Random retreat news

Today is Thanksgiving, but pretty much a normal day here.  The internet has been super sketch since yesterday afternoon and we could pretty much accomplish nothing online.  But I wanted to add some random details about our weekend.

These are pictures of how Noah one day decided to
arrange all of their toys in a very methodical way
around the end of the carpet....

The power went out at retreat.  Right in the middle of the meeting on Saturday night.  Also right in the middle of me trying to put the kids to bed.  Luckily I was almost done putting the kids to bed so it wasn't a big deal.  But when it came back on I had to go back to the room and turn the light off because I didn't think to when I left the room!  Since it was in the middle of Bart's talk, a couple of the girls came for our computer so he could use it to see his talk notes.  And people used their phones to shine light on him while he was speaking!  Hilarious.  Venezuela.  Embrace it.  But the power did come back on during his talk, so that was handy.

Our countdown to Christmas.  Noah loves doing it every
day, but he's sad we'll be gone for 10 days in December.

Noah woke up sick on Friday morning.  He had a pretty high fever and was really lethargic.  We went down to breakfast with me carrying him, which is unusual.  He kept trying to get comfortable in my lap and couldn't so he said he wanted to go lay down.  As we were walking back he threw up.  He laid down and slept for a couple of hours and then woke up and wanted to go swimming!  He still had a fever the rest of the day and a slight one the next day, but he functioned pretty well.  He now seems to have a bit of a cold so I'm wondering if it had something to do with that.  The team has generously been sharing stomach and cold stuff so I'm guessing our whole family will be experiencing that soon.

It has been an incredibly huge blessing that our kids haven't been sick that much.  Bart and I have had it much worse than them, so we're super thankful for that.  None of us will probably have a very good immune system to everything back in the States whenever we're there, but at least we know we'll head back in the summer when sickness is at it's lowest.  It's those little things that we appreciate.

Our Christmas tree with gifts.  It took
the kids a few days to be ok with not
opening them all right away!

I was able to have some fun conversations with a few people on the team at retreat.  I don't always get a lot of time to connect with people on the team outside of my one day on campus each week and even that my time is spread out between one on one conversations.  So I really enjoyed getting to just sit and chat with people while the kids were sleeping.

We had a talent show on Saturday night.  HILARIOUS.  I mean, they always want to do talent shows so it's pretty normal, but it can be so entertaining.  The Venezuelans tend to be more serious whereas the gringos tend to get a little more silly.  The first "talent" was a telenovela (or soap opera) which included the team and a couple of Venezuelans.  It was absurd and very entertaining, though I didn't catch all of the Spanish.  Either way, ridiculous.  We just can't pass up a good talent show.  And honestly, why would we?