Happy Valentines' Day!

I'm posting again a little sooner than usual, because I will be gone all weekend at a women's retreat for Mars Hill church. About 200 women are going to a local summer camp from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. I'm looking forward to bonding with some ladies, hearing some great speakers, and sharing a cabin with my youth group girls. While I'm gone, Kayle is planning to program and hang out with some guy friends, though I think his plans are still tentative.

Last weekend, Kayle and I babysat little Grace so her parents could go out for Valentines' day. It was sweet to see them all dressed up for a nice restaurant outing. Grace was pretty easy this time and growing cuter as she learns new words and games. Of course, bedtime was still an ordeal, but we are becoming old pros (or something like that).

On Saturday, I spent most of the day with youth group girls. We had a leadership meeting in a coffee shop in the morning followed by watching the movie, "Dear John". The girls have lots of ideas for our bible study and are eager to go in every direction at once, it seems. So, as the main leader, I'm a little overwhelmed but optimistic. The movie was a chic flick with some cute and funny scenes but mostly unrealistic and not very hopeful about love. A relationship loses a lot of depth without Christ at its center. Afterwards, we went to Courtney and Emily's house to make valentines for some girls in Brazil. The opportunity came through Hope Unlimited, the place where Cody visited last summer. We ended up making 25 beautifully ornate valentine cards with messages and Bible verses in Portuguese. Not bad for a couple hours work!

On Sunday, I taught in primary and Kayle worked in the tech booth. My lesson was on the parable of the wedding banquet, so I brought wedding pictures and cards and let the kids make their own wedding invitation. Even the boys had fun with that! I learned that that particular parable is hard to explain to kids, so I'm not sure if they understood the overall message or not. Or maybe, it was just confusing to them why people would choose to reject God's invitation to Heaven. We spent the rest of Valentines' Day relaxing, watching our romantic short films DVD, and eating chocolate truffles. Yum!

Monday was President's Day, so I had the day off from school. I had some laundry and cleaning to catch up on, so I enjoyed being able to do some backed-up chores at a leisurely pace. In the middle of the day, I picked up Kayle from work and we had lunch together at Applebee's. I felt well-rested going into the rest of the work week!

This week, I have only 4 days at work and a new student from Australia for 3 days/week. I told him all about Kristen studying abroad and he has been telling me some differences between math there and here. For example, they call the slope of a line the gradient and distinguish 5's and s's by making a mark called a "hat". Overall, my 11 students are doing well and I'm especially enjoying getting to teach through entire math courses.

Yesterday was community group. Another family joined our group, bringing the toddler/walker total to 5 and the baby total to around 4 or 5 any given week. It's a crazy full house every Tuesday night! Our women's prayer time was excellent and several of us are looking forward to going to the retreat together. Of course, I still need to find a ride there, because I forgot that Kayle would need the car! Oops!

I'll try to post about the retreat sometime next week, but we expect to be quite busy. We love and miss you all!

Angie and Kayle