Ok, so I've been a very bad blogger lately. Honestly I've been swamped! Let's seem if I can give a quick synopsis...
John and I were asked to join a Southern Gospel style, singing group at our church, In His Service. John has picked up the bass guitar very quickly. I know I'm a little bias but he's really quite good at it. I sing lead with them, and sometimes fill in the alto of tenor part when needed. We really enjoy it. We normally do the praise and worship music one Sunday a month, and have even performed for another church in town. We may not be the best group around, but we love what we do... praising God. :)
However this little adventure has added to our already crazy weeks. A basic run down of our weeknights is as follows...
Monday - home :)
Tuesday - John's bible study
Wenesday- Awanas
Thursday- Praise team practice
Friday - home :)
Saturday - home in the morning, then practice and normally something with friends
Sunday - at church from 7am-12:30 then back at church for practice between 4:00-5:00
Along with all of this, I helped out with the youth conference the first weekend of March. I was a small group leader for 6 middle school girls... AHHHHH. Ok so that's what I thought at first. I'm so NOT a girl mom. I've never been much of a girly girl, so I figured it would be a rough weekend. The weekend started on Friday night at the church with dinner and a quick introduction to the weekend. We then went to our host homes. Our host home was the best! :) We sat around the dining room table and decorated our children... eggs. The lesson was about God the Father. It went fairly smoothly then the girls wanted to go out and look at the stars. There is a park right across the street so we decided to go there, only to find out it was too cloudy to see anything. So they started to play tag... at 10:30 at night. I just asked them to try not to scream or squeal. Yeah right... middle school girls... remember? You barely tap them and even at half volume, they could still be heard into the next county! Finally the mom-mode kicked in and I made them go inside, fearing that the neighbors would call the cops on us.
They were fine with that since our host family had bought 6 cartons of ice cream.
6:30 Sat morning came awfully early considering the girls didn't go to bed til after 1:30am. Sat was filled with team building fun and service projects. All the high school and middle school girls, and female leaders, decided to go do the project at the nursing home... except me. I'm not to fond of nursing homes. I choose to go with the guys to a senior living apartments and do some yard work. Wow was that an experience. 5 middle school boys and I went to the apartment of an elderly women who attends our church. She needed us to clean out her flower beds and pick up sticks and twigs in her yard. At one point we start hearing her yelling sh** sh** sh** sh** sh**, like 12 times. THe boys are looking at me in disbelief. THen she starts yelling at her motorized wheel chair "WHEN I TELL YOU TO STOP, YOU STOP... DO YOU HEAR ME?" THe boys quickly picked up the trash bags and slowly started walking away... they looked terrified! :) The day finished up by returning back to our host homes after dinner to do our final lesson on Jesus... however the kids were so tiered that most of them slept through it! :)
On Sunday I realized I don't thikn I ws there for the girls, nearly as much as God had put them there for me. We had a blast. It might have helped that no of them were girly girls either! :) What a blessing!
Along with all of this I've been trying to organize our 10 yr high school class reunion. I'm actually really excited about this reunion. John says this is the perfect job for me since I'm nosey! :) It's been interesting to find people. However it is posing to be quite the challenge trying to track down the 80 people or so that have seems to disappear! I've had a blast designing the invites and tickets and creating a database for the addresses. I can't wait to finish up with the addresses so we can get the ball rolling, like mailing out invites, planning food, gathering pics for a slide show! I thought this would be a lot harder since I don't still live in the area, but thanks to modern technology... email, facebook, myspace... it's not to bad!
I found out yesterday that a friend of ours, Gabe, is coming to visit the weekend of my birthday. :) As many of you know I have this incessant need to take care of bachelors. I love having them over and cooking as much food as possible. He's my last bachelor to take care of. All the others have gone off and gotten married. I'm excited to hear his stories from his latest deployment to Iraq and for him to come visit our new church.
I'm hoping after Easter things will slow down a little bit. I can't wait for summer. I want to go hiking and camping. I'm getting a little stir crazy. Hopefully we'll be able to do some decent hiking this year. I have my appointment with the cardiologist tomorrow morning to figure out if we can fix my little blackout problem. For those of you who don't already know... this problem started back in college. Anytime I exercise or get my heart rate up, everything goes black. Luckily I've only passed out once or twice. it's bothering me a lot more these days. I don't really think it's getting worse, I just think I'm trying to do more things that trigger it, like hike, swim, and chase Andrew in the park. I'm sick of it limiting my family when we try to do things together. So hopefully after tomorrows appt. we will at least have a plan of action to figure everything out.
Well, that is the basic update... not as brief as I had planned... Hopefully as the weather improves we will be able to get out and takes some updated pics.
Thur. morning about 11 am at Maria's house. THis is how the snow was drifting on their deck.
Thurs. late afternoon. A look at our back deck
Friday morning. The sidewalk by Maria's house
