Thanksgiving and such

So, a little behind in posting this, but as always things just seem to get busy with classes and all.

Anyway, Thanksgiving was wonderful. I only hope that everyone had as wonderful a time as all of us. Since we are already in the South we figured we'd head a little further south for Thanksgiving. So we went to Florida to visit my grandparents for the weekend. We left Wednesday morning and arrived at their place, about an hour north of Orlando, just in time for dinner. The kids were amazing on the way down, but quite excited to get out of the car. Of course we were greeted with some outstanding cooking from my Grandma. I'm not sure what it was called, but it was some kind of egg casserole with sausage, hashbrowns, and of course...lots of cheese. The first dessert for the weekend was homemade apple pie...it looked so amazing you almost didn't want to eat it...almost :) And that was only Wednesday night :)

Thursday of course had us stuffing ourselves on turkey, mashed potatoes, pies (I had a three piece sampler for Thanksgiving), etc and watching the traditional loss for the Lions...a bad one this year :( Aside from that we spent time playing bocce ball, shuffle board, pickle ball, a little swimming in the pool and of course lots of cards with Grandma. Much to her delight, Brian learned her favorite game, "Dimes", and put in a couple good games. I was also excited for the chance to get to see one of my good friends from high school, Nick. It was great to catch up with him and play some Euchre Settlers.

It took a little while to get back to Columbia. We were supposed to get back around 7pm, according to Garmin, but taking 3 hours to go 10 miles due to traffic around Savannah had us getting home around 10pm. I called Laura in the middle of it to let her know that I blamed her...as she is a civil engineer...it was the best I could come up with. The funny note was that we planned to stop for dinner just before we hit the traffic jam and it was at a spot without any exits...so we ended up waiting until nearly 8pm for dinner instead of 6:30ish. By the time the traffic cleared up and we found a Burger King it seems that everyone else had found it first as Burger King was...sold out of burgers. The kids didn't seem to mind a dinner of chicken nuggets, french fries, and their cheesy tots (not very good in my opinion)...so all was well.

Back in Columbia we are (with the exception of Kelly) all just trying to finish up classes and looking toward Christmas break and traveling up to Michigan to see family and friends. Classes are outstanding down here and I am really happy that we made the decision to come, but it is still nice to have a break and especially to see all the friends and family whom we miss so much. Oh...Kelly for her part is still working on her language development. We did have our first Russian night, but that's not what I'm talking about. Amidst her discussions of the elephants that are in our living room she has added a nuance to "Oh snap" as she has made it a verb. She seems to have the correct use when she says "Oh snap", but now enjoys adding "I snapped it".

The last two days have been a mix. I got a lot of homework done yesterday and still managed a trip to a tree farm to pick out a Christmas tree. An hour later Brian had changed his mind about 15 times, but we finally decided on one...a little bigger than we had planned...but it'll fit, right? Kelly on the other hand was quite content to run around and try to determine which trees were taller than her. Although she rarely was the victor...she was quite diligent. She would run up to a tree and lean against it to try to see if the top was taller than her. She was consistent with this measuring method even when faced with the 30 foot trees, quite cute. Today we decorated the tree...a little trimming was required in the end to make it fit...things are a little cramped, but the kids had fun. However on the tough side, we received some difficult news from back home, so please keep my family in your prayers.