Work and Play

The fall semester is officially underway!  After kicking off our year at our staff retreat, we came back and jumped full force into team socials and planning meetings to get things squared away for the first weeks of campus. I am really excited about hitting the ground working just in Queens on our campuses here and seeing what the Lord does!

During one of our planning meetings, Blake woke up from his nap and showed one of our staff women just what a sweetie he is. Gotta love Blake snuggles!

This lasagna (thanks mom and Aunt Kay for the homemade recipe that we love to make!) is the food we will serve at our leader’s meeting tonight as we hear about their summers, cast vision for what we want to trust God for this year, and make plans for the fall. Lasagna, Texas Toast, Salad, and Brownies – thats good food right there!

What happens when your babysitter misunderstood the time and didn’t show to watch the staff kids? One mom goes to staff meeting and the other takes on ALL the kids. Yep, totally crazy, but we survived and actually had fun. They are all smiles, so it couldn’t have been that bad, right?

We also had a team social and visited the Queens Night Market – an event they have occasionally where vendors sell food from all around the world. One of our favorite parts about living here (and one the scariest too because we aren’t the most adventurous eaters) is getting to taste amazing cuisine from so many different countries! I can’t even tell you the different things I tried, though my favorite would be Arepas and pure cane sugar lemonade from Colombia. They also had seating with live music playing. We will definitely visit here again!

Then, because we had a Sunday afternoon free and know that baseball season is winding down, we decided to check out and support our hometown team. I have to say we have quickly become NY Mets fans from living here in Queens. We debated going because we knew our kids were at a hard age for a baseball game, BUT we knew that even if we went and it was crazy, we would be making memories.

We had super low expectations and I am excited to report that they were met! Overall, the kids did well. We ended up ditching our lower level seats that were in the middle of an aisle surrounded by people in the sun and moving UP to the top in the shade where there weren’t people around us. We figured that way our kids could move around, drop things, make many bathroom and food trips, and not disturb anyone. This was seriously the best decision we have ever made! It also helped that is was Sunday Funday so they had bounce houses for the kids, balloon animals, and they let the kids go on the field and run the bases after the game.

This is the picture of the kids (and Ed) before and starting out running the bases (Emerson is in the purple outfit and Kinsley is in the pink dress).

After these pics were taken, Emerson fell at second base, scraped up her knee, was helped up by Mr. and Mrs. Mets (she has no idea how cool that is), and was carried away by a staff person. The funny part was that Ed was so intent on filming Blake that he missed them helping Emerson right beside him and he missed the lady carrying her right behind him. On his video of Blake he took on his phone, you can see her feet right in front of him. I was waiting off the field for the kids to finish and I saw all of this happening before me and was powerless to do anything to get his attention. Bless it.

Overall, it was a neat and fun experience and something we will be repeating in future years. So cool to have a major league team so close!

Would you pray for us and our campuses over the next few weeks – that we would have stamina to keep up with the kids and all the busy days, that we would stay healthy (we just had two start throwing up last night in the middle of the night), that God would move on these campuses and that students will want to know who Jesus is and begin a relationship with him, and that God would connect us with students on these campuses who already believe in Jesus? Thank you for partnering with us in this ministry!!

 

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