Happy Birthday, Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you, Grandma and Papa, for this castle set! Jakub has loved playing with it so much! Above I caught him saying "thank you" to you in the picture. :)

Happy Birthday to our sweet boy! We already celebrated a couple of weeks ago with friends, which I wrote about in another post, but we also celebrated recently just as a family. We took Jakub on a long walk outside, fed the ducks at the river, the weather was beautiful, and then we ate out just as a family for one of the first times with him. Then, we were in Germany for an annual retreat the day Jakub turned 2 and to honor and celebrate him our church family there, about 80 or so in attendance, sang him Happy Birthday. Of course it made me cry to have so many people I know and love be a part of Jakub's special day and to want to do that for him. He just watched them all in awe and couldn't believe they were singing to him when he heard his name. After that every day of the retreat when he woke up he asked if it was "birthday today." :) It was also a Sunday on his birthday so we had a special day of worship and praising God with our "family" around us. The singing and scripture reading at this retreat always moves me to tears. It's a special moment to worship and sing in English with so many believers gathered together. We miss this type of community a lot and it continues to make us long for that even more in Olomouc. We hope there will be a strong church body here one day.











Here are a couple of pictures from the place we stayed in Germany. It's so beautiful and every year I'm still amazed by it. When you see it decorated for Christmas it's like a place you would imagine Santa to live. :) The weather this year was cold, but beautiful and sunny, and we enjoyed some nice walks through this village.












Jakub and I really like to do art and craft projects together! Josh's Mom sent us this really cute turkey to make together for Thanksgiving. Jakub loved making it and still walks up to the fridge to see it and to say turkey.











On our way home from Germany we stopped in Ceske Budejovice to visit Jamie, Ashley, and Luke Sides. They are missionaries living and working there and have been friends of ours for several years now. They offered for us to visit them, their city, and to stay for a couple of days over Thanksgiving so we could celebrate together. It was nice to cook our traditional foods with Jamie and Christie, and for Jakub to have Luke to play and celebrate with.















We put our Christmas tree up with Jakub the Saturday we returned from our week-long trip because it's the only day we would have for just our family before we return to the US in 2 weeks. Jakub was a good helper and loved saying "ho, ho, ho!" to us. :) Christie helped Jakub, Evan, and Thompson make those sweet angels in Bible class a few weeks ago with their hands and feet, so I decided to make Jakub's an ornament for the tree. He's our sweet angel. :) Sappy, I know... I can't help it. After the tree we cooked all day because Sunday we hosted our annual Thanksgiving worship with our closest friends and it was a wonderful event! We had about 40 of us gather together this year and many of them were brave enough to help us make the food by following our American recipes. The food and the fellowship was great. Praise God for that and for them!























Happy Thanksgiving to you all (really late I know!) and I hope you had a great holiday time with your family and/or friends. My next post will likely be from the states. Please pray for our safe travel there and back, and for sanity while traveling with a lovely and lively toddler. :) We look forward to seeing many of you soon!