Graduation and the Retreat

This morning I woke up with the desperate feeling of needing to update my blog on life-happenings, because by the end of this year I want to remember all of this stuff!  So starting with two Monday's ago... Our precious Brit friend, Kadian, missed her graduation ceremony!  Why it was in the beginning of Nov I have no idea.  (We keep telling her that Brits are a little weird...)  But the point is that we through a graduation ceremony/party in their living room and it was hilarious!  (I should also mention that my mom and wonderful family bought me an IPOD and EXTERNAL SPEAKERS for an early birthday present so we used them to play Pomp and Circumstance!  Lol!  But the birthday post will come later)  We made Kadian put on a red sheet as she marched since there was no gown for her and of course she had to throw it in the air instead of a hat:

 Haha, I love this one!

I was proud of us because Kadian doesn't cry much (or so she says) and she cried several time that night :-)

 I think it's funny that she's a little outlandish herself but she won't hesitate to give you a "What-ARE-you-doing?!"  look and this is it:

 Good times:-)  After the party that night I decided I was going to work really hard to get all of my work done so I wouldn't have to do anything on Tuesday.  But when we got to school Tuesday we heard about a retreat that the secondary students were going on that coming weekend.  We just had to go!  So my Tuesday off didn't really work out, but we did have a really nice weekend in Valle de Angeles (a small town outside of Teguz up in the mtns).  Emily has most of the pictures but here are a few... (after we arrived of course, which was an adventure with our bus breaking down on the side of the highway, missing lunch, etc.)

One of the activities was going on a hike up one of the hills to a lookout, but no the picture here is not from the lookout because we never actually found it.  We hiked up and up and up until the teachers all got separated with their groups of students and word got passed down that the leaders didn't know where they were going anymore.  It was not so fun for the students but enjoy hiking anyway :-)




I wish I had more encouraging stories about good conversations I had with the students or how they were really encouraged, but really it was just a weekend of getting to know some of them a little better especially as the electricity went out for two hours Saturday night... haha, so many crazy things happened.
Finally we ended up at a mall for two hours on the way home Sunday.  Emily has got some better ones of us with the students in front of the big christmas tree, but here's a cute on of her and two of our 7th graders.

So that was the week before last.  And the next blog (maybe I'll get to it later today)  I can catch up on Thanksgiving!  We had a good time :-)