The weekend and MOPS

Dan and I spent this past weekend at Marriage Encounter. What an encouraging time for so many couples. God worked miracles in that, toward the end of the weekend, some couples shared that they were able to see that there was still hope for their marriage. We had a nice time and enjoyed being away. We managed to sneak off to Beaver Falls Coffee & Tea, which everyone involved with Geneva College raves about. The service was great. The coffee was great. And it had a nice atmosphere. While in the Geneva College area, we ran into two former students of mine and an old camp friend of Dan's. Small world!

This morning I went to my first MOPS meeting. This is a big step for me. :) The anti-social side of me dreads events like this. But the other side of me is looking for new friends that I have something in common with, i.e. Christian women who are married with young kids. The boys and I had a good time, and we plan on going again.

Marriage Seminar Prep

Tonight we met for the first time with the three couples who will be leading our marriage 171 seminar in October. These three couples have a combined 171 years of marriage experience. Yes, they have all been married over 50 years. What an outstanding resource! We're excited to be organizing a hard-core, reality-based marriage seminar lead by couples who have been through it all. None of this feel-good, how to have a happy marriage junk. It's about covenant and commitment. It's about conflict resolution and forgiveness. It's real, and it's how to make a marriage last.

We had a great time hanging out and formulating the plan for the weekend with these three couples. It's going to be great. For more information or to register, click here.

Art lesson

At the end of our dvd, The Pirates that Don't do Anything, the artists give a tutorial on how to draw the characters. Isaiah and I spent quite awhile this afternoon drawing Larry. We kept pausing the dvd so Isaiah could draw his Larry step by step. We had fun, and it was like getting free art lessons!

Persistent Widow

Looking back over my posts from the past few weeks, I realized that Sunday is the day I'm least likely to blog. I don't know why. There's always something from church that really hits home, a message home run, so to speak. So I'm going to try to share that more often.

Today Vern spoke about Jesus' parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8). He focused in on verse 1, where Jesus tells his disciples to always pray and never give up. His message home run for me was his answer to the question, why should we pray? If we don't pray, we will lose heart.

I've felt like I've been losing heart in two areas of my life... guess why. I haven't been praying about them. Time to change that!

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PS. See playground pics below...

New playground

The new addition to the playground by the North Park pool is open. We went for the first time on Sunday night. The boys loved it and burned off a lot of energy.Spying Lovin it!

Dinosaur stairs up to the playground

Sam preferred to play in the dirt... We loved the choice of colors. Go Steelers!

A triple slide... each one was a little different, and Isaiah had fun findind out which was the fastest.

Face first

Sam going down a goofy slide

Sam hanging on for a few seconds