Thanksgiving

If you've never experienced Thanksgiving in South Bend, IN with 37 people, two turkeys, some polish sausage, noodles, green beans, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, about 50 rolls, various salads, jello, and lots and lots of beverages...I highly recommend it! The kids had a blast. It was the first time in a while that all of the Hojnacki's and all of the Klein's kids were together for a holiday. That made 13 kids in all: three boys and ten girls. Several of the older girls did a great job of entertaining the younger ones (something that I less-than-subtly tried to encourage.) One of the coolest parts was that in the evening it started to snow and all the kids ran outside (some in their p.j.s) to experience the first snow of the year.

We got a lovely package from Grace's foster family in China this week. They sent the dress that she is wearing in the Thanksgiving Day pictures in addition to lots of other clothes and some wool scarves for us. It was an early birthday present as she's turning three this Saturday. We're going to have a little party here at home for her with some kids from the neighborhood. In some ways, she seems so much younger than Sophie and Lily did at this age. Probably because she's still not talking much, but in other ways she is much more capable than they were when they turned three. She can dress herself, put her own shoes and coat on, cut with scissors and do puzzles. Some of those things Lily is still working on!

The other plus is that she is officially potty trained outside of nights and nap time. When we first started she was going every fifteen minutes or so, but as the novelty has worn off, she's spacing that out a little. I suppose that means it's about time to move her out of the crib and into the big girl bed, which of course both of the other girls were long into at this age, but I just can't bring myself to enter into the land of getting up whenever she wants and not staying contained at nap time.

I had my first JV basketball game tonight and was very pleased with their performance. While we didn't play the strongest opponent we'll see this year by any means, we won 50-28. They really picked up their intensity on defense and ran the fast break well. Dave says he'd hate to play for me because I've been coming home from every practice complaining about how much work we have to do and then he came to the game and watched them really blow out the other team. I guess all those bad practices just convinced them to finally step it up and get to work (either that or all the yelling I've done lately.) Sophie came to the game and sat on the bench tonight. She said I did "a lot of yelling and stomping my foot" but she has the final score memorized and is finally paying enough attention to report who won the game when she gets home.

Off to bed now. The Christmas Tree is up!