Sunday Differences

We now have an new musical instrument to sing along with,
We celebrated the kids finishing their school
curriculum by getting this small keyboard

Sunday is a special day. Sunday we get everyone ready to go out the door for church from 9 to at least 12. If there is some type of special celebration, church will turn into a 5 hour event. At church the women sit in one section. The children sit in another section. The young adults and the men also have their own sections. So if you can imagine a dozen children from 4-7 years old all sitting on a single pew without their parents for a 3+ hour church service and often with no children's programming... It is the expectation that they will sit there quietly and without fidgeting (and if not a switch is brought out for tapping them on the head and giving warning).

So we feel like we are living at the extremes! In the States children often are not expected to sit for 5 minutes and here the expectation is 3+ hours. Our children generally still sit with us in the worship services, but it feels like we are looked at as odd parents and our children as immature because they are acting so differently from the norm. Yet, for sitting in the 100 degree church listening to a service in a foreign language for 3+ hours, we feel like our children have made many adaptations.

We sometimes talk to US churches for their service or Sunday School on Sunday afternoons via skype, then we like to head off to the pool at some point on Sundays too. In the evening we have a family worship time in English before the bedtime routine.