Happy Birthday to Me!

For the past few days we have been celebrating my 27th birthday! It has been a blast with lots of good food, good friends and good presents. It started off with the team giving me a delicious spice cake at our monthly get together and ended with a special lasagna dinner last night; with one blowout party in between. Monday we went over to Curtis and Annie's and they had a Chipotle themed, burrito dinner. It was wonderful and was topped off with an professionally made chocolate cake, special thanks to designers Katie and Jessica. Then I opened loads of presents from here and from home. Thanks to all for making needed contributions to my wardrobe and cd/dvd collections. Last night we had a wonderful lasagna and crunchy romaine dinner with the Craig and Katie, followed up by cheesecake and our weekly game of Rummy. It's been a wonderful birthday so far, especially since my birthday isn't until tomorrow. However, I don't anticipate the nightly birthday celebrations will continue.

Two Years. Lounge Chairs. Babies.

Well Jared and I are celebrating our second anniversary on August 13th. We decided to celebrate early by going out to eat at a nice restaurant over-looking the lake here in Adana on Saturday evening - it was lovely. We also decided to celebrate early by giving our gifts to one another. We bought a pair of patio lounge chairs for our balcony as you can see in the picture below - currently as it is hotter than the face of the sun outside we are making good use of the chairs in our living room! They take up the majority of the space in our living room, but since they are quite comfortable, especially with the A/C blowing directly on you when you are sitting in them, they will remain inside until the temperatures drop below the boiling point!

We also had one surprise gift that we did not purchase this year... a baby! We found out last week that we are going to have a baby! We are super excited and feel so blessed by this gift from the Lord. We are pretty much beside ourselves! We are due in April! We wanted to share some of our excitement with y'all!

Our University Students

For the past two months Jayme and I have been teaching English to a group of 10-12 college students who are home for the summer. Most of them go to different universities around Turkey and they come home to work or be with their family. We have enjoyed getting to know them as we teach every Tuesday night. Next week is our last time to be with them and we are kind of sad to see them go back to school. When you take on a class full of college students you never know what you are going to get, but these guys and gals have been a lot of fun and give us something to laugh about every week. Jayme is a superb teacher (and has often regretted dropping elementary ed at MC) and the students love her. I am really just there for moral support and to give her a break as the class is rather large considering our main focus is conversational English.