Trusting and Thankful

This has been such an incredible month! My cup is overflowing with thankfulness from spending time with our family and watching it grow!!! They're engaged!!! Sharon & Cliff, we are all SO excited for you!

And thank you guys for all the goodies from home!

It takes a little time sometimes!

I'm not really good with making schedules and following them, and I tend to work better under pressure (which some people call procrastination), so one of things living on the other side of the world has taught me is how to plan. In order to get things accomplished here there's always a process to go through, so I'm learning to always expect that accomplishing one task is going to take patience and time. The cool thing is that the process usually always ends up allowing me to meet and spend time sharing with someone, whether its riding the bus, going to the post office, or getting my shop on!!!

This is just a fun little story that I wanted to share with ya. Over the recent holiday we headed out early one morning to the center of the city to buy some foam for our beds (you know the good stuff that makes the bed real soft) and some fabric to have a few summer clothes made (b/c obviously I'm a little bigger than all the Asian ladies). The place where ya buy fabric is a huge underground market that is filled w/ rolls of material for as far as the eye can see. And the foam happens to be in the same market laid up against a stairwell in large bundled rolls. We got to pick out how thick we wanted the foam, gave them the measurements of our beds, then settled on a price we'd be willing to pay for it. After that a sweet little old man that owns the foam rolled it out in the middle of the market floor and used a honkin' butcher knife to cut our foam to size. After rolling it back up again we headed out with our big bundles of foam and had to find a person that'd be willing to take us back to our apartment, since we couldn't get ourselves and our foam in a taxi or on a bus. We ended up stuffing it in the back of this man's bread truck and then hoping in the back with it since there was no room to sit in the front. Needless to say, we made lots of fun memories in the back of the bread truck on the 40 minute drive back to our apartment.

When we brought all the foam upstairs, we had to move back all the furniture in the living room so we could vacuum off all the dirt and dust the foam had collected. When we went to put it on the first bed we realized our measurements were a little off and had to head back to the living room to do some re-cutting. We had tried to convert the measurements we made in inches with our tape measurer into centimeters when we had it originally cut, but we were off by a pretty good amount. (so if you see any packages that i send your way with foam padding you'll know where it came from)
We definitely worked up a big appetite by this time so we had some noodles delivered to the house and had a little lunch break.

After lunch it was back to getting the foam and the sheets readjusted on the bed!

Finally we had a little xiuxi (rest) on our new and improved beds before heading back out with some friends...and I'm telling you I've been having some pretty amazing sleep ever since!

Hangin Out

I have to apologize for not updating in a while! But here's some of our weekend fun with friends last month...

I got to teach Novi how to bowl...but I'm pretty sure that she has natural talent b/c she got more strikes than all of us! We also got to go to our first concert last month! The stage was in the middle of a huge arena...so we had to use binoculars to really get a good look! Glow sticks and light sabers filled the arena, and were swaying to the beat!
It was so wild to see everyone singing their hearts out to these popular choruses, the young, the old, the girls and the boys! May their heart songs soon turn to praises!

I love to tell the Story...

Here's one of the sweet cleaning ladies that works around our apartment! We love to talk with her and she's always up for a story!

We had a PRECIOUS time celebrating this past week with our friends, teachers, and classmates! Val taught us how to make these yummy cookies from scratch!We had a party for some friends, who got to hear all about the Easter story! We played games, read stories, and ATE...just having a really good time!
I got to demo for everyone how to throw back a PIXY STIX! Thanks so much for sending them Jenny & Kaci...they were such a hit!
We spent some time dying eggs, which our friends loved! So I just recently made a connection in my brain...the egg symbolizes a New Life!

The egg hunt was also a BLAST!

So many reasons to CELEBRATE!

So many sweet reasons to celebrate this week! Here a few you may not know about...

Oh...how I love my Mama! She's my best friend, my role model, my encourager, my confidant...and she's TEACHER OF THE YEAR!!! "Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all!"

The same way Morgan's show us who's boss in this picture is the same way she keeps her precious little residents under control...they love her SO much they named her "STAFF MEMBER OF THE MONTH!"

2 in a ROW! The GATORS once again take the title of National Champs this year in Basketball!

The ZOO!

An exciting little trip to the zoo w/ lots of "firsts"!My 1st time to see a panda!
Ice Cream BREAK! My 1st time to try this really yummy ice cream I always see everyone eating!
1st time I've looked at an animal and thought "Bless...what in the world is that?" I'm still wondering the same thing!
And my 1st time to feed a monkey! We bought little cereal like snacks to feed the bears...but the bears were no where to be found. So I got to use my stretch-armstrong arms to reach across the railing and stick food through the cage to feed the monkeys!

Pure Country!

We got to spend some retreat time this month out in the COUNTRY!

3 little pigs went to market!
Aint he cute!


No, I didn't bungee jump...and yes, those are monkeys!