Wow, it's already February!

Hello Friends and Family,

Thank you to friends Kent and Sammie for posting your comments - it was good to hear from you both. We miss you all too! And hope to stay in better contact this year. One of our goals this year is to keep better in touch with our friends and family back home. Skype is really helping us to do that! :)

Hope you all are doing well. Life here in Mito, Japan, is going just fine for us. The start of the new year has been pretty good so far. We enjoyed the holidays and hearing from friends and family. Laura's dad came and visited Japan for a month and that was really nice. Allen went to America to be in our friends' wedding and saw his family. Allen's birthday was December 4th and Laura's was January 31st, so now we're both 25! Wow, we're a quarter of a century old!!

Laura got her Japanese drivers license at the end of January and will be able to start driving to school in March when we get a car from an AET who's returning to America. That will be really nice that she won't have to ride her bike everywhere. Allen has more energy and doesn't mind riding his bicycle everyday. :)

Good news...Allen had a good observation at his school last week. He and one of his 6th grade teachers had worked hard to prepare for it and it turned out well. It was an all school observation, so the Mito educational board members were walking through each class and Allen was observed team teaching with one of his teachers in a class that he says is his most challenging class, because the students tend to act up a lot and they don't seem to care that much for English. They did skits covering different lessons they've learned over the past years in elementary school. Afterwards the educational board member who is in charge of us AETs spoke with Allen about his good and bad points. He said he was really glad to hear the good she had to say and was relieved that it went well.

We still have our challenges everyday and we're still adjusting, but it's almost been a year now and we'll be here at least another year. God is good and He's taking care of us even with the little things as we strive to put Him first everyday. We'll sure miss Mom when she leaves at the end of next month. She's looking forward to being back with Dad and Drew and she misses home, but we've sure had a good experience together here in Japan. God is so good to have blessed us with this special time together.

If you are reading this and want to pray for us, you can pray that in this new year we will be used by God to cultivate our relationships here in a way that we can share God's love and help meet people's needs. This past year we've focused so much on our own needs as foreigners in a strange land, but in this new year we need to start trying to focus more on the needs of the new AETs who will be coming and on the needs of the Japanese people and our friends here.

Thank you and may God bless you all!

Love,

Allen and Laura