All Sorts of Seafood!

Yet another big day of activities and socializing for all of us! Saturday just flew by! The little guys had school in the morning followed by our usual rounds of soccer, horse back riding and basketball games. Quincy was invited to yet another birthday party for a friend of his. I love the birthday parties here, they just consist of the kids having their friends over to play with a little bit of cake and a lot of playing and running around outside - no big themes, goodie bags or anything like that. Very nice. While Quincy was at his party, Josh took Max and I took the other two to do some of their Christmas shopping. Wow! The stores were absolutely packed. It was crazy! After all the shopping we could handle, we headed home and put up our Christmas tree and wrapped some gifts. We were then confused once again.... We fed the kids and prepared them for an evening on their own while we went next door for a dinner party. When we arrived at the neighbor's house, we were told that the kids were supposed to come too. So, we ran home and got them... They had a great time playing with the 8 year old girl and the dog while we had our usual 5-6 hour meal! Whew!! We were all exhausted though as we didn't get home until after 1:30 a.m.!!! Our neighbor is a professional fisherman so we ate like kings! Huge piles of seafood, followed by wonderful scallops, some delicious (although practically raw) beef and potatoes, followed by salad with cheese, followed by dessert, followed by coffee! Absolutely delicious. I couldn't tell you the seafood other than the shrimp... but we are certainly not nearly as dexterous at extricating it from it's shells as we need to be around here. The other couple at the party were the former residents of our house. They were very, very nice and interesting to talk to. The man works for an American medical company and speaks relatively good English. Josh's French has improved so much that he is really able to communicate all sorts of things now and there are times that I cannot follow even his conversations. We really had a great time - last Saturday's dinner party was very tiring and difficult to follow the French language but last night was interesting enough that we managed just fine. Very fun. Here are Max and Calvin's class pictures - finally. Max does not have an individual shot because he didn't know what was going on and didn't know to get one taken.... Oh well.