Professional Face Painters

On Thursday night our small group from church did a service project at a local low income housing unit near Temple. We got there around 5pm and BBQed and brought lots of games and fun stuff for the kids that lived there to play with. Eventually the kids spotted the face paint that was in one of the boxes of toys and our friend Sarah, Keith and I ended up painting every single kids face for the rest of the evening haha. They had such a great time and we definitely had a few laughs trying to figure out how best to carry out their requests. Some of the better requests that don't really translate to face paint: Dora the Explorer, and a princess. Above is Keith's Spiderman masterpiece. Once he did one little boy, every single one of them wanted to be Spiderman, until we ran out of red paint haha. He also did a pretty great Incredible Hulk. Sarah and I painted lots and lots of flowers, and full face butterflies, we should probably take up the trade professionally. I understand now why clowns get paid so much for what they do haha

Speaking of our church... I had a really awesome experience last night that I want to share. We've been going there for about a year now and have participated in 3 different small groups, and through that we've started to make some pretty great friendships. Since before the wedding, the lead pastor at the church's wife Tiffany had been trying to schedule a night that Keith and I could come over for a couples dinner with some other people in our group... or so I thought. We finally planned to get together last night, so Keith and I headed over for what I thought was just going to be a normal dinner. Turns out, the whole time Tiffany had been trying to throw me a surprise Bridal Shower, and the whole "dinner" plan was just a cover up. When I showed up last night I was COMPLETELY surprised... had NO idea, and all of the girls from our various groups were there to hang out with me for the evening. So much fun, and such a cool surprise. We had some dinner, cupcakes, played some fun games and got to talk all about the wedding since I had brought our pictures to show them even before I knew it was a party for me haha. I felt so blessed to think that there were so many people here that cared enough about me to throw such a cute little party. I think it really solidified that no matter how isolated we may feel here at times, we do have a great community of people in Philadelphia. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures last night, which is a bummer because Folake did a REALLY great job making all kinds of cute decorations.

Moral of the story is: if we DID have to stay here in Philly for a bit longer, I wouldn't be so bummed :)