Costa Rica Fun

Hola friends and family. We pray that everyone is doing well. Thank you so much for all the encouraging emails and messages you have sent. It seems that God knows just when we need some encouragement because He sends someone our way.

Last weekend the kids were invited to a birthday party at McDonald's for our friends' little girl Avery. They had a wonderful time of playing games, face-painting, and hitting the pinata. It was pretty funny watching a bunch of 2 and 3 year olds try to hit a pinata. I don't think Kendall even realized that candy was going to come out of it. The party was quite the fiesta. The women who were in-charge sang songs, played games, and did an excellent job of entertaining the kids. We also went downtown with the kids on Saturday morning. They have a square where you can feed pigeons. We saw one little girl, probably around 6 0r 7, feeding the birds and they pick up one of the birds and hold it like a football. She had the death-grip on it and wasn't letting it go. It was really funny and Jon and I both said, "Man, I wish we had brought the camera."

My ESL classes will be over this Wednesday. I am sad that they are over, but we will start up again in May. This past week was my birthday and I only stayed for part of the time since Jon had arranged a babysitter so we could go out on a date--our first in almost three months. Anyway, the ladies in the class were so precious because they were actually upset with me for not telling them it was my birthday. Birthdays are a big deal in Costa Rica.

Even though I only stayed for half the class, we had a great time. Last week we taught them verbs and nouns that went with cooking. One of the ladies actually made the sample recipe that we did and brought me some. The muffins were still warm when she got to class. For class this week, we had them actually follow two recipes and bake banana bread and peanut butter cookies. Most people do not bake here, so this was a new thing for them. Most people only use their ovens for storage and they don't measure ingredients. I assume many Ticos don't use their ovens because there are so many bakeries.

School is defiantly getting harder. Our English brains get confused sometimes because the sentence structure in Spanish is different than in English. I just keep saying, "Thank you God for not calling me to China, learning Chinese seems almost impossible to me." But aren't we all glad that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion?

Praises:
1. God has kept us safe here.
2. We're learning Spanish--I'm pretty sure we aren't getting worse.
3. We're extremely grateful for all those who are supporting us through prayer and finances.

Prayer Requests:
1. Parker is having a hard time in school. He's just extremely tired and he has been biting the other kids. Many of you may remember that we had this same problem when we did our training at Wycliff this past summer. Please pray for his teachers, us, and Parker in this situation. We have tired several things to deter him from biting, but nothing has worked yet. The administrators at school have been kind in this and are doing all they can to help him.
2. Pray for rest. We are tired from the busy schedule.
3. Pray for endurance for the rest of the semester. It is getting harder and harder to get up in the morning (5:45 comes early).
4. Pray that we would be able to extend our visa for one month to give us a chance to leave the country at the end of the trimester and not during the tri. We will be going to the immigration office this week to complete our paperwork for this.

Please send us your prayer requests so that we can know how to pray for you.
Love In Christ,
Jon, Amanda, Kendall, and Parker