A Little of This and A Little of That

Leif was gone for a few days to a meeting for many of the Christian leaders for our church throughout the region. They meet every month and take turns meeting in different places... often it's right here in Ulan-Ude. This is the only picture he took from the trip, but maybe sometime he can write more about it and borrow pics from Zhenya (another guy who takes lots of pictures). I found it interesting that it usually takes 6 or 7 hours to get to Uzbarguzeen (the village where they met), but with snow and ice on the road, it only took 4.5 hours! The ice has filled in a lot of the awful potholes. Nice.

Speaking of men and getting together, Leif has been really encouraged by a group of men from our church that meet every week. They look in the Bible and share what God has been teaching them, pray for one another, discuss theological questions, and encourage one another. Often these times will go for hours and hours. But the cool thing is that Leif has been a part of similar groups in both college and in Spokane, and he's seen clearly how God has grown mightily in each of the guys in the past (including himself!) and he's beginning to see the fruit of these times here, too. As each man grows closer to Jesus, he shines more brightly to all that are in his life (family, friends, coworkers, etc.) It's exciting to see and think about! There are 5 of them that come consistently and two or three others that sometimes join.

Happy New Year! This weekend is the third new years celebration here in Buryatia. We tried to get some pictures yesterday but our camera ran out of batteries. But we'll try again and will write more about it.

My belly button is now officially an outie. A couple of weeks ago, it semi-popped out where I could choose, innie or outie. But now it's just a plain outie. It's popped out three months faster than when I was pregnant with Anneka! We should find out the baby's gender in two weeks!

Something that used to really bug me was that whenever I would buy a notebook for class (or for whatever), it always had graph paper inside and not nice lined paper. But today, as I was sitting with some women from church, studying Psalm 119, I realized that I now love graph paper. It's so great. If you need to make columns the long way, you can just flip your notebook over and there are lines running the other direction! It's genius!

Now that Anneka is talking more and more, I've been thankful several times that people don't understand English! She will point out something odd about a person or call a lady a man (or vice versa) and we are all in bliss because nobody understands! Of course, I still use the opportunity to correct her, but nobody knows it. She was so cute last night. Leif shaved his beard because he wants to look the same for his exit visa picture as he will when when we leave for the States this summer. She looked at him, and declared, "Papa has chin!" What a discovery!

I usually go shopping once a week to a bigger store with Inka and then buy basics (milk, flour, sugar, eggs, bread, etc.) at our little local store throughout the week. Milk is really heavy to carry, so it's nice to get it on a separate trip from our store than to lug it up the stairs with the bulk of the weekly groceries. But our store has been out of so many things lately! Out of the last 12 times I've gone there to get milk, they've only had it 2 times!! Thankfully milk comes in boxes, so when they have it I buy a bunch and we store it in our cupboard. And speaking of food, our neighborhood now has a fruit stand!! I've already been there three times this past week! We eat a lot more fruit when the fruit bowl is full. The owner of the stand is from Armenia and is really nice. I'm so happy about this new stand.