Happy New Year!!!

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas!  My birthday is exactly 1 week before Christmas, so we celebrated that, and then had a lovely Christmas last weekend.  When the kids were under 2 years old (yes, we had 4 kids under the age of 2 at one point) we took them all to Busch Gardens because they were free, but that was the last time we had been there.  So we all went to Busch Gardens on Thursday, and they have a deal where you buy a 1 day ticket and it gets you back into the park for a whole year!  Good thing, too, because the place was PACKED!  Some rides had 2+ hours wait!  With all those people there, I couldn't believe it when I recognized this lady near the Zagora Cafe'.  She was the wife of the couple we stayed with when we were in Switzerland last year, can you believe it!!!  They are in the USA for a couple of weeks, so we're going to try to hook up with them before they head back.  She and their 3 boys were on their way out of the park, but ended up hanging out with us for about 20 minutes catching up with each other.  That was SO cool!  And then Friday we packed up the ole' camper and headed out of dodge up to Brooksville for the one last hurrah I referenced in my last post before we sell the camper.  The weather has been absolutely gorgeous, and this place we're staying at, called Lakewood Retreat, is such a haven.  Nathan and Nicole each brought a friend, so Nathan and his buddy slept in a tent next to our camper, while Nicole and her friend slept in the cab-over.  There was SOOO much to do here it literally wore me out!  We played tennis and putt-putt and ping pong and this cool roll the pool balls down this alley to knock 5 pool balls in the goal and air hockey and basketball and bike riding and canoeing and hiking and a human foosball game.  Whew!  I knew it wore me out, but I didn't feel so badly when Nathan also had to rest for a bit before celebrating the New Year.  So he and I laid in the back bedroom of the camper and took turns half-sleeping and then playing Boggle on his iTouch while the others played games at the front of the camper.  :-)  We were too worn out to go through the trouble of a campfire, so we heated up s'mores in the microwave!!  Isn't that pathetic?!  ahah!  But they still tasted delicious!  Then around 11pm we had an extended prayer time, and finally we broke out the sparkling apple cider and toasted all around as we turned on the TV and realized we had just missed the ball dropping!  :-)   Tim's challenge to us all was Jesus' question from Luke 18:8 "...when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"  So we prayed that 2012 and would be a year of faith.  May God richly bless you and your family with faith this coming year!!  Happy New Year!