Sunday, October 22, 2006

A year already?

Nels and I celebrated our first anniversary together. ... We are quite the exciting couple. No roses, not even a card. We both figured, "What's the point?" We were just happy neither of us had to work today.

Instead we watched the Vikings beat the Seahawks and then headed out for Alaskan king crab at a nice restaurant near my parent's home where we had our groom's dinner and where I learned to make salads as a "salad girl" at age 16. We dropped Erika off at my parent's house beforehand.

It would have been quite romantic, considering the location, but you know, it's hard to hold hands and gaze into one another' s eyes when you're trying not to cut yourself with the buttery scissors you're using to cut away the shell to get to the crab meat.

We were so stuffed that we didn't even have a piece of our wedding cake that has been in my grandma's freezer for the past year. But my mom and Erika did and they said it was still very good.

It's hard to believe we've been married a year.... only what, 49 years to go?

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Jesus loves the little children ...


How cute are they?

OK, you can't see their little mugs, but what a fun bunch of 3-year-olds.

I had to share a photo of my 3-year-old Sunday school students wearing their masks we made last week during our unit on Noah's Ark. They are ravens and doves, the birds that helped Noah.

I started helping with the preschool Sunday school class at our church last year and when they decided to split the class into separate 3-year-old and 4/5-year-old classes, I immediately volunteered to teach the 3-year-olds. While last week we only had five children in class (one boy didn't want his photo taken), we have had as many as nine kids.

I was nervous about everything at first, especially since it's been 10 years since I was the parent of a 3-year-old but so far I'm loving it. It's sort of my own personal test to see how much I enjoy teaching and whether it would be something I'd like to do in the future. So far, so good. I can see the rewards that go along with teaching when the kids are having fun and learning, too.

I try to do a fun craft with the kids every week, whether it be making baby Moses baskets out of coffee filters or making hand and feet angels. The kids loved it when we painted one of their feet yellow and had them stand on a blue piece of construction paper. Then we painted their hands white, which became the angel wings and used googly eyes on their angel face.

While I don't consider myself a crafty person at all, I now find myself scanning the internet in search of fun crafts that would fit into our lessons.

This Sunday we're learning about baby Jesus and how as a grown up Jesus healed a sick man so I'm off to Wal-Mart in search of a toy nativity set that the kids can play with.

While I love my students, I can't imagine letting them play with the expensive ceramic nativity Nels and I got for our wedding last year.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

So scary ...

So my grandma had a man stop at her house Sunday afternoon while she was outside washing windows. The man asked to use the phone, said his dad had car trouble up the road, but my grandma, who was apprehensive, told him that her dog gets upset when strangers come inside so she would go get her portable phone and bring it out to him. The man then said something like the call was long distance and that he'd just go to the auto shop up the highway and use the phone and he drove off in his red pickup.

The situation unnerved my grandma and she told several of us about it later on Sunday.

Well, she was shocked today to find the man's photo on page 5A of today's paper. The man is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for the murder of another man on the Red Lake Reservation. My aunt called the auto shop up the road that the man said he would stop at, and the owner said no one stopped by there on Sunday. He had an employee there all day.

Such a scary experience and it gives me chills, thinking about what could have happened had my grandma allowed this man in her home.

I found a website that offers safety tips for single women but the tips could apply to everyone.

It's frightening to think how quickly life could change. I'm reminded of this everytime I've turned on the television to hear about another school shooting, rape or murder.

Be safe.