Busy Weekend!

Sorry that I haven’t posted in a while! We have been very busy this past week. On Friday evening Jesse and I were at UD where we hung out with Katie and Christiana, who were there for “highschool day”.

On Saturday, we went to our “marriage bible study” or whatever you might call it with Heather and Josh. We have it every Saturday (or we’re SUPPOSED to, but in Great Lent anything can happen!) led by Father John. The goal by the end of it is to have a ceremony to get our marriage blessed (it’s like a consolation prize for those who wish they had had an Orthodox wedding:) We are currently reading a letter on marriage written by the Holy Synod of bishops. It’s quite enlightening- did you know that they don’t have vows in Orthodox weddings? Sure, the couple gives their consent to be married (“..I do….) but they don’t say vows. The Orthodox Church does this because they believe that only God can keep vows and only He, therefore, should seal the marriage with HIS vows. Kinda cool!

Anyways, after that we went to Vespers and came home exhausted. On Sunday after church, we stayed for what seemed like HOURS talking to people (almost everyone had cleared out by the time we left!) and then went home to clean to get ready for company. See, during the course of the afternoon I had realized that this was the last Sunday that we would be free in a while and that we hadn’t spent any time with our group of friends in a couple weeks. So, without asking Jesse (who has huge papers due very soon!) I invited them all over;) He ended up being fine with it, so we went to Whole Foods and bought veggie rolls and soy sauce for serving and went home to clean the house.

It was great having everyone over, especially as it was a “wine, fish and oil day”- the Orthodox version of a fast freebee day. Most people take wine to mean alcohol, although there have been Russian dioceses that simply could not fathom telling anyone to fast from beer- I mean, what else were they going to drink?

Anyways, Heather and Josh definitely brought beer while Carissa had made a wonderful veggie/rice casserole to accompany her Lenten chocolate chop cookies. Jenny, of course, brought a fruit salad, while was nice since I never manage to eating the fruit I buy before it goes bad:(

I have one picture to show you why Jesse and I are waiting to have children. He had WAY to much fun setting Genevieve up for this.