Thanksgiving

I've fallen behind in the updates lately. (And I was doing so well there for awhile.) The lack of new posts can be contributed in part to the fact that I've been keeping myself mildly more busy lately and that we haven't really done anything extremely exciting recently. Work and school have been sucking most of the life out of David while I've been rejoicing in our newest purchase: a car! It's so lovely to have a car again. It makes running errands and visiting friends so much easier and I'm starting to suffer fewer heart attacks everytime I drive the streets of Seoul. I'm starting to learn how to drive like an Asian.....which isn't really a good thing but it's necessary if I'm to stay alive here.

The most newsworthy thing to happen this past week was Thanksgiving. And what a day of thanksgiving it was!

I made several pies, of course, but my proudest accomplishment was this absolutely delicious maple pumpkin cheesecake.

Cheesecakes still freak me out just a little because you can't stick a fork in one and declare that it is done. They are supposed to still be runny and jiggly and it's a cheesecake's wriggles that make me nervous. Is it wriggling too much? Or not enough? In any case, this cheesecake set up very nicely. (I'll post the recipe if anyone is interested.)

We celebrated our Thanksgiving feast with our friends from church (the Bartletts and Cottrells) and four missionaries. There were two Korean missionaries and two American missionaries. Needless to say, the American missionaries were very happy to eat turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and pie again. I am very grateful that I get to live in a foreign country but still have access to all the familiar foods from home.

I'm also very grateful for David. He works extremely hard and I really appreciate all that he does for us. (And aren't we cute?)
Here's the majority of us (minus the children) digging into our feast. And what a feast it was, too. We had two turkeys, two pot roasts, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, green beans, two types of bread, jello, salad, and numerous types of pie.

After dinner, Superman and Spiderman here decided to cause some mayhem and destruction.

Mostly by attacking David. One thing that I've always loved about David is that children love to play with him and that he, in turn, has the patience to play with them. See, I find playing with children to be mind-numbingly boring. I can only handle about 5 minutes of it before I'm desperate to get away but David always spends at least half an hour playing with the kids and they love him for it.

There's always a lot of swordfighting going on. And most of the time, it was four against one.

As we were finishing our meal, we went around the table and said what we were thankful for. It might be trite and cliche, but it really is very touching. This year, I have two things that I am most grateful for. One is that we've made some wonderful friends already in our time here in Korea. It's hard to be so far away from home, but now I have a support system and network of friends from our ward that rivals even my family. In some ways, being so far removed from home and family has made us all turn to each other in ways you wouldn't normally do. But since we all are in the same boat, we all help each other. And I'm so grateful for those relationships. It makes the thought of being away from home for so long or having a baby in a foreign country not seem so scary after all. I feel truly blessed to have made these friends so quickly, especially since I've always had a difficult time befriending new people.

The second thing I'm grateful for this year is being a woman. I've always been particularly drawn to women's history and I spent a great deal of time researching the home and women's role within the home during graduate school. And I've come to the perhaps unpopular opinion that the so-called "liberation" of women and the feminist movement have done more to debase and destroy the notion of womanhood and femininity than it has to uphold it. Women are sacred; the work we do to bear and raise children and to keep our homes warm and safe is the most important work on earth. And yet, to be seen as the "equal" of men has required women to give up their place in the home, become things to objectify and sexualize, and has reduced women to say that they're "just a wife and a mother" as if that's somehow not good enough. I love being a woman. I love my femininity, and I love that my husband worships me all the more because I want to be a mother, I want to stay home to raise our children, and I want to vacuum our carpet wearing high heels and pearls. (Just kidding about the last part.....we don't even have carpet!) I certainly don't mean to say that women who have high-powered careers or choose not to have children are any less of a woman than I am, but rather, I'm grateful that I've finally learned to embrace my womanhood and be content to not have the career that I had always envisioned for myself and to finally have found a purpose for myself outside of the world's expectations for me.

So, Thanksgiving was wonderful this year. And on Friday, David and I put up the Christmas decorations because I just couldn't wait to bring some Christmas cheer into the house. And of course, Suyom just had to help us set up the tree in the way she knows best: taking a nap in the box.


Happy holidays!