The day before Thanksgiving, we ate a great meal of a beef pie with stuffing and vegetables and ice cream.  While it wasn’t quite Thanksgiving (and we would have two other more Thanksgiving-ish dinners in the rest of the week), the food and relaxing atmosphere was enough to get us talking about Thanksgiving.  We talked about the past year, and took turns listing what we were thankful for in 2009.  Here’s some of what we listed:
 
Phoebe: Knitted blankets at grandma and grandpa’s house, playing with her friend Keziah in Cape Town, watching a potter work
Zeke: “We three kings of orient are” (he’s being a king in a Christmas play), yummy food at Kim and Todd’s house, climbing the tree at Mabibi (where we went on vacation)
Adam: Monkeys at Mabibi, that our power is still on (there’s not power shortages like there were in our previous home, and ESSA has the money to pay its electric bills), this meal.
Chrissy: Trains we rode and the car we rented, the chance to home school
 
As a bonus, we also listed things we learned in 2009:
 
Adam: The challenges of institutional fundraising as a foreigner, how book publishing works
Chrissy: How to teach and prepare for my Developing Country Economics course, lots about the field of Christian anthropology
Phoebe: Doing cartwheels, swimming
Zeke: How beans soaked in water can push the cover off a container, how to say anthropology.