just poured rain. By that point my waffle was done, Kyle was a bit wet, I was getting cold, people were running around like crazy trying to get out of the rain and all the Christmas trees were soaking wet. And that is how we ended up using the fake tree we knew we had at home.

Before we were married, Kyle bought a little Christmas tree that lights up for his apartment in Montgomery. We have never used it, so I thought this year would be a good time to start. Even though I have been here four years, my brain lapsed a little and I plugged in the tree without putting the plug into a converter first. Just as I was thinking, "Man, this looks tacky." I hear a 'poof' and the smoke starts coming out of the plug. I had slightly blown up the Christmas tree. Luckily Sam Carney had given us a string of Christmas lights back when they left three years ago so I laced those through the tree. We had bought some decorations on different trips so we were at least able to fill up the tree. When we were in Trier I saw these two ornaments and thought they were too cute to pass up considering our stage in life. Since we aren't finding out the sex of the baby, we bought one of each. Only about a month now until we know which one to put out next year!