Pumkin Carving

We decided to bring in the fall season by hosting a pumpkin carving extravaganza with some friends. Kolby put the whole impromptu event together to continue his grandmother's annual tradition of pumpkin artistry. The evening was complete with hot apple cider, Monday night football, roasted pumpkin seeds, and awards for pumpkin-carving talent.

Cleaning out the pumpkin goopKolby hogging the Princess Pumpkin-Carving Kit tools that we bought at the grocery storeOur final products at their best: Kolby's pumpkin calling for Batman and my pumpkin just sitting there being the amazing masterpiece that it is. If this isn't a creative display of raw talent then I don't know what is! The whole gangThe pumpkin line-up
We all had a great time and Kolby and I ended the night chatting about how blessed we are with our little life here. We have wonderful friends and have jobs that let us spend time with them often. And our apartment is very old and small but we love it and that night it held 8 people carving pumpkins and smelled like yummy apple cider so what more could we possibly need?

October Twenty-Sixth

Today is the first October 26th in 7 years that we aren't celebrating as our "anniversary" anymore. We have a new one now, and although a wedding anniversary is much more official than a dating anniversary, it is a little bittersweet to be starting over. I don't think an October 26th will ever pass by without thoughts of how our story began. We were sixteen and chatting on my front porch after a school event that we had attended "as friends" when Kolby kissed me. We awkwardly didn't really speak much for a couple days afterwards and then eventually decided that we might as well start dating since we'd already kissed and I suppose that means we both like each other :). He proposed to me on that same front porch almost 6 years later.

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In other news, I presented part of my thesis research on micro-credit yesterday at the Baylor Symposium of Faith and Culture: Bottom-Up Approaches to Global Poverty. I was pretty nervous about it because it was my first time to do a presentation for anyone except other students in my classes so I was quite intimidated by the audience of professors from universities all over the country and ministry practitioners from all over the world. It went really well, though, and now it's time to get back to all of the schoolwork I've been neglecting.

Lil' Two-Five

My brother's t-shirt company has just launched a chilren's line, Lil' Two-Five. Each t-shirt purchased still provides a chicken for a poverty-stricken family in India. So, if you have any kiddos or even know any kiddos --- buy them a cool t-shirt and know you've changed the life of a family in need. Here are a couple of the designs:

Go to http://www.25cloth.com/ to buy a shirt!

A Winning Weekend

Kolby took the GRE on Saturday and knocked the socks off of it-- one of the many highlights of our weekend! Others included Texas beating Oklahoma ([college football] to Kolby this was probably a bigger deal than the GRE success), a visit from my best friend/college roommate Laura who I hadn't seen since she moved to Colorado this summer, watching Baylor win a conference football game (not a common occurrence!), and an afternoon taking care of our favorite kiddos:

Addi helped Kolby take Maya on her daily walk through campus and Jackson enjoyed our stop to visit the Baylor mascots.

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Queso, Michael Phelps, and Cookie Cake

Kolby and I finally got around to celebrating my birthday, which was back in August. We were in Ghana on my actual birthday and then my birthday present didn't come in the mail until this week so we've had to delay the celebration. What did I ask for for my birthday that took so long to arrive? The MICHAEL PHELPS: INSIDE STORY OF THE BEIJING GAMES dvd, of course! Isn't that what everyone requests for their birthday? I know it may sound strange/random, but we were in Africa for the vast majority of the Olympics - obviously without access to any television - and missed the whole Michael Phelps phenomenon. So, neither of us had seen a single second of any of the races. Spoiler alert: He wins all 8.

Our evening started with a yummy dinner at Ninfa's, my favorite Mexican food restaurant in Waco. I got to order all of the things that we're usually too frugal to spring for like QUESO, a topping for our fajitas, and a coke! I mean it just doesn't get much better than that. Then it was two full hours of Michael Phelps commemoration followed by a delicious dessert --- a mondo cookie cake that Maya had ordered for me. She's so thoughtful.

It may not have been the most conventional of birthday celebrations, but it was quite perfect and certainly worth the wait!

Help?

I'm getting to spend this beautiful Saturday cooped up at my desk studying for a microeconomics test that will most certainly be the death of me. I vaguely remember the head of the economics department telling me (years ago) that if I plan to go on to graduate school in economics then I should use my undergraduate electives towards upper-level math classes. But what fun would that have been? Not nearly as much fun as taking classes like "backpacking & camping" and using the spare time to plan a wedding! The fun was short-lived. So if any of you math guru's out there have any insight on the following topics, it would sure save me some time on Wikipedia.com:

Quasi-concavity, homothetic functions, Euler's theorem, Marshallian demand vs. Hicksian demand, log-function rule, matrix determinants, second principal minors, bordered Hessian matrices, Lagrangian multipliers, monotonic transformations, Cobb-Douglas utility, the envelope theorem, or Shepherd's lemma.

Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?

Wedding Album

We finally got to see the design of our wedding album this week, via e-mail. Who knows when we'll actually have it in our hands, but this certainly suffices for now! Here are a few pages:

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What a wonderful, wonderful day!

Memory Lane

I was cleaning out some stuff around my computer today and came across a CD with pictures of Kolby and I from high school. I thought I'd share my walk down memory lane...

Dressed as G.I. Joe & G.I. Jane for a costume banquet... age 16.

In St. Louis, Missouri on a church mission trip... age 17.

At youth camp... age 15.
I think I may even still have braces at this point. And, if you think Kolby is lanky now--- check out those legs in this picture!!!

I feel like we've changed a lot since then but when I take a look at pictures like these it seems like we're exactly the same and that no time has passed at all. It was this time of year at a high school football game EIGHT years ago that we awkwardly talked about how we both liked each other.
And that's how it all began...

www.25cloth.com

My older brother's t-shirt company has a new initiative for this quarter. Now, every t-shirt you buy will provide a chicken for a poverty-stricken family in India. Chickens can produce up to 40 dozen eggs per year, providing these families with a steady source of food and income.

Check out www.25cloth.com and buy a shirt that can change the life of a family in India!

Here are some of the t-shirt designs: For $20 you can have a cool shirt and know you've helped a family in need... so why not join the Two-Five movement?!?!

Heartbroken

I'm sorry for the back-to-back dog posts. I promise I won't make a habit of it! Today was the first Saturday in MONTHS that we've been home at our apartment so we took advantage of the leisurely day and cooked a big breakfast. Maya assumed that because I was in the kitchen cooking-- it must be dinnertime. I tried to tell her that it's not time for her dinner yet, but she obviously didn't understand. Thinking she must have misbehaved so badly that she didn't even deserve her dinner for the day, she retreated to the living room so ashamed of herself that she even had to hide her face. She is still being a mope about it... silly dog!

Such a Lady

Maya hasn't gotten much face time on the blog lately so I thought I'd post a couple of new pictures. She crosses her front legs like this pretty much anytime she's laying down... such a little lady.

We think Maya is the best dog... ever. She's the happiest dog in the world but also very calm. She's totally silent and possesses none of the annoying dog habits like jumping on people, begging for attention, getting into things she's not supposed to, etc. She is also a snuggler, especially when it's getting close to bedtime. And she's BEAUTIFUL! I'd say 9 out of 10 people that I pass on the sidewalk when I'm taking her on a walk comment on how pretty she is. Add that to the mystery of not knowing what breed of dog she really is (obviously mostly husky, but she only weighs 33 pounds so she's got to be mixed with something else) and she's just the whole package. I couldn't recommend rescuing a dog from an animal shelter highly enough... especially ones that are full-grown like Maya was when we got her. Such a joy!

NEW, NEW, and more NEW!

There is all sorts of NEW stuff going on around our house these days!

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We have a NEW neighbor!

My younger brother, Russell, started school here at Baylor this week and his dorm is four blocks away from our apartment. Lucky kid, right? We're happy to have him here and I'm glad to see him carry on the Baylor family legacy (he'll be the 17th Baylor graduate in our family). He's already following in his brother's footsteps of "happening" to call right around dinnertime "just" to see what I was doing. Cooking for three is just as easy as cooking for two and we enjoy the company just as much as he enjoys the free food so no complaints here.

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We have NEW kitchen appliances!

Our apartment complex changed management while we were in Ghana and I guess the new people took one look at the kitchen appliances and immediately tore them out. We had no idea this happened so we were very pleasantly surprised when we walked in and found a brand new refrigerator, dishwasher, and oven! We were already SO GLAD to be back to our apartment and all of the new stuff plus the fact that we had just picked up Maya after missing her for three weeks made for one happy household. Fingers crossed for a new washer/dryer!

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Kolby is teaching at a NEW school!

Tuesday was Kolby's first day to teach at his new school and he LOVES it! He teaches five classes of 9th grade English and has just one lesson plan to handle. Compare that to last year where he taught six classes and had to prepare six different lesson plans and you can see why he is such a happy camper. I'm so proud of him and so happy that he's had such a great start to his school year. And, the school dress code requires that he wear a tie so he also got to get a whole new wardrobe last week. Combine that with the kickin' briefcase he got for his birthday and he is just one dapper fellow these days.

We're Back!

Kolby and I made it back safe and sound from our three wonderful weeks volunteering in Ghana, West Africa. It was definitely the experience of a lifetime and we had such a great time soaking up the Ghanaian culture and sharing in the work of Village Exchange Ghana (VEG).

In addition to his work with the youth at VEG's resource center, Kolby taught basic numeracy and literacy to the two groups of young women involved in VEG's income-generation projects. Here is a picture of Kolby teaching in the village of Takla, where these women participate in VEG's Lady Volta Beads Project. As most of them are teen mothers, the project allows them to work flexible hours making jewelry in order to earn income for themselves while still being able to care for their children. You can view the Lady Volta Beads catalog here.

Here is a picture of the four seamstresses who participate in VEG's Lady Volta Batik project listening to Kolby's lesson on decimals (batik: textile-dyeing technique common in Ghana).

I worked with VEG's micro-credit program and spent most of my time with the rural women who participate in the program. These women use the small loans to aid their self-employment activities which usually consists of the trading of commodities such as vegetables, maize, fish, or household provisions. It was an eye-opening experience, and there are so many difficulties associated with the implementation of micro-credit that I would have never really understood without seeing it all first-hand.

Here is a picture taken at a meeting I held with the loan groups in the village of Helekpe.

Here's a picture of me in Helekpe with Mary, the chairperson of one of the loan groups, who gave me a bottle of honey that had been produced by a the women in her group.

Here is a group of women who produce palm kernel oil, a substitute for vegetable oil that is made from the seeds of an oil palm tree.

One weekend we made the treacherous 3-hour climb up Mount Adaklu. Here is a picture of us at the top.

Unfortunately, going down was even more difficult than going up. I didn't fare too well (huge hip bruise, rolled ankle, ants in my hair, etc.). Let's just say that if we were keeping score it would be Ghana-1, Emily-0.

Kolby, however, thoroughly enjoyed every part of the excursion. Here he is in front of the mountain with our "tour guide" (11-year old boy), Wonda.

Another weekend we went to a village called Tafi Atome where we visited a monkey sanctuary and rode bikes to a kente cloth weaving village.

It was a great trip, but after three weeks of cold showers, mosquito bites, unfamiliar food, and a $6.50/night hotel room, we were eager to make it home! We are grateful for the amazing experience and send our love back to VEG and our new friends there!

Going, Going, Ghana!

We are off to Ghana, Africa for a three-week volunteer placement at Village Exchange Ghana. We will work primarily with their micro-credit program and Kolby will also spend some time teaching English to local youth. Our micro-credit work will involve assessing and selecting loan candidates, organizing workshops, reviewing business plans, and setting up new loan groups. Offering these small loans to the disadvantaged women of Ghana is VEGs main tool for poverty alleviation and Kolby and I are excited to take part in such important work! I'm not sure if we'll have internet access while we're there, but I'll be sure to post about our trip after we get back on August 16th. Please pray for our safety... Africa is a long way away from home!

Open Water Certified

Kolby and I, along with my family, finished our SCUBA certification this past weekend. We had to do four dives at a lake and demonstrate that we could successfully do all of the underwater skills like achieving neutral buoyancy, removing and replacing our mask, navigating using a compass, using our buddy's alternate air supply, and doing an emergency ascent. Despite having to get into a full-length wetsuit in 100 degree heat and then carry 65 pounds of equipment on our backs down to the water, the actual diving was a lot of fun. We saw some nasty 2' long catfish and my dad had his ear bitten by a sunfish so hard that it bled. Good times. I would have taken a picture if I thought anyone would be able to stand seeing what we looked like in those wetsuits. It was a great thing to do as a family and now we're ready for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef!