Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Our Week: 20 Dec to 26 Dec

Sunday:  Church today, Facetime with Feeserville, and then Gingerbread house decorating!!  Every year, Aunt Tonya gets a gingerbread house for her and Price to make and decorate together.  Since we won't be home for that this year, I bought a kit that came with 4 small houses to everyone could decorate.  Each kid had their own house, and Ron and I decorated one together.  It was a lot of fun!!












Monday: CHYNA'S BIRTHDAY!!!  She's 17 today!! She picked dinner tonight at TGIFriday's and invited our neighbor to go with her.  We had lots of fun!!

Opening her gifts!!

Dinner at TGIFriday's in Sevilla

Her yummy oreos!!

Lots of people out with lots of lights for Christmas

Chestnuts roasting.... all over the place!! :)
Tuesday:  We had Spanish class for the last time in December and 2015.  Otherwise, we did school and just hung out.
Wednesday:  We went to a performance at the Teatro Oriente (Theater) in Moron tonight.  People of Spain stay up really late at night.  They generally don't eat dinner until 8:30 or even 9:00.  This performance didn't start until 9pm, but we decided to go anyway.  We knew we wouldn't understand anything they were saying, but the performance was supposed to be dancing and playing this musical instrument called a Zambamba.  They sang lots of songs and not much dancing happened.  It was something I'm glad we saw, but I did spend a lot of time confused about what was going on.  Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I thought it was really good!





This guys played the Zambamba.




Thursday: Christmas Eve!!! Lots of fun today!!!





We had a community potluck at the club in between the services.

Santa Came by and Price was peer pressured to get on his lap! :)

Christmas Eve candlelight service... 


This is a group of marines who are deployed here.  They are away from their families this Christmas and sharing their talents with us to help us celebrate.  I am in awe of their sacrifice and love worshiping with them each week.  They are awesome!  (and there is a drummer hidden back there behind them!)  :)


Milk and cookies out for Santa...

Santa came and dropped off some awesome stuff for everyone!!


Friday:  Christmas Day!!!
I got lots of yarn for Christmas!!

Opening gifts...


Ron and I served Christmas Dinner at the Dining Facility for anyone who wanted to come eat there.

We joined them for Christmas dinner at the Dining Facility... it was great!! 

Ended Christmas Day relaxing around the fire pit!!

Saturday:  We took a quick trip to Rota for 3 of us to get haircuts... We had a great day after Christmas just hanging out with each other.
Before

After

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Our Week: 13 Dec - 19 Dec

Sunday:  Relaxing day after an eventful Saturday in Merida.  We had a great time at church and then spent the day relaxing and hanging out.

Monday: Back to school this week.  Both boys are studying about the UK this week.  They have pretend passports that we will add a country to every time we learn about them throughout the year.  Hopefully we'll be able to add some actual stamps to their real passports this year.  Wesley had to make the earth's crust and then show what happens when there is an earthquake.  He made a volcano with the dough that Chyna made for him.  It was cool! :)




Tuesday: Spanish class today went well.  In Project 3:17, I'm still in Exodus, and today I went a little farther and listened to and read chapter 4 as well.  I was completely confused by Exodus 4:24.  When Moses finished speaking to "the angel of the Lord" in the burning bush, he went back and told him father-in-law that he was going to Egypt and he said okay.  So Moses took his wife and two sons and put them on a donkey and left.  I have to say that I'm pretty happy that he actually took his family with him.  I didn't actually expect that because God and told Moses to go to Pharaoh and ask him for THREE days to worship outside the city and that was all at first.  So it didn't seem like something he would need to take his whole family for, but I'm glad he did.  Anyway, back to verse 24... It says that the Lord met Moses at one of the stops at night AND WAS ABOUT TO KILL HIM.  This is completely unprovoked as far as we can tell.  There is nothing at all to say why this is, and THEN... to keep her husband from being killed, Zipporah (Moses' wife), cut off her son's foreskin and TOUCHED MOSES' FEET with it.  This just brings up so many questions for me.  I'm going to spend this week looking up more about these verses in chapter 4, and next week I'll decide what point of view I want to use for the creative writing part of this book.  For Genesis, I told the story of the fall of Adam and Eve from the point of view of the earth.  I can't even find what I had written, but I'm also going to look for it this week as well.

Wednesday:  Got school updated today... that was about it.  :)

Thursday:  I looked through the travel guide for Madrid since we are going there in April for Ron to run a race.  We will spend the weekend there before flying on to Copenhagen for the rest of the week.  I will continue to plan our Madrid/Denmark trip.

Friday: Today was all about genealogy.  I found out this week that my genealogy software, Family Tree Maker, was being discontinued.  They are no longer doing any updates with it and at the end of next year there will no longer be any support for it from ancestry.com who owns the software.  I was a little sad at first, but then I saw where Rootsmagic (another genealogy software) had a special discount for people who wanted to switch to their software, and I've heard great things about it.  So I spent today exporting my files and importing them to the new software.  I'm excited to get going with the new software next week.  We had a progressive dinner in a nearby neighborhood tonight, where we went to 4 different houses and had wonderful food at each place!  It was a great night!!

Saturday: Today was great for two reasons.  First, we went to the nearby city of Moron de la Frontera (we just call it Moron!)  and met at the tourism office to walk around the city and look at different Belen's... (Bethlehem in Spanish)...  Here in Spain, their traditional decorations for Christmas are not like what I'm used to.  They don't do the Christmas trees like we expect to see.  They do nativity scenes. From basic sets to very elaborate.  We went to a couple of churches in the area and then to a couple of people's homes to see their Belen setups.  The second great part of today was getting to see the new Star Wars movie with Ron and the boys (Chyna decided to stay home because she doesn't like Star Wars! :)  Anyway, we were able to see it on base because the deployed marine service members here got a copy and offered some extra seats to any of us who wanted them.  It was a great movie, and I won't share any of my other opinions on it since I know some people haven't seen it yet.






 They sometimes hide a figure in the Belen who is pooping... :)  There were two hidden in this one, and we were all looking everywhere until we found him.  Behind this yellow wall... You can see him also in the next picture... 


See you next week... Oh, and only 8 weeks until my mother comes to visit us!!! ;)