wild weekend

Once upon a time on Friday, when all the American gals were enjoying hanging out together at a restaurant, Becky's phone rang (mine was with Bethany and she had left a little early to tuck kids into bed at Nadia). It's the mom from Casa Ana and she's calling in for reinforcements. It's 10pm when we arrive and it's calmer that we thought it would be, but there's a broken mirror in the girl's bathroom and Claudiu and Zorro still look pretty wound up. To make a long story short 6 out of the 10 kids were involved in the drama. Becky and I listened to all the stories and then had the kids wait in their rooms as we collaborated about the disciplinary action to be taken. We decided on 3 days of no snack, no movies, no special priviledges, extra homework and cleaning the house (which involved my idea of scrubbing all the marks off the walls where they had written, touched with dirty hands, kicked or thrown food). We had a range of responses to this decision when we arrived to dish it out on Saturday morning (while the 4 children not involved watched a movie in the mom's room). Some children ended up getting double because of their actions and attitudes and 2 ended up with 4x as much because they ran away and chose some unwise behaviors. We hung out at the house until after 4 and left a list with the moms about Sunday's work. Today after church Bethany and I went with the 4 kids to McDonald's (ok, I know we were rubbing it in, but we had to make a huge deal out of this). From what I've heard the house has been pretty peaceful this weekend. We'll see about tomorrow, when restriction will be lifted on a individual basis. (What have I gotten myself into...I don't have kids...what am I doing???)

In the middle of all of this (actually we were out looking for one of our runaways but when we were told she was back at the house), we made an appearance at the "siblings' day" party. We have 7 children from Nadia and 1 from Ana that have siblings that are not in our care, and they spent a few hours together on Saturday afternoon. I have attached a picture of Catalina and her brothers, Gerian, Corado and Trandafir Galben (Yellow Rose...what were they thinking). It was sweet to watch some of the reunions and others were just awkward. I pray that these relationships will be able to continue and thus families will be blessed because one child or a group is in our care and hearing about and experiencing the love of Jesus.

We had to immobilize Claudiu on Saturday. He talks back and ugly and then when asked to seperate himself from the situation does not listen. He hit David as he tried to help him to his room. Thankfully it was an incredibly short ordeal and he followed through on asking forgiveness from everyone involved and staying in his room. When talking it all out we shared with him what a great leader he had been that morning when he was cleaning the walls and whistling, and then asking for more work to do. I told him one of his assignments for this week is to study with me what the Bible tells us about being a leader. Please pray with me on this one, as Claudiu has a heart for God and His word! Pray that God would direct this study and bring light to both of our eyes. Pray that He would work through the language barrier.

Today I took an amazing nap (I know it was amazing because I was dreaming when the phone rang) and then we walked the 30 minutes to Kelly's for taco soup, fudge pie and "White Christmas." Good times. I'm working on translating some pen pal letters for the kids and have taken Nyquil as I'm getting a cold and wanting to sleep. I finally downloaded my ipod stuff and it only took 7 hours to download the cd that I bought. Tomorrow involves paying bills, maybe calling the landlord (which takes a lot of courage because it's all in Romanian), maybe sled shopping, grocery shopping and I'm sure much more. Don't you wish you could have this life?