Sunday

      If we could pick one day to be home in America for, it'd be Sunday. We really miss the routine of hearing our pastor preach at church, and then going home to a good pork roast lunch. Here, neither of those options really exist... so we do something different.

Sunday
      Usually, Nicole takes over morning duty with Aliyah on Sunday so that Dave can sleep in. She's become pretty talented at multi-tasking on her own: In the span of a few hours she is able to get Aliyah dressed, fed, and entertained while simultaneously prepping a large breakfast dish to bring to our weekly "house group". With no decent church options, we gather with five other families every Sunday morning at 10 A.M. for the purpose of spiritually encouraging/teaching each other. We always start our meetings with a delicious potluck breakfast. Truly, our breakfasts make us forget all about the bacon that we don't get to eat all year long. It's that good. A few times a year, we even go all out and make homemade glazed donuts or cinnamon raisin bagels - both of which taste far better than anything you can buy in America. Not that we're bragging or anything ;).
      Right now, our house group is studying an incredibly informative book entitled, A Muslim and A Christian in Dialogue, by Adru Kateregga and David Shenk. We mentioned this book in a recent blog post, and we would recommend reading it. Though we wish we had done it earlier, we always find ourselves completing the reading "homework" for our house group a few minutes before we need to leave the house. oops. But we still really appreciate the conversations gleaned from the book during our meeting.
      We usually don't wrap up our conversations from house group until around lunch time... but Nicole refuses to cook lunch on Sundays (Why bother after eating such a big breakfast?). The unspoken house rule is that you have to find your own lunch if you're hungry... with the exception of Aliyah, of course.

     Our house group takes up a good chunk of our "Sunday routine". Aside from this, our Sundays are pretty lazy. Occasionally, if the waves are good, Dave will go surfing in the afternoon while Nicole and Aliyah nap. Living just a few minutes away from the beach has its benefits. In the evening, we usually make it a priority to Skype with our family back home and to cook a decent dinner. Our go-to Sunday dinner is a chicken roast with rice and gravy - a meal that we have perfected in our 5+ years of marriage since we eat it nearly every week. Sunday, as it should be, is a day of rest in our family.

-Dave, Nicole, & Aliyah