Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Breathing...What's that like?

Has it really almost been a month!?! Yes, since we have last written a bunch has happened, and we have barely had time to catch our breath, even though some of it we were on vacation.

In mid-March, Lawrence, Leah's cousin came to join us for a week in Mexico City. It was great to be able to show family our life here and we really were excited that he was so excited about things. We did everything you could possibly do in a week, which means he missed a ton, but then we've been here nine months and have missed a ton. Some of the highlights were taking him to the community center at a trash-dump community for a medical brigade that we help translate for. Lawrence is quite a good on-the-fly optrician. We hit the pyramids and the center of town and a new attraction for us, was that we went to Tula, an ancient ruins about 2 hours from our house. It was quite fun.

The day Lawrence left, we too left on a plane bound for California. My (Kevin's) 180 days was almost up and I needed to leave the country to enter again with 180 days. We had planned on taking the time to do some fundraising, but with all that has come in and the way we've been able to cut our budget for the year, we did not need to do any of that. It was great to see family and friends, though the time with each of you was waaaaaay too short. Our little trip home was quite the adventure, because a nearly midnight we found out that we booked the wrong date without knowing and missed our flight! Oops...but we worked it out with not a little trouble and are here jumping in the swing of things.

Upon returning, we'd been off of our duties for homework club for two weeks, so we were excited to return to our kids. That also meant last minute planning.

On top of that I (Kevin) was scheduled to preach at church, in Spanish, the Sunday after we got back.

About that...I DID IT...well to be honest I read the sermon I prepared rather than preached it, because though I'm picking up the language fairly well, it is still difficult to flow in my thought process, especially for 30 minutes in front of a crowd. The experience was difficult, and I learned a lot about my language and cultural limitations, but it only makes me want to do it again and better. Everybody has been generous and said I did a good job, so that was nice.

We have now generally settled into our routine again here and after about three weeks of craziness, it is a nice break.

Hopefully we will be better at our time here on the blogosphere.

Congrats friends about to get married, and ones who are about to have children! We look forward to sharing that with ya'll when we come back!

PS - another aspect of the title of this blog comes in the fact that we have hit the smoggiest time of the year...hot and no breeze. Plech. A beautiful city hidden. It only means that it is time for the rainy season to come shortly - my (Kevin) favorite type of weather! Woo hoo (although it makes line-drying clothes a bit difficult.)