Thanksgiving week

We enjoyed a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at the Rhees home with the other embassy families and friends.  I was too busy eating the good food to take many pictures.

Rhett Rhees and Hyrum Garvin

Not a great shot - the 5 Sarajevo Elders

Elder McNeil wearing the table decorations

I had listened to a very old BYU devotional talk by Harold Hansen a few days before Thanksgiving.  It was about gratitude and he quoted a poem by Pauline Stone that I liked.

Little Things

Did I forget to thank thee, Lord

For things that may seem small:

A flower by the wayside,

A wild bird's lovely call,

For all the daily happenings

That we call commonplace -

For autumn and for sunsets

And a neighbor's smiling face?

For life is made of little things,

So let me not forget

To count my smallest blessings,

And before the sun is set,

To thank thee, Lord, for every one

That adds a note of cheer,

And our blessings will be multiplied

Before another year.

Thanksgiving is a time of remembering the gifts we receive each day and all the blessings that are ours.  We are grateful for our wonderful family and for all the joy that you bring into our lives.  Speaking of family, we can do a little bragging here.  Great grandchild #5 was born on Friday.  Nathan and Maria had another baby girl, making Anna a grandma for the second time.

Jordan Arlene Rose Lowry - look at all that hair!

That shiny new car I showed you a couple weeks ago has been broken in - broken being the key word.  The Elders took the car Friday afternoon to do their service hours and had an encounter with our gatepost going out our driveway.  No one was hurt and it is still drivable but it kind of makes us feel bad to have this mess on the car now.

Fence post meets new car

Filling out an incident report on a Church vehicle is a tedious chore.  We don't know if or when it might be repaired.  The Elder driving is very remorseful and probably worried that his driving privileges will be revoked.

Elder and Sister Swendsen were in Sarajevo overnight; we met them for dinner last night and had a nice visit.  It is nice to have other missionaries our age to talk with once in awhile.  Not that we don't enjoy the young missionaries company but they just don't relate to grown up topics very well yet.  Elder Swendsen is a counselor in the mission presidency and today changed the first counselor in our branch presidency.  Hyrum Garvin is the new counselor.

We brought the Christmas boxes up from the basement to see what we had to decorate with.  We found a tree and started to put it together.  We've never had one that is built one branch at a time.

The beginning of our Christmas tree

Christmas tree parts

It's a tree!

It was a long process but we got it put together and the lights on it.  We left the decorations for the Elders to do when they came for dinner tonight.  I think they kind of had fun doing it.  It saved us the work and looks pretty good.  

Elders McNeil, Thompson and Christiansen decorating our tree

The photo is dark but the tree looks good

Be kind to one another this week!