Friendsgiving 2021

I was really excited to host our first Thanksgiving in Jakarta!  On Thanksgiving day, we had a special dinner as a family, but it's difficult to do much because it's a regular school and work day for us.  We had planned a big dinner on Saturday and invited several American families (and one French 10th grader who was curious about Thanksgiving) to come celebrate with us.

Our group grew to 23 people, so it took some work and lots of borrowing to make sure we had tables, chairs, plates, and silverware for the entire group.

Thank goodness Kayla had tables and chairs to put together a great table for all the kids.

I was pretty excited to decorate the table!

Had a little fun with the selfie stick again when everyone started arriving!

Alice made an awesome fruit turkey! Everyone really chipped in to get all the food we needed.  Amanda's dressing and gravy were pretty important and all the other majors sides were covered.

The kids had fun shooting their table from upstairs with nerf guns!

We were really thankful for Bubba, our barbecue guy, who fried our turkeys and sent them over at dinnertime.  My EZ bake oven could never handle a big bird.

We got (almost) the whole gang before dinner!  I didn't realize I'd cut off Ben and Noa on the right side until later. Such a wonderful group of friends.  They are very high on our thankful list this year!

Ahh, dinnertime! This table suddenly got very quiet.

Dinner was amazing, or so I heard.  As soon as I sat down, I realized I wasn't hungry at all.  About 15 minutes later, I was hit with pretty terrible food poisoning and I spent the rest of the night upstairs locked away in our bedroom.  I was grateful that I'd had a few hours to enjoy everyone's company but sick enough not to care that I was missing the rest of the party.

Amanda's desserts looked amazing!

We also had pumpkin, pecan, and apple pie!

The kids went upstairs to take over the game room and the adults moved to the kids table to play some games.

We had a 4-way tie for the closest guess of M&M's in the jar!  Since they couldn't all share the grand prize of Chick-fila sauce, they had to figure out some way to split all the goodies.  

Really thankful for our friend family here in Jakarta. We couldn't do this without them and they make it a pretty awesome place to live. But we're also pretty dang excited to spend the next big holiday with our actual families!