Lifeline

On Friday I got picked up by Karla - one of the volunteers of YFU who is also hosting a student :) She drove a couple of us girls to a friend of Sheila (my area rep of YFU) where we were scrapbooking from Friday about 6pm to Saturday about 5pm.

It was so much fun. We were all so focused on working on our scrapbooks so that we didn't talk at all - we listened to music so it wasn't completely silent ^^. Junior (she is from Thailand), Alice (from China) and me stayed up till 5.30am and we got up again at about 11am to go on working on the books. I took pictures of the room when we went to bed and of each page of my scrapbook:

At 5:30 am

Front side of my scrapbook

Title page

Arrival

Different Places

Back to School

Picture sets of Malachi, Tirzah and Micah

Josh and Malachi

Church Potluck

Senior High School Girls Sleepover at Calvary

 It was so much fun, thanks to everybody who made that weekend possible :)

Lifeline

Happy Birthday

Hey Daddy!

Happy Birthday for the third time today, even if it's over in Germany, you still have 10 minutes here!
I hope you had an awesome day since it was a holiday?! :)

Here my Birthday Card for you... sorry that I didn't send you one in a letter...   :(

Happy Birthday Daddy!

For Germany:

Happy Birthday

For everybody else:

Happy Birthday 

It's over now

I had my last event for volleyball last Wednesday: the banquet.
It was a lot of fun as I already posted on my facebook wall ;) We got awards, talked to different people, had dinner catering from a Mexican restaurant and coach Merten talked about the season in general.

I got the 'Most Improved' award of my team - obviously it's not very hard to improve when you can't play at all :P
I also got the 'Senor Award' (it's spelled wrong, it's supposed to be 'Senior Award' ^^) and a certificate of participation. When I got my Senior Award they asked me to give the 'younger' players an advice and when I was struggling to find one, Claire (one of my volleyball sisters who's also a Senior) told me that I could just tell something in German... Well that didn't help at all, it was even harder. It is so weird when I talk German, I always translate into English before I start talking :D Anyways I said 'Sei gut.' which means 'Be good' :D Pretty simple.

Waiting in line for the food :)

JV1 Team with their coach

Our team getting out team awards from Coach Merten

My 'Senor Award' - I love how they spelled my name ;)

My participation award already in my volleyball scrapbook

And my team award :)

It's over now

Every Day

The last week was so awesome. I was happy every single day and I feel like I've grown a lot in Christ this week, especially during the retreat and today with Sunday Class, the Sermon, Small Group and Youth Group ^^

We are going through Esther in Church right now and it is very fascinating each Sunday. 

I really enjoyed this Sunday because my new Sunday class started and it is a very good one ;) We also had a lot of fun in small group (we are going through the book we're reading for that: Lies Young Women Believe by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and Dannah Gresh). Youth Group was a little bit different tonight, Josh started to talk to us and we went through a few verses in Exodus and after that a couple of people shared their testimonies with us which was actually very interesting, I liked that a lot.

After that we went to Applebee's like we always do (it's a restaurant here in Saint Cloud). It was so much fun as well and I got to talk to Becky about stuff that's going on in my life right now - thanks for listening ;)

When Kari, Becky and I wanted to go home (Kari's usually giving me a ride ^^) we weren't able to open Becky's door of the car, so Kari had to crawl to the back part of the car and open the other door from the inside. When we finally all sat in the car and were on our way home Kari asked me if I were able to open my door. I said 'It's not like I'm going to test it right now...' I did try but I was not able to open it :D

As soon as we arrived my house I had to get out of the driver's door and then I said to Kari that I have to take a picture of her how she was trying to open the door earlier at Applebee's ...

Kari trying to open the door.. Becky's still inside as you can see

After that I showed the picture to Kari and we started laughing, so Becky wanted to see it too. Here's what she did to be able to see it:

Becky :)

By the way I changed the link for 'I have a shelter' please say if it's working now or not. If it's not working it would be very nice if somebody from Germany can try to find it so that I can post it. It's "I have a shelter" by "Sovereign Grace Music"

Every Day

Happy Day

Yesterday was a very happy day :)

My Christmas packet from my parents arrived:

It is very big :)

Thank you so much!

I already got my Christmas present with the packet but I gave it to Steph so that she can keep it until I can open it :)

We also left for the Fall Retreat from Youth Group yesterday, which was awesome. Unfortunately we are already back so we had just about 24 hours there but it was still very cool.

We girls slept in a cabin together with a squirrel :D

There was a hole in our window (the wood frame was eaten) so that's probably how it entered. It was very crazy: every time we got back from lunch etc. there were other girls running out of the cabin and screaming. I never got to see it but it should be very big ^^ Here are some pictures from the Retreat:

The bus

Sun goes down

Emily, Elle, Alex and Jamie

Alex

Everybody's listening to Josh ^^

Laura and Paige

Grace and Paige

Becky

This was the squirrel protection :P

We were kind of afraid and stand on the couch, table, etc. :)

That's where the squirrel escaped

Jamie and Elle

One of the fun games for our Girl-Guys competition (let the pencil jump into the cup letting it drop on the eraser)

Happy Day

Winter Snow

It's snowing :)

Yeah I know it's not a lot but when it got more I didn't want to take a picture anymore - wet camera is not good :P

Winter Snow

I have a shelter

Okay, so I planned to wait till I know what song we sang last Sunday after my Baptism, but I reeeally want to post about this so I just decided to pick another song which fits very well with this blog post :)

You can see Steph's blog for her blog post about last Sunday and very good pictures of the baptism.

It was just incredible and so awesome. When you read Steph's post you will get a very good idea what the baptism was like so I won't write that down again :)

I was so extremely nervous when we went up the stage to change into our baptism clothes. And it got worse when we were standing in front of all those people. I noticed that my knees were shaking and that was a very weird feeling because I thought I'm used to stand in front of a lot of people just because of all the concerts I already had (must be about 200 now :D). Anyways it was just amazing and I can't really tell you exactly what it was like.  

When we were all baptized and when our friends joined us for prayer I was overwhelmed with emotions - I almost started to cry - it was just amazing to listen to the prayers of my friends: Thank you to all of you ;)

I really hope that we'll get the video of the baptism so that you all can listen to our testimonies.

I have a shelter

Earthdance

Yesterday was my first concert with Symphonic Band :) It was in the Apollo Auditorium and Concert Band also played three songs. We played 'Earthdance' by Michael Sweeney, Donegal Moors by Sean O'Loughlin, and Hymn of Freedom Johannes Brahms. 

I really, really enjoyed playing - especially Earthdance.

I also finally finished all my projects for school: a research paper about Martin Luther for Language Arts, an analyze paper about my diet for Health II and another research paper about stem cells for Anatomy & Physiology.

We went shoe shopping today :) Even though I just bought house shoes I realized that I need winter boots :) I hope I can get some in the next couple of days since the winter's coming ^^

When we came home and Eden and I went to our room she started reading her book and then started to tell me a little bit about it. It sounds very interesting and when she kept laughing I got even more interested so she read a part out loud and then just continued reading. Now she is kind of tired (like I am) and we stopped, but I thought it would be cool to write another blog post since my laptop was already on :)

Earthdance

Tell the World

I would like to put two things under this heading :)

First: I feel like a lot of people visit my blog, even if it's probably not that much compared to others. I'm happy that the people who read my blog found it and are interested in my life here ^^  I started to follow how many people visit my blog right away when I started blogging (August 16, 2010) and it's kind of cool to see that people from all over the world at least had a look on the page. The numbers of visitors from the specific countries are from another website I'm using to keep track of my visitors so that's why it's just 1,257 when you add them together - I started to use it a couple days after I posted the first post.

Here just some number:

Total Number of Visitors: 1,273

Number of Visitors Germany: 783

Number of Visitors USA: 461

Number of Visitors Canada: 4

Number of Visitors Australia: 2

Number of Visitors India: 1

Number of Visitors Russia: 1

Number of Visitors France: 1

Number of Visitors Finland: 1

Number of Visitors Norway: 1

Number of Visitors Indonesia: 1

Number of Visitors United Kingdom: 1

The second thing I would like to share with you is that I'm going to be baptized this Sunday :) I'm so excited and I hope to see you!

Tell the World

Misunderstanding

 Okay so there was a "little" misunderstanding yesterday :)

I thought we would go to Minneapolis to a theater after I read this message:

The Loring Theater in Minneapolis is hosting a 90 year old gathering of that era characters from Oct 18th -30th Long forgotten characters will be on hand, spine chilling tours of the upstairs rooms and the basement and be greeted by these characters the best time for me is 29th or 30th. let me know 

But we went to a little tiny village where they had kind of an haunted house thing in the elementary school and the church. It took us a very long time to go there (about 2 hours including picking up some other people) even if it's just about 20 minutes away. We drove in the wrong direction for about 20 minutes :( It wouldn't have been so bad if we had two people waiting for us who eventually made the tour without us after they were already waiting for an hours.

Still it was a lot of fun even if it was very scary :D

Misunderstanding