Happy Thanksgiving

Hello friends. I've decided not to be a "slacker" anymore (please refer to the comments :) and give you a mini update on how things are going! I will begin with the team. Everyone is doing well. Moving on...just kidding. The guys are working at the church and are busy helping remodel big church and launch the youth ministry. They are doing an outstanding job! There are two campuses that need updates and they have one of them finished. It looks awesome. We hold our youth church at this facility. It's a warehouse but it looks super sweet. We have moved all the weekend services to this campus so we can begin working on the other. Laura and Tabi have been busy with the youth dance team and programming, I have been busy helping with some graphic stuff. We had our youth church launch this week and it was awesome. Several people came to Christ and the students seemed to like it. It's exciting seeing all the student involvement. They are really taking ownership of their ministry.

The kids (Gabe and Taylor) started school a couple weeks ago and are adjusting quite well. They have made some new friends and rather enjoy going to school with no shoes. (It's a Kiwi thing.) The schools are keen on the arts, music and learning about the Maori culture. Tabi, Laura and I were fortunate to be able to attend a field trip with the kids to a Maori temple. It was really cool. Elena has been busy potty training, picking up bugs (which are extremely large here) and overall being 2.

We are still living together in the white house on Kennedy Rd. which all our Kiwi friends think is funny. Summer is slowly approaching and the weather is getting nicer here. It's weird having Christmas in the summer. I almost put snow around this tree I made on a flyer, but then I realized there's no snow here. It was kinda sad, but kinda cool to go hang at the beach at the same time.

Our Thanksgiving was good, but sad at the same time. Tabi, Laura and I cooked all day. You should all be so proud because 1)None of us has cooked Thanksgiving dinner before 2)They don't have any short cuts for cooking i.e. no canned pumpkin or yams, no boxed stuffing. We actually had to make our pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin...I know that may sound silly, but really, how many of you have done it? :) We looked up some recipes on the web and tried our best. We had candied kumera (kind of like a sweet potato), pumpkin pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls, ham and chicken (because nobody gets turkeys until closer to Christmas). Tabi made little name place settings out of mini apples with funny Indian names she made up for all of us. It was funny. We missed our families and friends a lot, but we felt proud of ourselves for keeping tradition alive!

So I think that's all I've got for now. I'm working on linking our photos to the blog, but I'm having technical difficulties. We've got some cool ones so I'll do my best this upcoming week to post them. Talk soon.

~erin~