Happy Anniversary and Birthday to Craig!

Apparently I can't upload pictures right now, so I'll just comment on things I have no pictures for. Saturday was our anniversary. It started off with the Lakers losing to the Warriors. Not one of Craig's happier moments. (Okay so he wasn't bawling in the corner, but he was hoping they would win!). We had a friend come over to watch the kids and left to go eat at this really nice restaurant. Normally a 20-30 minute drive, it took 2 hours to get to the restaurant. We have no idea what was going on to have traffic bumper to bumper for MILES, but nonetheless we crawled to the restaurant. We got there at 8pm and there was not a soul there beside the staff of course. Imagine! Have you ever gone to a nice restaurant and had the place to yourself? It was nice and yet kinda lonely in that, you go out to be around other people who are needing to go out. We were given a pool side view. This restaurant has a pool. I'm not quite sure why unless they just invision that those who are rich enough to eat there would probably like to spend their time swimming while waiting for their food. Kinda crazy. Even though there was no food orders being placed before ours, it still took an hour for them to cook our khebab dinners. (That's just standard here. You wait at least an hour to get your food) The food was good and traffic had cleared so that we could get home in 20 minutes. On Sunday was Craig's birthday. He is now 31! Yes, he's getting so old. For his birthday he got a broken down freezer. yes, it's true. Our freezer decided to stop working and puddles of water started gathering on our kitchen floor. We had to eat our ice creams as fast as we could and what we couldn't consume, we took to our neighbors. Hey, even better to have 2 excuses to engorge on desserts!

I'd like to take a little time to talk about church here. Well, our church. It's a little different in how things are run. I was given a call to teach the CTR's. All of them. Ages 4-7. I also play the piano for sacrament and am the primary music chorister. This also includes playing the piano. So if you can imagine, I'm playing the piano while conducting. Not as hard as it may seem unless you need a second pair of hands to clap and get the children's attention to get them to stop talking and start singing. It's not like that's out of the ordinary; kids talking while you're trying to teach them something, but these kids don't listen to me. It's like I'm not real or something. They hear me, look at me, but have major BLANK faces and keep on doing what they're doing. Until of course one of the other teachers (Ghanaian ) tells them to quite down. (any Ghanaian really--male or female) Then they are like INSTANTLY quiet. Maybe I just don't have quite the right tone with the right accent. So this is my struggle. I'm striving to earn respect from a bunch of children who don't want to give me respect. Singing time is nothing compared to my sunday school class. I have one little boy who will not listen and if I tell him to do something he doesn't want to, he'll hit me (if he's within range). I would get help, but I don't know who his parents are or the names of any other adults (well maybe a few) and the primary only runs during the last hour (as well as all other auxilaries). Everyone goes to Sunday school and then the third hour, we meet for a combined singing and sharing time. So I have these small children for an entire hour and it pretty much consists of me telling them to sit down and be quiet for the first 20 minutes (there are 10 kids in the class and each one likes to act out at different times) and then I'm lucky to get a 20 minute lesson in and then I have 20 minutes to spare wondering what to do and they end up shouting, running, hitting one another, and ignoring me. Oh yeah, and it's perfectly okay for them to leave class whenever they want if they're bored because that is okay here (including nursery children!). So, I'm not trying to complain....seriously, I'm not. I just find it kind of humerous how things run and thought you might find it amusing as well!