In January, one of our Elementary Children's Worship small group leaders left NYC. He's in the army and is now stationed in South Korea. We really miss him and are praying for a regular replacement. This picture shows some of our class, there were about 3 boys absent that day. One of the girls was visiting from out of town. We have a group of about 9 very, very active, noisy boys and 2 very calm, quiet girls! The guy in the picture is able to help out about half of the time. With that many boys we really need a guy there all the time!
Work on the storefront continues......
We've had several groups from supporting chuches come out and help with spackeling, painting, building, etc. Now it's mostly up to the artists themselves to complete it. They are spending every Wed. night in Feb. and March working on it.
The goal is to have it up and running right after Easter. There will be weekly groups that meet: a song writing group, a figure drawing group and a ball room dancing class. There will be a "trash to treasures" craft class that meets monthly. There are other ideas in the plans, too, like a high school tutoring time and some sort of poetry reading group. WE're praying that God will use the artists in our church to use the Storefront to reach out to the artists in our community.
January 18th is Jae's Gotcha Day. It's the day we celebrate when we picked him up at the airport and "got him". We celebrate by playing yut (a Korean game), watching the airport video and looking through his scrapbook. It's also become a tradition to go to Chuck E. Cheese on Gotcha days!
We finally had our first "sledding" snow of the season. The forcast was calling for it to turn to freezing rain by noon so Paul got the boys up and took them sledding at 7:00 AM! They came back soaking wet and freezing so they got hot chocolate and blueberry pancakes for breakfast before starting school. Just a few of the perks of homeschooling!
We're still dealing with health issues with both boys. We have surgery schedule for Jae's eyes in May to correct the turning up and out. Daniel's eyes are doing the same thing, just not as severely or as often. The dr. wants us to patch his eye for 1-2 hrs. 6 days a week for a month. He hopes that will strengthen the muscles in the weakest eye and correct it. We have quite a few more dr. appointments for both boys (but mostly Jae) over the next 3-4 months. Please pray that we will see some progress in some of these areas soon.
Jae has an appointment with INS on March 26th to get his citizenship papers. He was supposed to automatically become a citizen when his adoption was finalized but we're still having to go through this process to get the paper to prove it. I haven't recieved a notice of Daniel's appointment but I applied for the citizenship papers for both of them in July. It will be nice when it's all done.
We are once again hosting international students who are in NYC to study English. We had a student for 2 weeks from Japan and a student from South Korea is scheduled to arrive tonight. He will be here for a month. We already have a student scheduled to arrive 2 days after he leaves! It's never boring in this house! The extra income is very helpful in paying for the extra medical expenses we're going to have over the next few months. Getting to know about other cultures is very eye opening for the boys. Plus, we hope that being exposed to a Christian family and going to church with us will plant some seeds that these students will take back with them to thier home countries to be watered by other Christians that they come in contact with. Our Japanese student had never been to a church service before coming to Crossroads. One night while he was eating his dinner (we had already eaten) he said "Americans say something before they pray, don't they?" The boys and I explained that some do and that we pray thanking God for our food. Daniel proceeded for pray for his meal. I'm sure he didn't understand a word Daniel said but God did and he (the student) was able to see a child who talks to God like a best friend! We hope that the students that stay with us will someday call God thier Best Friend!
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