"Another suitor for the princess"

My weekend has been one of adventerous proportions!

It started off Thursday, like I've already written about and it's has been expanded to the majority of my weekend, which I really enjoy!

So Friday I did the whole work thing, and it was good. The kids who attend are only here for 1/2 the day and then they go with their mothers. Let me explain this a little further. As I said before there are 5 phases of the program. During the first phase, the kids of the mothers have to attend our program if they are between the ages of 6 months & 5 years. Right now there is one exception because one the children cannot get the appropriate funds to go to regular school. It's kind of a messed up subject; perhaps I will explain it in another time.

On Wednesday's and Friday's these mothers don't have any afternoon going-ons; it's like their free time. During the week, they don't really get out of the house because they are still in phase one. This means that they stay here at Champa and attend the LEC - Literacy and Education Center to work on different things that help determine their literacy, academic and career skills, etc. Along with that, they also go to life skills classes. During this phase, they have the ability to leave the building for 4 hours a day, so long as they are going somewhere with another mother who is in a higher phase.

Everytime they change phases they get more incentives. A later curfew, more free time, etc. It's a really neat program in the way that it is structured, I think.

After work on Friday, I went back to the Crossing and relaxed for a little and then went for dinner. I am surprised at how much better the food there is than in the DC for the most part. There are sometimes when it's not very good, but unlike in the DC - here it is free for me. :) After dinner I decided to go to a prayer meeting with Candace at 10 pm. Ashley, Candace's super, was one of the leaders at this meeting so we went with her before hand at like 7:30 or 8 into town to the church. Ashley [who coincidentally went to college in Michigan] was headed to the Chris Tomlin concert before the prayer meeting and she asked us if we wanted to use her car to drive around and of course we told her no. Just KIDDING. I jumped at that chance like it was my job :D So, we got to take her car and drove around downtown a little bit, then we decided to park it. So we put an hour's worth of quarters in and went on our way.

We walked around 16th street and checked out all the cool stops. It was nice to walk around and see downtown life on a saturday night. On 16th street they have all of these people who have adult-like strollers attached to their bikes to drive peopld around and they are pretty cool. Apparently whenever Candace goes out to places, boys always hit on her and this was no exception :) One of the bike guys asked us if we wanted a ride and since I like to make things awkward for my friends, I made us say yes and away we went. He talked to her the whole time, it was kind of pathetic. :) He asked her if she skied or anything and she said that she snowboarded. He responded with, "It's okay, I'll forgive you". HAHAHAH. It was so funny, so luckily I needed to buy some Q-tips and there was a walgreens right on the corner so we told him to take us there and then we went in.

There was also a big commotion on 16th street and cops were all over the place. I wanted to find out what was going on so I put my nosy ears on and listened to what people were saying. It was somethign about a family and the dad did something to the mom and daughter and I don't really know, at all. Actually. I was a bad eavesdropper. I was a little disappointed in myself ;) We did, however, make up a sweet list of things that we need to do before we are done here. ps, Candace leaves the 27th of March. What am I going to do without my little exploration buddy?! I don't really know. Oooooh, I am going to dye my hair soon. I am excited. :D

So, we eventually had to go back to the church for the meeting and we get to the car and I said, "what the crap is that?" Maybe it wasn't that exact word, but it was close enough. Yep, you guessed it; the crap was actually a parking violation. Our meter expired on us! And we were so careful, too. It was for 25 stinking dollars! Holy moly. It was 100 times what it would have cost us to throw an extra quarter in for 15 more minutes - which would have given us time to get back and not have a ticket. We haven't told Ashley about it yet, we will when we have the money to pay it.

The prayer meeting was awesome. It was so nice to get back into that atmosphere. It wasn't a pray all of the time prayer meeting, it was more like a praise/read scripture/pray through scripture/ pray for a bunch of different things/write down your own prayer kind of thing. It was good, but Candace and I left just 3 hours into it (it went until 6 am). I am going to start memorizing scripture, starting with Galatians 6:8. I think that this verse is an important verse to remember [For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. But he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.] I know that this is something I need to be reminded of daily, if not hourly. It's so easy to forget to be intentional with what we say and do, and I have decided that I need to be intentional about being intentional.

After that, we took Ashley's car back to the Crossing and she's picking it up in the morning. This was a GOOD day!