Yesterday it was winter, today it's summer.

And let me tell you - I am not complaining one bit about the weather today. The thing that's hilarious is that my apartment is so cold that I put on a winter jacket when heading out this morning. I dressed Caleb in a really heavy jacket as well.
As soon as we got outside I realized that it was in the 70's and how ridiculous we must look in our winter jackets. These cement apartments are really good at retaining whichever temperature they are most exposed to. Since it's been so cold this September that means the apartments are freezing cold as well!

Rocio and I had a really good time at Casa Alba today doing program with the Purple and Green rooms. Well, sort of Purple and Green Rooms. We took out Renata (Reni) and Dorin who are Green room because they are in a group now on Wednesday afternoon. Dorin is probably the most difficult child for me at Casa Alba. On top of that, he is even more difficult in groups. So we put him into a smaller group on Wednesdays to help this, and to not have so many "difficult" children piled together on Thursdays...there are quite a few between even the Purple and Green rooms. Anyway, the group went fantastic today. We are using Romanian material that my friend, Rachel, found at the Christian bookstore in the nearby city of Oradea. She surprised me with the books as a gift- so fun! I am not so impressed with the activities but I like the way they condense the Bible stories so the kids can understand. I wanted to give the material a try and have promised myself to run with it until the end of the book. It is more work in a way because you need to come up with the activities yourself. We actually did the Christmas story today. We sang a Christmas carol and talked about what a manger was like, along with what it meant when Jesus was "swaddled." Kind of a hard word if you think about it! What better way to learn than to actually experience it, right? To do this I brought in a huge piece of fabric and proceeded to swaddle each child in, I'm assuming, a not very accurate but good enough for 5-7 yr olds way of how Jesus was swaddled. To finish off the lesson we made yogurt carton and egg carton little puppets of Joseph and Mary. As always, we ended our time together praying. The kids thank Jesus for something and then they pray for the child next to them to get a Mom and a Dad. When they come to me it's for "un sot" (a husband). Lots of giggling when it comes time to pray that for Kelsey. : )

I am super lame - sorry. I left my camera in the car downstairs or else I would post pictures of the swaddling! Why not go and get the camera? Easy. It's 4 flights down the stairs and up again in the pitch black because there are no lights in my building. You'll just have to wait until tomorrow!

Oh, can I just say one more thing. Mihai. I love this boy. I didn't used to love this boy. Last year though I started praying that God would give me love for him and now I can definitely say he's "my kid" there now. He's also one of the most difficult children there, I know that too. The thing is that today during group he knew ALL of the answers to the questions I asked about our last 2 times of group. It rocked my face off. I was so proud of him! And, this boy who was told he was never allowed back in school again because he was "so bad" last year...this same boy is doing SO WELL in school this year. Thank YOU JESUS!