Ministry Update - July 2019

Conference

Every year the husband *has to* go to district conference, and every year there is a hassle of some sort.  This year we debated whether the children and I should even go with him, or stay at home, and then when we decided we would travel together whether we (the children and I) should try and attend conference or do something else.  This year we opted to stay in Ottawa, where my mother in law lives, and visit with her while my husband carpooled with another minister to Trenton, a few hours away, and sat through the meetings.

To be honest, I'm torn on attending conference myself.  I think I'd like to do it once, but having children makes sitting through a meeting nigh impossible.  I have tried before, when the conference was being held in Brockville, and it was miserable to try and entertain little kids, by myself, in a hallway.  The other parents who had pulled the 'take kid out of the meeting straw' and I hushed and shushed for hours.  The next time we went to conference was the year it was held in Toronto, and again there was no keeping the children occupied through the meetings.  I believe we went to Ottawa last year, possibly, as well, and he went to (Brockville again?  Somewhere?) and anyway, you can see my interest in pursuing this is waning.

So anyhow, that's the first thing - conference accomplished!  We were gone for several days, which was just long enough for my house to start smelling horribly and my garden to turn into a bed of weeds.  Fun times.  It's taken a week for me to get things somewhat back to normal.

We learned that there will be a Zone meeting sometime in the fall, and it will be about three hours from us, which is better than the usual ~5 hours, and so we will likely attempt to attend that as well.  And it will only require one night away, so the children and I might tag along and get a hotel with a pool to sit in.  There is also a National conference meeting, and that is even farther than the District conference and would require significant driving over two days and so since it isn't required we will be skipping it.

School

The two courses we enrolled David in are halfway to completion and we are pushing to get them done.  They started at the beginning of May and last until the end of August and the courses he is taking are Anthropology and Romans.  When he is finished them, assuming he passes (and I have no reason to doubt that he will as he's been an A student in every other distance ed course) there will be between 3-4 more courses to take before his Associate's degree is complete.

We won't know what else he can take in the fall until later this summer because the school he's working through hasn't posted their fall distance ed course offerings yet and won't for a while.  There is the possibility that the school will just decide not to offer any of the courses we need, and that would put a bit of a hitch in our plan for him to graduate in Spring 2020.  We're hoping there is something offered that he can take.