Snapshots from the week

Wow, for a day that had nothing written in my schedule, it sure has been a full day! The kids will be home soon and I'm not finished my list of things yet, but I thought I'd stop by here and give you some glimpses of recent events.

Early in the week I battled a cold. It's almost gone, barring the asthma, which, like an old friend, always hangs around a little longer. So that kept me at home all weekend and most of Monday and Tuesday. Which did enable me to complete the final bits and pieces needed for our magazine's production editor/art director (she really does both jobs) to really get to work on designing the magazine, due to come out early next year.

Yesterday I spent a few hours in the afternoon with some Swiss language students from OMF. I'd met them briefly when I was up in Sapporo in May, but it was great to spend some more time with them. Even more exciting was hearing how they feel called to Support Ministries. This is pretty unusual in OMF. Most people are headed towards church planting. So it was exciting to tell them our little story of getting into support ministry. I also managed to make friends with their little boy (2 1/2 y.o.). It's always nice to pull out our younger-boys toys (like Duplo and cars) and share them with friends. They almost never fail to interest!

Then last night we went to our first Wrestling Tournament since February. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy watching the guys wrestle (check out my enthusiasm here). Though I did come home with a tension headache. It isn't a terribly relaxing spectator sport! This was just a short encounter between our school's high school team and one other. Our middle schooler will be in the high school team next year (presumably). It is a tad scary to think that he will be out there with those big guys. Mind you he's getting to be a big guy himself at a rapid pace, though still a little string-bean like, he's very strong.

This Saturday they have a six-school high school tournament, so I guess we'll be down there supporting our guys. It isn't as popular a sport as basketball at CAJ, so they need all the support they can get. I also think it is good for our middle school wrestler to watch as much wrestling as he can, he can only learn more, can't he?

Last night my husband brought home this cute Christmas card from the Grade Once class where I taught them about Australian Christmases last week. I told you they loved Colin's DVD!

Last night we also pulled out the Christmas presents that we'd been working on collecting for our Australian families. Including a slide show to make up for our video recorder that's died and taken with it all our family video footage for the year.

Actually I sat on the lounge and held my aching head, watching David sort presents until he told me to just go to bed!

It turns out the piles looked a bit sad, so today I've been doing some last-minute shopping to make it at least seem like we've made an effort to remember them. I reflected here, two years ago on how hard it is to buy presents for people you don't see very often and almost never get to hear their responses to your gifts. Nothing's changed!

Enough snaps. The kids are home. Time to follow-up on an email about homework not done, supervise more piano practise, and make home-made fish and chips.