Happy Thanksgiving!

A few descriptive words come to mind when I think about this year's Thanksgiving...
1. Early: because of the school schedule and other various reasons (i.e. the amount of nationalities here at BFA!) we actually celebrated American thanksgiving 2 weeks ago!
2. Massive (amounts of food): preparing food for 26 girls, 5 dorm staff and about 12 other guests was no small task!
3. Scrumptious: Turkey, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, stuffing, rolls, pumpkin pie, apple pie, hot apple cider...all made from scratch!



My self-proclaimed job for the evening was "coffee lady."



Scrumptious!



This is Les (dorm dad) carving the turkeys. We are so lucky to have a chef in our dorm! Seriously, he's a real chef.


This is me, Meghan (middle school teacher), Jessica and Katie.



Helen and Charity are enjoying the hors d'oeuvres!



Our dining room.




Lizzy, me and Kristi feeling full and happy.


Me and Anna ate too much turkey.


November is almost over and now it is officially the Christmas season! We will be decorating our dorm soon and the girls will all be cramming for exams. It really is hard to believe that the semester is almost over! The last day of classes is December 19th and all the students will go home for 3 weeks. I had originally planned to come home for Christmas, but it seems to have worked out better financially and logistically to return home for the summer instead, when I will have a longer break. So I will be staying in Kandern, resting and celebrating the holidays with friends here.
I pray for God's blessings over you all and wish you a Happy Thanksgiving!

October is for pumpkins and open house.

Pumpkins!
What would October be without carving a few pumpkins?
We split up into groups and let the creative juices flow!


This is me, Katelyn and Hannah. The best group.

Our design was pretty intricate; it took a lot of concentration and precision. This is Katelyn hard at work.

The finished product! The pumpkin on the left is ours...if you can't tell, it's a carving of Perry, one of our vans!

This is the Jessica's. They are roommates and I'm pretty sure they took out their frustrations with each other on the pumpkin.


Palmgarten Open House
Each dorm has 1 open house per year where the students come up with a theme, decorate, and invite the entire BFA community over to traipse through the dorm. We recently had our turn and the girls did a fantastic job of pulling off a major event!

The theme was "The World Wide Web," and so the goal was to make people feel as if they were actually in the Internet. We decorated the halls with signs made to look like different websites, and the girls chose to decorate their rooms as a website as well.


This is Naomi. She was in charge of organizing all the decorations.
I think the stress was getting to her at this point...



This is Shanna & Dahee's room. They chose InStyle.com as their website.


We have 2 main hallways in our dorm, so each one was designated as a separate "browser"--Internet Explorer...



...And Firefox. Anna did an awesome job on these signs!



This is Bonnie (a fellow RA) with Emily & Helen. They were in charge of refreshments and chose to make cookies, in order to go along with the Internet theme. We were expecting over 300 guests, so all the girls pulled together and, over the course of 2 weeks, baked over 900 cookies!
The next few weeks are going to be very exciting and very busy! We will be celebrating Thanksgiving as a dorm this week, which means tons of good food! And the school is having its annual Christmas banquet coming up at the end of the month. Stay tuned!