Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all!  We have been busy all this week preparing for Thanksgiving 2011.  We are very excited in our household, because this will be our first Thanksgiving with Julia at home.  Tom and I met Julia last year on Thanksgiving Day.  That evening we went out to Celentano's Pizzeria, in Kharkov, to celebrate Thanksgiving.  Along with the joy of meeting Julia that day, Tom and I were also sad, since we were missing our children back home very much.  So this year we are really looking forward to spending Thanksgiving together, along with two special guests.

My uncle will be spending the long weekend with us.  He lives a pretty quiet life in rural upstate New York and I'm sure, on some level, he is happy to return to his little home in the country after of a couple of days with our group. :)
 
Our other guest is coming all the way from Canada.  Many of you may also know this special person.  Around our home she is affectionately called, "Andrea the Missionary".  I discovered Andrea's blog when I saw a comment she left on another RR family's blog.  It just so happened that Andrea had been on a mission in another region in Ukraine at the same time Tom and I were over there.  She is home now, so I decided to contacted her.  We have read each others' blogs and exchanged some e-mails.  I could tell from just reading Andrea's posts that she is a special person and I knew we could spend hours talking about orphan care and RR.  I invited Andrea to come and visit with us and I thought Thanksgiving would be a fun time for her to come to the "States".  So, needless to say, we are all very excited that Andrea took us up on our invitation and will be coming for a visit.  We can't wait to hear about all of the missions she has gone on.  You can visit Andrea's blog here.

We hope that all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We pray for safe travel for all those making a trip to visit friends and relatives.