Thankful for a great Thanksgiving!!!!

We did have a great thanksgiving and I wanted to share some pictures with all of you. But my internet is not working at it's best right now. And my man, who can fix anything he lays his hands on (we tell him that anyway) is on the other side of the country. So the pictures will have to wait. But I didn't want to wait to thank God for a nice thanksgiving. Katrina was here with us for a few days, and we all enjoyed her being here. She is really a fun person to be around and our kids love her. Any of you that a have never met her are missing out. She is our fellow missionary who now lives in our old house in Nova Odessa, in southern Ukraine. We had a nice American style Thanksgiving dinner (well sorta) on Thur and two Ukrainian teenager boys joined us. Artyom has been living with us as our translator. His twin brother Maxim just repented and had been helping Jason with the remodeling of our bathroom. This was their first time to celebrate Thanksgiving with Americans. We couldn't find a turkey (I did find half a turkey though) so we roasted a chicken and ham,and had corn, green beans, mashed potatoes, dinner rolls, dressing, and Jason even bought me cellery(it's very hard to find & expensive). It was all very good, if I must say so myself. The peacan pie was walnut pie, but that didn't hurt anything. Everyone still liked it. On Friday afternoon, my friend from college, Donna Downing Buck, and her husband, Wesley, came over to visit us from Modavia where they are missionaries. I was so happy that it all worked out for them to come. We had a great time together. Friday afternoon we did some site-seeing in Kiev and then on the evening train, Katrina, Maxim, and Artyom went back to Nova Odessa. We will miss Artyom sorely so it was a day of crazy emotions(please pray for him). Donna and Wesley fit in just fine at our house, because both of them are into children's ministry and we usually have plenty of kids hanging around our house. I was so impressed that they got right down on the floor with the kids and played games and did their best to communicate with them. It was great to see. That's my kind of missionary. On Sat. morning we took them to a village bizzar (market) and let them see a little more of the village life after seeing the Big City of Kiev on Friday. It was fun and Donna found the handmade basket that she wanted. Sunday they both helped with Sunday school, which was a blessing because we had an untrained and new translator. In the afternoon service one of the girls from Sunday school praised the Lord that everything went fine even without our normal translator. I was saying Aman to that. In the evening Jessica enjoyed a long piano lession from Donna, who is very talented,along with her husband, in music. My kids enjoyed the holiday, food and fun with company. But on Monday night Jessica said, " I'm glad that it's just our family now". And so ended our Thanksgiving week. Thankful for Friends, Food and just Family again.