Thanksgiving

Long story, but we had quite the crowd for Thanksgiving. We ended up having 23 people including ourselves - way more than I've ever hosted before. We had wall to wall people. We even had Brittany and her friends sitting in the back entrance. We had an interesting mix of people. We had friends from California, Arizona, Tennessee, Texas and Oregon as well as England, Scotland, New Zealand (Maori) and our friend who is a Native American from the Hopi tribe.

Mission call

We had an exciting Thanksgiving this year. Just before we got ready to sit down to eat dinner we got a call from Jeffrey in Utah. He had the family gathered together there and was getting ready to open his call. I don't know how he managed to wait to open it. He found it in the mail the night before, but waited till everyone was together before opening it.

He had a phone held up to each ear - a three way call with us and Ken's parents and a call to Kenny in Pullman in the other ear. He is going to the Chile Concepcion South mission and will be entering the Provo MTC on February 10th. I was so excited that I just wanted to tell our guests that Thanksgiving was cancelled. We had more important things to think about :)

ROTC competition

We went to an interesting event last weekend. Stuart is participating in the ROTC drill team and color guard this year and they had a competition with another DoDEA (Department of Defense something something) school. There were several different events where they had to march in formation, do routines with rifles etc. It reminded me a bit of District III marching band, without the music.

Stuart's team did very well, taking top honors thoughout. The most exciting part came at the end though. Both teams were out on the floor and a sergeant was calling out commands. None of this had been rehearsed, and they had to execute each command perfectly. There were several judges walking among them and as soon as anyone made the smallest mistake they were tapped out and asked to leave the floor. The kids got eliminated pretty quickly and soon there were only four left, then three. These were kids who had been in for three or four years and and had done a fabulous job in the other competitions. We were so excited to see that Stuart was still out on the floor, one of the three. The three eventually became two: a third year student (who had trained Stuart) and Stuart, the first year cadet. Then there was one ......... STUART!!!!! We were so excited that we forgot to take pictures at the end :) What a way to make a name for yourself at a new school :)