Living in a country where very few people celebrate Christmas, and even less people celebrate Thanksgiving makes it tough to get into the holiday spirit. Throw in the fact that the weather is in the 90's and are away from our family makes it almost impossible. Last year Christmas was - well, just sort of depressing. So this year we really want to try to hard get into the spirit of the season. How to do this, I'm not incredibly sure. In the US, it just sort of happens. You can't really get away from it and the spirit all around you just sort of seeps in. I'm terrible at planning ahead so I knew it would really be a struggle to start early.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Orin had school, Damien went to work, and I took Sora to speech therapy. Hum, not starting off great. So I decided we were going to put up our tree. We have NEVER even come close to getting it up this early. We were given a fake tree by someone last year. Having always had real trees growing up (and always going to cut them down ourselves) having a fake tree was a little gut wrenching. It is the saddest tree I've ever seen - but once you get all of the lights on and stuff what a huge transformation. The kids had a blast. Sora, my child who freaks out if anything out of the ordinary happens in her life, was all concerned at first, but eventually got into it. We finished with the tree right when it was time to leave to go eat Thanksgiving dinner!


There are a couple of restaurants in town who do a Thanksgiving buffet. We chose one that was right down the street and a place where we love to eat. They grow all of their own fruits and veggies and even raise some animals. And we can walk there! However, on our way we saw that they had a lot down the street where people could park and they were giving Tuk-tuk rides. He sort of insisted we take a ride so we did!

It was a great dinner. Until Micaiah had to go potty. He's been having some tummy issues the past few days. He was trying to wait for the person to get out of the indoor bathroom, but finally decided he couldn't wait anymore. About 3 minutes later I was outside getting more food and heard him crying from the bathroom. Poor kid couldn't get his pants down in time. Poor mommy had a clean up a HUGE mess and lost her appetite. Poor daddy had to walk home and get new clothes. But in the end it was just an interesting way to extend our dinner by 20 minutes. And Micaiah probably won't remember it tomorrow.
Micaiah wanted to give Sora a taste of his pie. :)
When we got home the kids wanted to turn all of the lights off and sing Christmas songs by the tree. It was so much fun. Seriously, they were all so into it - and it was so much fun. Damien and I were just talking about how much more special just having the tree up is compared to at home.
Back in October the restaurant flooded pretty badly. They have pictures up of the restaurant with all of water in it. Pretty crazy!
I love this one because it's a REAL laugh from Sora.
And we stopped by the post office today (we hadn't gone in forever) and we had a package. It was the
Christmas around the World gifts for the kids!
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