Thanksgiving

We celebrated thanksgiving on Saturday (as Thursday was of course a regular working day) with a large gathering at our house consisting of several Americans, a few Australlians, several Canadians, a South African, an El Salvadorian, a few Brits, and our honored guest...Abby!

Abby is one of Meade's former students from Garfield and was our "mother's helper" a few days per week when the twins were age 3 months to about 7 months and, following that, our babysitter occassionally. She is curently traveling through Europed visiting firends on her way to India and spent a few days with us. The kids were SO happy to be with her.

Meade cooked the turkey and stuffing (in our neighbor's oven, as ours was too small) and our friends brought the rest. It was a fantastic meal and a great time. The kids enjoyed the unlimited access to chips (crisps, whatever!), the pumpkin spice cookies and playing with their friend Christy Anne, who is the 11 year old daughter of one the teachers and often the only other child at school social functions. It did not get too crazy (vs our party a couple months ago) with all heading home after a little late night dancing by about midnight.

The next day, we took Abby to visit the home of Charles Darwin, which is in Kent, about an hour from us by car. It was interesting- we all learned more about the life of this brilliant scientist. I did not know that he had several children! We got to see the chair in which he sat while he wrote The Origin of Species, the gardens in which he performed natural history experiments, his laboratory, etc. The kids were not as impressed with this, even though they did get to use the headphones like at Stonehenge. There was a small area with manipulatives, so that provided a little relief (see photo with Abby). We did the turbo tour, as usual.