It's been a while....

It's been a long time since I've posted, mostly because we've gotten back into a crazy busy cycle. But are having lots of fun and doing lots of good things.

My job....

I'm anticipating my largest event ever on April 1st (no joke...it's really on April fools day). It's a fun event. Jake and I just recently got to enjoy our first "tasting" at the Hyatt in downtown Cincinnati. It's the coolest thing, the first thing they do is put 3 salads in front of us to try....we chose the leafiest one with roasted red peppers...YUM. THEN they put 4 main courses in front of us. All chicken of course because that's what goes over the best with 5oo+ people. We ended up choosing this herb crusted chicken with mushroom bread pudding and asphargus. It was very vey good...especially the bread pudding stuff. THEN, the best part is last of course, they put 3 different kinds of dessert in front of us (definitely two S's...because dessert makes you fatter....just like my 1st grade teacher taught me haha)...Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding with a warm sweet sauce on top...Orange Creamsicle Cheesecake....Tiramasu. I didn't even need to try all of them because as soon as he said Tiramasu I knew which one we were going to have at the banquet. But of course i ate most of the desserts that they put in front of me...the creamsicle cheese cake was weird....the bread pudding was awesome...but too heavy for a banquet dinner...i don't want ppl falling asleep before we can ask them for boat loads of money. :) So the tiramasu won out ultimately...which like i said...i knew from the beginning. :) fun stuff...

Jake's job...
He's just been given boat loads more responsibility and not any more pay...which is fine. He's up for the challenge and if I know him at all....he'll do a great job. His strength is "Woo" on the Strengths Finder Test by Gallup. Woo stands for Winning Others Over. He's really great at training up volunteers to lead in different areas of the church. They gave him our churches children's ministry which is missing key leadership in lots of areas. I think it will take time to build up those great leaders. But it will be a wonderful investment of his time for the life of the church.
The youth group is going fine...we are in conference season right now. Tonight the Believe conference for middle schoolers starts...jake LOVES middle schooler's. Okay not really...but hopefully he won't want to poke his eyes out by the end of the weekend. He's staying at a host parent's house with 7 middle school boys overnight tonight. I have 2 girls staying at our apartment. He definitely got the raw end of the deal.

Next month we have Superstart for 4-6th graders (our tween class) and Acquire the Fire for highschoolers, which of course is what we are looking forward to the most. IT's at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana and we are staying at a hotel with whatever high schoolers decide to go. I've heard GREAT things about this conference so I'm definitely pumped.

In April we are supposed to go to the final Passion Conference in the USA in Atlanta Georgia with the college/young adults from our church, not sure if that is going to happen though. I'll be bummed if we don't go but we have been to 2 Passion conferences in the past year and half so...we'll get by.

Jack and Ava are doing okay....
Jack spent the night with a family from our church because we stayed at a Bed and Breakfast for Valentine's day and I'm actually writing this from the comforts of this 108 year old house. It's beautiful. They have treated us like royalty and it's so much cozier than staying at a hotel!
Ava had 3 teeth pulled and her teeth cleaned last week...that cost just short of an arm and a leg but she is still cheaper than having a kid so I won't complain. I felt terrible her teeth were so bad but it didn't stop her at all from eating so how was i to know??

I'm REALLY sick of living in an apartment at this point...we are waiting another 6 months though to really decide if we are meant to stay in Cincinnati and then we may or may not buy a house or may or may not be moving which means we may or may not be looking for new jobs. Crazy. I'm BEYOND ready to know whether or not Cincinnati is our long term home. Cincinnati was finally growing on me until last night when we got lost trying to find this B&B because the street signs are LAME. We've lived her for almost a year and I work in the same area of town at the B&B you'd think I could find my way around. Thank the Lord for my Blackberry (or crackberry as jake and tim call it) it got us where we needed to go so you should just be thankful i always have that thing with me!! :)

Tim and his wifey Ashley...are great friends of ours. We would definitely not be as happy as we are in Cincinnati without them. Tim is the pastor of The Bridge (www.thebridgecincy.com) and he also works part time at PregnancyCare and that is where i met him. We spend lots of time with them and their amazing 8 month old Noah. He's pretty awesome.

Well that is enough for now i think...time to wake jake up and go home.