Can you imagine 21 cute kindergartners playing kid-sized guitars in class? This is now happening at A's class. The teacher got a grant to learn basic guitar for the purpose of classroom education. Since she knows Ted plays guitar, she came to us for help. With my limited guitar knowledge, I tuned 7 guitars for the entire morning this past week. She is prepping the kids to play basic G and C chords for an upcoming performance. There are 20 "cheap", untunable guitars, but 6 (including Isabel's) pretty good kid-sized guitars. And can you imagine Abigail is "mentoring" her class in how to hold and strum a guitar. Just the thought of this makes me laugh so much. Our kids are so used to guitar, piano, drums, and all sorts of musical instruments...yet so many of the classmates have never even seen or touched an instrument. I'm so thankful for the ways the teacher tries to teach the class through so many different ways.

Dear friends,
Some of you have written personally requesting us to update xanga more regularly. We apologize for being MIA for some time. Life can get quite busy sometimes, but I do feel the need to sit back and keep an ongoing journal of our kids and their milestones. Our desire is to somehow compile all these entries into a scrapbook to present to our kids later. We wish Xanga had a automatic formating software that can do this for us =).

Today marks Rachel's 17 months of life! We've been telling Abigail that she was just a little older than Rachel when Isabel was born. It boggles our minds how young Abigail really was, yet we expected so much from her. She cannot believe it herself.

Rachel has definitely mastered the art of walking. When she sees other kids holding people's hands jumping up and down, she tries to do that to no success. She loves imitating the older sisters, esp saying "pee pee" while sitting on the toilet. Abigail is vigilantly teaching her to say "a, b, c, d..." She would only go up to "C". She loves bothering Isabel by pulling her hair out, grabbing different parts of her face. Yet, Isabel is so patient with her and just cries without any retaliation. Although I jokingly say "just hit Rachel", Isabel always says "I can't.". On the other hand, Rachel never bothers Abigail but has a healthy fear of the big sister. It's really interesting to see the dynamics among the three girls.

Isabel has been growing leaps and bounds. She has gotten into the daily routine of studying with me while Rachel takes her morning naps. She is so excited to start kindergarten and is trying to get ready in every way. We're quite surprised how much she is learning so quickly. Everyday, she prays that she will get Ms. P (A's teacher).

Abigail has been very sick this past week. I've never seen her so sick. She actually missed school Thursday and Friday, missing her first kindergarten performance of "La Raspa" (a Mexican dance). The teacher later told me that she had a prime spot in the front row, which was given to another student who wasn't even supposed to be up there...all b/c Abigail was absent. It was truly a lucky day for the other student. Abigail was so sick that she didn't care about missing school or the performance. She literally slept and slept. But, as pastor's kids, they were dragged to church on Friday night, and Sun morning...fortunately with no complaints.

Abigail and Isabel were super excited to stay with us at the adult service on Sunday b/c they love seeing people getting baptized. Ted had the honor of baptizing 6 new Vietnamese believers from a new small group that started from our ESL ministry at church. It was an awesome sight!

We'll post pictures soon. We do have pictures that are backlogged since Christmas time that we want to post.