Lanza Letters: News crews, pom pons, and the joyous blessings of FALL!

My apologies for being so late in updating this....but, whoo!, this month has flown by!

It seems like just yesterday that I joked about it being October and celebrating my birthday all month long! Now, I'm only a few days away from getting "old." Just kidding! I'm actually excited about the TWO-FOUR this year (maybe, eventually, I will quit being mistaken for a student at school). :) I'm just hoping all this youthfulness pays off in future years.

Now that we are over halfway through the month of October, the halloween decorations are in full swing. I'm not a huge fan of halloween due to what all it symbolizes for some people; however, the kiddos in our subdivision sure do love dressing up and getting their candy. (For me, I'm just pumped that this means that Christmas is right around the corner - yes, Christmas card ideas are being pondered, and I am SUPER EXCITED!). Nevertheless, we are going to have to stock up on the candy even more this year. The decorations draw the kiddos in, and last year we ran out of candy. Let it be known that we really prepared for kids last year - however, we didn't really plan for 150+. haha This year we will have our game face on, especially since our new next door neighbors decorate even more than we do. Here is a collage picture of some of our decorations (the night picture didn't show up so well):

Speaking of kiddos, you know I can't do a blog post without mentioning our precious Inner City babies. Since the last post, we have taught the kindergarten class three more times covering the stories of Noah's Ark, Abraham and Isaac, and Joseph's coat of many colors. They LOVED talking about all of their favorite animals during Noah's Ark (and the stickers were a big hit).

Sweet babies loved the story of Abraham and Isaac. The graham cracker was the "altar", the "chocolate bar" represented Isaac who was put on the altar. Then, the children took off the chocolate "Isaac" and replaced him with the marshmallow "the ram" that God sent to take his place!! Of course, they got to eat the S'mores after the lesson. Yummy!

This past week Paul taught them about Joseph and the coat of many colors. I could not be there due to other obligations (which just so happened to include a girls' night!). One of our sweet friends helped Paul teach the class, and from the picture, I think it's safe to say that a good time was had by all!! Again, they LOVE stickers!

With mentioning girls' night, I have to admit that Paul and I have enjoyed some girl and guy time with our friends lately. We seem to get so busy with life sometimes that it is so refreshing when we just take a small break to catch up with friends. This past weekend, Paul enjoyed the Alabama game with some guys over at the house. With their enthusiastic yelling at the tv during the game, I was not heartbroken to leave for awhile to catch up with one my besties. I met up with my friend Lindley, and we enjoyed girl talk over a wonderful Japanese dinner at the new Fuji restaurant in town. (Highly recommend it - not a fan that they only have miso soup (with tofu) and ginger salad, though). Then, last night I was blessed to have a girls' night with some awesome ladies from my Bible class at church (all young married women) at P.F. Chang's (one of my faves!). God has truly blessed us with some awesome friends.

Carrying on with the girl fun, cheer season is now in full swing for me. My girls have been practicing so hard to prepare for basketball season, and we have our first game on Monday. I am so proud of their progress, and I can't wait for them to show how hard they have worked. Their cheers are ready, and they are currently working diligently on perfecting a super cute dance to perform at a few home games. Creating the pom-pon horseshoe had also been an exciting, yet challenging, task. For some reason, this became much harder than it should have been, but they kept working until they got it! We are ready to bring in the new cheer season on Monday with new uniforms, exciting new cheers and dances, and some VERY CUTE new bows!!

Another exciting part of this past week was having the news crew come to my class. My students were so excited as the crew filmed them in action using technology in the classroom. (A link to that production will be coming SOON!).

During that week, I also took the opportunity to teach them about the news and how to read particular news stories. I showed them a site called Newseum, which you may also find extremely intriguing. On this site, you can view the front pages of papers from all over the world. How cool is that?! They LOVED it! To visit the site - click the link below and then go to "Today's Front Pages" once on the site. From there, you can search for papers all over the world.

http://www.newseum.com/

As for new Lanza news, we have just been taking it one day at a time. Sometimes we feel that we are in over our heads, but I don't think we would know how to handle it any other way. We are on the go people. However, we do thoroughly enjoy not setting an alarm clock on Saturday mornings. Paul is still working on his graduate doctoral class (which is the hardest class he has had yet), while still managing time for Inner City, church, friends, his own projects, family, and me. He's pretty much awesome. I am THOROUGHLY enjoying my first full year teaching and gearing up to begin my graduate classes again in January while teaching. I took a break to get this year going on the right foot and while coaching the cheerleaders; however, basketball season will be coming to a close in January, so I will pick back up with classes, along with coaching. Nevertheless, the Lanza life is not all work and no play! We have enjoyed catching up on some of our favorite shows together (Duck Dynasty, Last Man Standing, Big Bang Theory, etc - television is a rare comodity at our house), and we have even squeezed in a fun date night of good eating and goofy golf!

Finally, we have two special prayer requests. Please be in prayer for some close friends of ours. This is an unspoken request, but God knows the need. :) Also, we are in the planning stages right now for a potential mission trip in March. This will be our first mission trip together (or EVER actually), and we will be going to Baja, Mexico if all works out according to plan. God has been so good to us and opened doors that we never saw coming. To look back over this past year and a half is truly humbling. We prayed that God would use us even more together, but I don't think we had any idea of just how much God would indeed answer that special prayer!! As we have always said, we are BUSY, BUT BEYOND BLESSED!!

We hope you are enjoying the fall as much as we are!! Our beautiful fall weather is off to a great start, complete with pumpkin spice goodies. These are the easiest, cheapest, and best little things ever! Trust me, you want to try these and make them! The recipe is below the picture.