Winter Happenings

New people continue to come to our English Club every week

    While on one hand, the winter seems to last forever, on the other hand each day seems to race by.  A lot of Leif's time recently has been on preparing talks for our church in a series from the book of Genesis.  It's been encouraging to see some of the other men step up and learn and grow through this study.  Of course, a lot of time is also spent in preparing for our move to the village.  The shell of our house is completed, with a roof on top!  We hope to get windows and insulation in next.

     We continue to be amazed at all of the new people who are coming to our English Club!  We have a great group of students, and many already speak English well enough to engaged in our discussions taken from different passages of the Bible on the life of Jesus.  We always enjoy the tea time at the end where we can mingle and get to know these students on a more personal level, too.

   

     We have been wanting to connect with these new friends outside of English Club and have found various ways to do so.  On this day, we invited several friends to the village where we'll be living (at Sasha and Yulia's house) for a game night.  They live not so far away from this village in another village.  We had a lot of fun!

    I like how games bring out people's personalities in new ways.  It's a fun way to grow in friendship.

    And speaking of friendship, I just have to say that our friends Adriana and Marius are AMAZING!  They had all three of our kids overnight that night, and Ella and Ike were both throwing-up sick throughout the night and in the morning.  Adriana told them she didn't want to call me because I would worry and come right away.  So she just kept them and told me when I came to pick them up! (And they have a new baby!) So we missed having our kids during the super-sick stage and just got them when they were tired and snuggly sweet.  =)

     Our kids continue to barter ice outside with their friends during English Club.  They collect and freeze ice on our balcony throughout the week.

     A bunch of kids at church have been sick lately (it's that time of year!).  Two of the kids in the youngest group were in the hospital the last couple of weeks with pneumonia.  One week Ike was the only kid in my group, so we made sandwiches for everyone in the church for after the service.  He took his job very seriously and was super cute.

      Leif's birthday this year was on the same day as the Superbowl.  The girls designed him this Seahawks football shirt that says "You are the best Papa" in both English and Russian.  Ike got this helicopter balloon for him.

     It created the perfect opportunity for us to have a Superbowl/birthday party!  We invited old friends and new (from English Club) and projected the game onto the wall.  It was fun for Leif to explain the rules to people. as most people aren't at all familiar with American football.  I didn't get any really good pictures, but we had 23 people total.  It was very fun!

     Last week we had our annual day of prayer as a team.  I was in charge of organizing it this year.  It's wonderful to take this day out of our schedules to be together and pray all day.

   
     Daniela led us in a time of worship songs that were great for including the kids. We look forward to this day each year.