Our church has a camp in Russia and every year, we have an auction to support it. One of the items we bought (on accident...but that's another story), was an authentic Asian meal at our pastors house. Our pastor and his wife open their home to host international college students and the three that they currently have at their home are all Asian. The students were excited to participate in the auction and offered making an authentic meal for 6 people.

We had food from Thailand, Korea, and China.
Here are a few of the chefs in the kitchen. They ended up inviting some of their international student friends, so there were about 11 kids who made the meal. They had been cooking since 7am and spent 4 hours the previous day in the grocery store shopping for the meal. Talk about a lot of work!
It was all very wonderful, and this was just one of the tables that the food was on!
The view from the deck was amazing as we enjoyed our food and were able to find out more about these students and their home lands.


Pastor Billy wore his authentic Chinese royalty shirt! He's a hoot!
And here are the two girl students from China that live with him right now.
The boys that represented Thailand
And a few more from Hong Kong. It was a wonderful night!
Aidan also managed to talk his dad and I into getting him an airsoft gun. He was rewarded with it on the last day of school. His friend Mark came over to help him get used to shooting it.
What a friend!
While looking for some posts for my garden, Mike found this little froggie hiding out on the side of the house. The kids enjoyed playing with "Brownie" for a little while before we set him free.

We've also been spending nearly every Sunday after church playing in the championship kickball tournament. Mark Neidlinger refs the game.
Isabella played for the first time today and had a lot of fun.
She even scored a run!
Bella and Daddy in the outfield!
Mike and Pastor Billy ready to make an out for the team.
Caleb (one of our Sunday school students) passed some time doing rhythmic gymnastics.
Patty took a turn too.
And of course, our kids found the only dog there and attempted to make it their own.
They didn't care that he had a leash and a collar, they wanted to keep him!

Owen has been quite excited about science the past few weeks. I picked up a body book at a garage sale for him, and he's been studying it nearly every night. One of the pages in the book showed how to make your own stethascope, so we did just that. Some tubing, a spliter, tape and funnel is all it took.

We also did some cat sitting for our neighbors this past week. Owen and Isabella love going to feed the kitties and even scoop their poop. And while they were gone, they told us that we could pick a few peonies in their backyard. After a week, the petals started falling off, and the kids helped assist in the process.

Not as cool as you might think!

And another garage sale adventure landed us this little gem. Can you guess what it is? It's an ant farm. Owen was so excited when he saw it, that I couldn't pass it up.

Which then led to a trip to the library to get some books on ants. Owen and I spent the morning reading books about ants so we could find out how to take care of them and start our own ant colony.

Which then led to some digging

And some bait setting...and then more digging. We are hoping that we managed to get a queen ant in our search, but the odds are stacked against us. The colony won't last for long without a queen, but in the meantime, it's fun watching the ants set up a new home. All in the name of science!