Christmas Potluck Party

The day after our special Christmas service, we had a church dinner. We had such a good time of fellowship with the church family!

Cute little Fabby

Hna. Marisol

Bryan and Austin

We played the same cookie game that we used on Bethany's birthday.... This game never fails to be hilarious! Here is Pastor showing the men how to play. He gave his "tips and tricks", like how to scrunch up your face just the right way... Usually players will take their time in working the cookie down to their mouth, but Hno. Baltazar caught on very quickly....

So quickly that I didn't even get a picture! I'm not quite sure how he did it, but it took him about 3 seconds to win this game. 

Next up was something that I, Nicole, thought would be fun! Gingerbread houses!

 Now, it did turn out to be fun and funny, but since I am very experienced in gingerbread house building, I didn't really know what I was doing frosting-wise. I found a recipe that supposedly was just amazing. Maybe the glue was amazing, but us humans lacked a bit. Haha.

We showed pictures of gingerbread houses to give the teams ideas, and then we started.

Team #1 Milka and Ricardo

Team #2 Hna. Rocio, Sara, and Choyo

Team #3 Hna. Carmen, Jerameel, and Ana Belen

Now the houses that we showed the teams as examples were American style gingerbread houses...

The results were very Mexican. :)) 

Houses here don't have sharp peaks like houses in the U.S. 

All in all, the results were pretty good!

Team #1!

Team #2!

And... Team #3!

The happy winners!

We played a game where one person had a Bible character on their forehead. Everyone could see it but them. Everyone has to yell out hints of who the character is. 

Choyo's brains get replaced by nervousness when he plays this game! 

At the beginning of the get-together, everyone took a guess at how many chocolates were in this glass jar. Would you guess who won.....

This guy! 

I was in charge of checking all the entries and was quite surprised to find out that Austin's guess was just one number away from the correct amount! I had to assure everyone that there had been no cheating! :))

And with that, we started to clean and pack up everything!

Here we are expressing our joy of  the beginning of holiday break with song and dance! :))

^Google made this little motion picture all by itself from my pictures! (Kind of scary) LOL^


I hope you all had an equally fun time with you friends and family over the holidays! 

*Nicole* 

Special Christmas Service 2014

The Sunday before Christmas, we had a special service for the families of our church and for the parents of our Sunday school kids. We wanted to involve everybody that we could, especially the kids, so we could get their parents to church. What better time than at Christmas? It seems like people's hearts soften up and their excuses fade away.

I was pleasantly surprised at the willingness of the church families to get involved. I thought a lot of them would be nervous about getting up in front of people, but it turned out many of them were chomping at the bit to get in front and shine! Ha! In the end, we had seventeen groups signed up to sing, testify, quote verses, etc. Seventeen!! We were sooo happy!

We started the service off with a slideshow of everything that had gone on in 2014. (The blog really came in handy for this!) Slideshows are a nice reminder of all the church has gone through and accomplished within the year. As people came in, we served sweet bread and champurrado (a thick hot chocolate). We had music playing in the background and we laughed and teared up as the pictures passed by.

Beatriz eating her bread in her...questionable clothing....
We didn't notice these very transparent tights/pants until we saw this picture. In real life, she looked fine. 

Ladies Choir 

Kids' choir

Sis. Rocio and her two kids read a poem called "I Want to Be a Friend of God"

Our new family (Sis. Carmen and her girls) and Sis. Elvira did a mini-skit on living for God. 

Bryan and Fabby quoted Colossians 1:13-20

The men's trio

Bro. Valentin and his family singing

Azuri and Sara sang "Here I Am to Worship"

This family sang "El Espiritu de Dios Esta en Este Lugar"

Bro. Juan Jose and his family sang 

Bro. Juan and his family sang -
They look so adorable! Sis. Marisol coordinated all of their outfits. 

At the end, Pastor Cortez ended with a message on the plan of salvation - for our visitors - which we had a ton of! 

After church, the kids lined up at the ticket booth to collect their giant goody bags. 

Maribel, Nicole, and Anahi

Sis. Francis brought her new baby grandson to church for the first time! 

~Bethany~

Check In to Check Out

Hi everybody! I just wanted to check in and give this blog a little love. (But only a little :P) These past couple of weeks have been pretty busy with the holidays and all of that. We also have our annual conference that starts tomorrow - 1, 2, and 3 of January. I am looking forward to it and also looking forward to sharing everything here afterwards! 

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday! We will be back to blogging soon! 

~Bethany~

Family Border Trip!

As most of our regular and faithful readers know, a long and arduous trek to the border has to be done every six months to renew papers and such. This past week the car's expiration date was looming near, so we started planning to head out! The rest of the family had just been out in October & November partying and having fun in the U.S., while I (Nicole), faithful, self sacrificial, and hard-working that I am, stayed in Mexico to keep the boat afloat. As it had been almost 6 months since I had seen an American flag blowing in the wind, I was pretty excited about going on this trip. Bethany and Austin stayed home this time.

Elder and Sis. Wakefield decided to go with us-- that definitely added to the fun!

In order for this trip to be safe, we left Puebla around 4am to arrive in the early afternoon. Its best to not cross the border in the middle of the night.

After several hours of driving, we stopped for breakfast at McDonalds around 9am. There was wifi so I decided to see how things were going with the school and Beth... I sent her a sisterly dorky hello picture, and she sent me one in return. :)) Somebody was having a rough morning.

When I asked permission from dear Bethany to be able to put up this picture of her, she suggested I put up all of the pictures that we have texted each other in the past few weeks.... I think NOT! Most of them consist of the kinds of pictures that you only share with the ones that you have no intention of impressing, because the facade that you put up the to rest of the world has already been shattered by years of growing up together.

Need I say more?

After our longer-than-planned-for stop for breakfast, we got back on the road. Turns out that we were better off sitting in that booth at McDonalds than on the road because we avoided this mess that had just happened. The ambulances/authorities had not even shown up yet and the driver of the smaller car was still inside, staring off in a daze.

We don't know how many cars exactly were involved, but there was a private security car crunched and a larger Explorer type car that went flying over the divide and landed up on a hill on the other side of the road. (Black Explorer in the red circle.)

You might think the front of this car looks bad, but the back was crushed even worse.

The Lord kept us from harm not only in this situation, but for the rest of our trip. We had no accidents, popped tires, or encounters with shady characters, going and returning. Thank you Jesus.

Arriving at the border!

Bethany is usually the one to pop out the patriotic tunes, but Mom was quick to fill her shoes once we were in the border crossing lane.

Gramma made sure we all had our hands over our hearts as we sang along with the National Anthem. :)

This is the closest picture I dared to snap... These border peeps ain't too keen on getting their pictures taken. (And understandably so....I'm not complaining)

Grampa and I - our first step onto American ground.

After driving almost 14 hours, we were tired and hungry, but very relieved to have finally made it!

First stop- Applebee's!

Am I the only one that gets mistaken for a 12 year old?? I mean really... How rude. LOL. I want to say this is a one-time fluke, but sadly I have had several encounters like this with restaurant servers in the past few months. Am I getting younger or something? This never used to happen to me...

We arrived on Monday and spent Tuesday-Friday shopping all day, every day until we literally dropped. It was tiring and lovely at the same time. We were able to buy so many supplies and goodies that we can't get in Mexico, or on the trips when we fly out!

This was about day #4 of shopping and dropping. We were at the mall and after just a few stores, all I had the energy to do was people-watch while eating frozen yogurt.

Friday morning Grampa and I went to an office store to get his December 

newsletter printed and out to you all.

Awesome things are happening in Mexico City!

Friday afternoon was spent just picking up last minute supplies and such...

My feet hurt. And maybe I was being a sissy. Judge me if you like. :))

The awkward part of this is that I kept running into the SAME MAN who was also in a wheel chair, but he actually needed his wheel chair... The first few times we crossed paths, we exchanged soft, understanding smiles... The next 20 times, I just avoided eye contact. -.-

In between all of our shopping we had to eat of course..

^Cracker Barrel is our favorite! You are really missing out if you've never been to one of these before. ^

I found Denae Abbott on the wall at Logan's Roadhouse!

Hi Denae! :)))

Once again, bright and early, we packed up and drove out. Crossing over onto the Mexican side can be stressful... We had the car and trailer packed full with things, and in the past they've made us unpack everything. We always hope for green lights and happy border agents. Thankfully they didn't have us unpack everything, but they did randomly choose a 25lb bag of brown sugar that happened to be close the trailer door to be examined. Much to our dismay they sliced it open and didn't even have the decency to provide us with tape or something to close it with...

Grampa and I kept ourselves entertained on the trip back! We spent approximately 3 hours thinking of words that rhymed with snow. It was quite funny.

Sweet little dogs at a rest stop.

This one didn't take long to warm up to the strangers.

And finally, as if this post isn't long enough we made it home!

*Nicole*

Cannibalism in Mexico?

A cute little restaurant here in town, but....

...That is just scary. 

Jaime and a Stolen Kiss

Sunday school had ended and the kids were filing out of the church. I was holding the door open when this little guy, Jaime,  passed by and stuck his hand out, totally taking me off guard. I grabbed his hand and shook it and he told me, "Te portas bien, eh?" I was like, *blink, blink*..."What??" And he said again, "Te portas bien!" (Behave yourself!) I laughed and said, "ok". He then stretched his neck out, eyes squinty, and puckered his lips out. I was laughing at the hilarity and at this little boy's gutsiness. He kissed me on the cheek then ran out the door.

Jaime is the one in yellow, with his brother Emanuel

I ran and grabbed my camera and told these little guys I wanted a picture with them. After snapping a few, I told them thank you and that I hoped to see them next Sunday. Jaime then stabbed a slice of orange off of his plate and held his fork up to my mouth. What else could I do? I took the bite very gratefully (lol!) and he informed me, "That's for taking a picture with us!"

Oh man...these boys are just too much! They have added so much life to our Sunday school classes!

~Bethany~