Day 203: Blessing ahead

A couple of evenings ago we were all out in the garden and the girls were playing on the bouncy-bounce (castle) when suddenly children were appearing out of the wooded area at the bottom of the garden. They all came and made polite conversation, introducing themselves and each other and welcoming us to the neighbourhood. Eventually one of them commented (polite but leading...) "So, you have a bouncy-bounce?" "Yes, would you like..." there was no need to finish the sentence - by this time they had all thrown off their shoes and dived in. Then seemingly without transition there were only four of them left and they were saying polite goodbyes. I think there were 7 of them in all (plus our two - E5N1 was asleep) aged between 6 and 11. The average level of self-assurance combined with manners in children talking to adults is really extraordinary and seems like something from another era, or maybe from no era to have ever occurred in the UK.

This evening was our church leadership meeting. One of our number has joined in by telephone the last couple of times and this evening we were using Skype and a Polycom Communicator USB conference phone which seemed (as far as we can work out) to have worked out well for him hearing us, but we still had sound problems in the other direction (due to his microphone we think) so we're halfway there. The meeting was good and we're continuing to get to know each other as we discuss the look-and-feel of our new church through the various documents (legal and otherwise) that describe it.

I must just give a little plug to my friend Dave's site funkypancake.com - his style has inspired quite a bit of the photography in this blog although his production values are much higher than mine. How could I resist this sign?