Beautiful Japanese?! Oops...

"Magandang hapon!", we said with a smile. Our language helper then preceded to laugh at us. "What's so funny?" we asked. "You just told me 'Beautiful Japanese'." 

Magandang hapon or was it Magandang hapon... wait they're both spelled the same! One means "Good afternoon" and the other means "Beautiful Japanese". It all depends on where you put the stress. Hapon is afternoon; while Hapon is Japanese. The joys of learning language.

One month in and these beads are multiplying like rabbits! Our first three weeks of language study we were required to put in 20 hours a week. This worked out nicely in the beginning as a warm up, and we were able to finish setting up our house. Now we are in full time study with a requirement of 40 hours a week. 

  These beads represent the completion of                              Now, to date, we are chipping away at Phase 1B,

     of Phase 1A a couple of weeks ago.                          and if you look closely you can see our first 100th hour bead!

I wish you could be here to experience what these beads really represent. It's not just a cold, boring number. These beads are hours spent working with our language helper, discovering how bad our accent is ;), listening to recordings, bonding with Filipinos, diving head long into culture, reading up on Pinoy history, and being a part of our study group.

Look what we found! Alex has a jeepney named after him :D

We have been busy adjusting to our new 40 hour schedule, plus some visits from our church planting consultants and a couple of friends will be visiting next weekend. We feel like we're keeping a healthy pace. Below is a picture of Alex building Mack's dog house... the pic of Mack is a little old, and by old I mean maybe a week and a half. He is growing so fast, I'm pretty sure he's going to be a monster.

Alex and I were able to have some of our missionary friends from NTM Philippines over for dinner. We had such a good time making adobo (Bottom left picture) and playing pass the pigs.

We've also been spending lots of time with our little neighborhood buddy. (Bottom Right)