What are the Scotts up to in Croatia?

What HAVE we been doing for the last few months!?!  I guess time flies when you're living in a new country.

Today (Thursday) and Friday we have our final exams for Croatian level 1A!  YEA!  We've been in class for 3 hours a day every day since February.  We can say so much more than when we arrived, but still have a long way to go.   

Some days are like today, where we get home from school and our sweet neighbors speak to us in Croatian.  Soon we realize what they were asking, that they want us to pick cherries from their tree.  So, we gladly say yes!  So while Dave was high on a ladder picking cherries, I was on the ground below working on my Croatian with our neighbors - a sweet sweet older couple.  I'm super pumped because cherries are everywhere in Croatia, and in our neighborhood we're surrounded by beautiful cherry trees, and oh how I've longed for my own.  That's kind of hard when you don't even have a yard.  So, here they are, our beautiful mound of fresh cherries (that's a salad bowl).

What else beside picking cherries have we been up to?

We're excited to say that we've worked hard with our team in creating the first NGO for our organization here in Croatia.  We're very excited about the possibilities this will open for us and in inviting others to join the mission.  We find out soon if it has been accepted officially by the ministry here.

Dave continues to meet new friends through sports and coffee - two of his loves in life (other than Jacob and me of course).  He plays basketball weekly and has joined a group of guys that meet weekly for coffee and talk about things Dave loves to talk about - religion, out of the box stuff, coffee, and just getting to know these guys is awesome!

On a daily basis, we feel blessed to be here.  That doesn't mean all our days have been easy - many are not; we miss home, things from home, and especially people from home.  But we are also meeting really cool people who have already loved on us in amazing ways and let us love on them.

We have not forgotten our French - actually I want to find a language partner to speak French with, so I don't lose it, but I thought it was smart to focus first on Croatian.  That is another part of what we miss - our lives and friends from France.

JJ continues to be amazingly creative and social.  He LOVES school and begs to have long days there.  He has started sporadically speaking Croatian at home.  And we're excited that this Fall we hope to put him in a school where he can learn 1/2 the day in Croatian and 1/2 the day in English.  In 1st grade, he will also have the option to learn French as a foreign language.  How amazing the systems are here with teaching children other languages at such a young age.  Here he is (from yesterday morning) as a very dangerous dragon fly.  He woke up and said he wanted to be a dragon fly, and so he made his costume and went to school this way.  He went to school as a dragon fly and came home a dinosaur.  Oh to be 5 again!! 

And then here are some other fun updates:

• In April we went to a conference in Bulgaria and met our SE Field team for the first time! 
• Our team leaders, from Bulgaria, came for a visit over Easter weekend! 
• In May a team member and I were the head of the prop department for a Croatian musical.  We found it to be quite a challenge to make things like: gold shackles, goblets, and a snake puppet when you don't have a JoAnns, Michaels, or Party City!! 
• Also in May Dave had a fun work weekend with the team at a nearby camp.  I stayed home with JJ.  And when I say "fun", I mean working in the mud all day long on endless projects that keep going awry.  But, nevertheless, they all seemed to have fun.  (Oooo, I learned the Croatian word for "nevertheless" the other day...it's "ipak") 
• Also in May our friend, from America (from Fuller actually), moved to Croatia!!  We were so pumped to pick her up from the airport in Zagreb and to have her stay with us for a week, to rest, eat, rest some more.  We're happy she's so close!  

Well, that's it for now.  Signing off, but I promise now that classes are soon to be over, we'll post more regularly and definitely NOT this long!