russian history??

OK This is a funny story and I need to tell you all what happened today. I have been studying Russian again, which, by the way, will be a life long task! That is not to discourage you new students of Russian but even if you are linguistically talented, Russian can give you a 'run for your money'. I have to admit that I am not as 'well off' as I thought with the language and can't remember a lot of what I have already learned. My long time excuse has been, "O...well, when I came I was pregnant and ended up having two babies close together. Being a person of strong personal convictions I decided not to give up my responsibility and desire to spend those first years of there life, to a babysitter while I studied Russian." Which is still my conviction and I would not do it differently, but now that my babies are 6 and 5, that "excuse" doesn't jive anymore. So here I am trying to remember all these cases and the grammatical lingo that I have forgotten. The first 2 weeks I was a little lost and very humbled hearing verbs I had never learned and fumbling along trying to remember the rules. Well this week has been better. Today, especially, I was feeling very confident that ,"I know this stuff! I can do this no problem!" I was cruising along conjugating my prepositional objects with adjectives, singular and plural. Then we moved to ordinal numbers and I was really cruising with those, when all of a sudden the teacher gives us this paper with historical figures and the questions ,"in what century was this war?" and , "in what century did so and so live?" all of a sudden my heart started beating fast and I started feeling my face start to get hot thinking, "What! I don't know history dates! I am terrible at history!" So when it was my turn I confessed my deepest shame of not being good at history let alone the dates, as they all stared at me and then burst into laughter! -Horror- Then they showed me that, right after the question was the number/answer for the century you were to quote! I felt so dumb! I guess it was God humbling me, again! I have had lots of those "ditzy" moments and I am sure I will have more. All I know is that I spent all day Saturday, ministering with a team from my church at an orphanage and once again, felt like that little girl in my childhood, scared to open my mouth in fear of all eyes upon me scrutinizing me and the words that would come from my mouth, only for different reasons. But seeing those kids so excited to see us coming gave me confidence despite my selfish insecurities, that whatever I could give with words or deeds would mean the world to them. I ended up having a great time of ministry, but also more inspired to press on with my Russian! I have lots more pictures to share with you from my time with the orphans for the next post. Please pray for all of us as we press

on with our language proficiency.