Five on Friday!

I've decided to do a "Five on Friday" series - hopefully this will help me remember to post on our blog at least once a week! So here's my first installment!

1. As you can see in the above photos, Nathan and Isa are working on their skills for playing Ticket to Ride - one of our favorite games! They will be experts by the time they are old enough to play with mommy and daddy!

2. Ruth will be leaving tomorrow morning with our high school group to fly to the coastal city of Manta. . . .from there we have an hour bus ride to a small fishing village called Pacoche. There our group of 25 people (students and leaders) will provide a Kids Bible Club over the long weekend (it's Carnaval weekend here - Monday and Tuesday are holidays). We are expecting around 150 children and moms to show up to the four clubs we will be giving. We're doing a series on The Whole Armor of God and the children will be memorizing the passage from Ephesians 6:10 - 18. Our high school students are very excited about the trip and have done a great job preparing the Bible verses, songs and crafts. They even made a more-than-life-sized soldier for the various pieces of armor. Lots of fun! Santi will be staying home with Nathan and Isabella (his mom is going to come and help too!).

3. Ruth returns from the coast on Tuesday and Santi leaves the following day to drive to the coastal town of Pedernales, where he will spend 10 days with a team from Calvary Church (PA) working on a school construction project with a local church there. Pray that God will stretch the $3,000 in project funds a long way as they try to get as much done as possible! Please pray for this team from March 9 - 19!

4. It's been raining a lot here in Quito - almost every night, all night long, in fact! We're enjoying the cooler temperatures and green grass and our outside plants are growing! And we certainly can't complain - it's not the snow that everyone up north has been experiencing this winter!

5. We are grateful that a robbery attempt on Ruth's car wasn't 100% successful last week! We were at our missionary small group meeting at another friend's home and our car was parked out front along with several others. The robbers were trying to rob that "computer" that basically runs the car - something that is worth at least $3,500 here. They somehow unwired the car alarm (which is why we didn't notice anything going on), and managed to get under the hood and were working on cutting away all the electronics when something (or someone) must have interrupted them. They did get away with a sensor/wires which came out to be a $900 job, but thankfully they left the more expensive items! We are grateful for several things (trying to find the positive in this!): we weren't hurt in the robbery, our car was functional enough to drive down to the HCJB parking lot and then drive to the Chevy dealer down the street the next morning, and that they didn't damage any other things in the car (i.e. windows, alarm system, hood, wiring, etc.).