Thanks everyone for reading this blog over the months about our time in Salerno. I feel like this blogpost among a few emails to send out will really close the door on this chapter of our lives. If you are reading this without getting a newsletter we have decided to not return to various reasons. God has given us a peace on our hearts and we have already had a lot of closure being grateful for everything God has done in our hearts along the way. We are passing the torch to the Valiquettes, Gallos, and the other families and people who are letting the idea of living in Salerno long term resonate on your hearts.
We could not have made it this far without all the support of all the people in so many places across the globe. From Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Grand Cayman, Israel and Africa; there have been supporters living in every corner of the world. God has really brought together people for a common goal to help love others and share His gospel in the town and campus of Salerno, Italy. Its strange how God's plan works, allowing us to be on staff for exactly two years, 10 months of which were actually spent in Salerno the others raising support and having our first child. Even though living in a culture that is not your own is hard, in many ways, I can look back at the last chapter of our life and know we were right in the right place for such a time as this, knowing God is completely Sovereign. Life is a process full of dead ends and different processes that continually start and end.
Who knows, from here there might be other blogs about the life and times of the Waltons but for now there comes a time to search for new paths and ways to glorify God in this fallen world. Thanks everyone for listening
So I have not done a post in a really long time. There has been a lot going on but just in random ways. Amanda's mom was here for two weeks which was a lot of fun. They got to do a lot of stuff which included me part of the time. Sometimes I had appointments with students and other times I had to watch Grant. It was good in some ways to be a part-time tourist in the land that we live since we do not always get to do it and never have an excuse.
I have been spending a lot of time with a lot of the summer project contacts like Emmanuele, Gaetano, and Giuseppe. Also some of my friends before the summer Andrea, Salvatore, among others. It is exam time in Salerno so a lot of people go MIA or set meetings up, having good intentions, and then cancel because they really have to study. The way school works here is you take all your classes for the year and then you take exams mostly in the summer (June, July, some of August because it is vacation month, and September). You can also take exams all different times of the year, but a lot of people take 2-5 of their 6-8 for the year in the summer.
The summer is a hard time for us also because of the heat and we do not have an air conditioner. Many people in Italy do not believe in air conditioning and they believe it can be expensive for your electricity. We are on the ground floor of our apartment building and there is no direct sunlight, but still without a breeze it can get hot.
We are almost done with our July update which will explain better where we are at.
Its so sad. The Americans are leaving. Sara Love and Bentley Crawford, Natalie, and Breanna are all leaving within the next week. They have all been here two years with the exception of Sara Love who came on STINT here in 2006 before she was married so she has lived here 3 years. They have made so many friends and impacted this city for the gospel so much. Last night we had a dinner with our church and the goodbyes and the reminiscing started. Bentley and I have become good friends as well as the Crawfords have a daughter, Lila Grace, close to the same age as Grant. They are going to live in Miami to get a job and join a Sovereign Grace church there. Breanna is going to help out with the Magdalena film in Florence for another month before she goes to America to get a job.
This week we are moving a lot of their stuff to a really cheap storage unit we found close to the university. So we are boxing their stuff up and storing it for future STINT teams since we will not have one next year. Please pray for that.
A highlight from this week is that I got to meet with Gaetano for 4 hours on Thursday. He is one of the students that have professed faith in Christ from the summer project group. We talked about many things including the Bible being extremely metaphorical. Please pray for me as I continue to talk about interpretation of the Bible to him and how part of the Bible is metaphorical and part is literal.
Here are some pictures of our friends over time:
Above, Lila and Sara Love Crawford Lila and Bentley Crawford Bentley and I hiked a mountain, this is Bentley at the top.
Bentley with Braden from summer project and some people from Panta Rei, the student government group
Natalie at one of our friend's, Andrea's concert Breanna, Coitaiba, me and Jutty in language class
The summer project just left Sunday. We are still trying to get used them not being here. They brought so much life to the city. Their intentionality with the gospel in relationships with the students was clutch for us. They were able to survey a lot of people to see who was spiritually interested. There are a ton of new contacts that I have gotten to know through them.
One of the main people are Emanuele or "Manny". He wants to be in a community of Christians. He understands how important this is after receiving Christ and seeing how we interacted with each other. He is really easy to talk to and loves America. He hopes to come to America at the end of August to visit all his friends in Mississippi and will probably be a good person to recruit others.
Others are two friends Gaetano and Francesco. These guys both are asking questions want to know more about the Bible. On my facebook profile you can check out Gaetano giving his testimony. I got to meet with him today and talk about "how God can still love us when people go to hell".
The other key group that we met is Panta Rei. I have met close to 15 people through this group including the president. He is extremely interested in doing service projects with us in the future. They are the student government group on campus and when the summer project went in their room and starting talking about the Bible they all wanted to listen to the scriptures being read in Italian. There are a lot of them that are close to accepting Christ. It is the first time we have started seeing God move in existing community on campus in a long time. These groups is the closest thing you can get to Greek Life and they seem like one big happy family.
Continue to pray for these people and groups as well as our team as the other 4 Stinters here are leaving in two weeks.
Here are some cool pictures and video:
Above, I took the summer project guys to my favorite pizza place, Pummarola 'Ncoppa
Antonio, Ambrogio, and I
We made the newspaper in Salerno. The picture is from one of our BBQ and the article talks about why we are here.
Partial video of Caleb, one of the summer projecters, giving his testimony at a BBQ and Marko translating.
So we are halfway through summer project! I felt like they just got here but soon they will be off to Rome and Florence. There are 35 of them including the 3 staff. Its the biggest project ever been in Salerno. God has been using them mightily. I have got to be in on some of those meetings or and also been there in a group as they have gone out to initiate conversations with students in English. They probably have met 150 people with 30-40 people being ones they have met with 3-5 times and gotten to hang out with them elsewhere for lunch, coffee, or in Salerno. It is hard because I do not want to neglect my friends also.
I got to share the gospel with Matteo the other day. I saw him for a few minutes since then and just hung out with him in between classes. Pray that I will have another opportunity to go back into the gospel in depth. Pray for my time with Raffele who I got to see for the first time since last summer. My wife and I along with some other friends went to his house for dinner. He has been learning English from Mormons in another city outside Salerno. I got into sharing the gospel at the BBQ with him but was interrupted. We have mutual friends with Francesco and Lucia who I have hung out with a few times. Please pray that at some point they can hear the gospel. My friend Erol on campus is struggling in his faith because he is learning about Evolution in his classes. I was able to give him a book about it as well as talk. Pray that he reads it and continues to have faith. These are just a few of the things God has been doing through me.
The last thing is that I got to go to a soccer game yesterday. It was a little sad because the Salernitana team is so bad that no one came to the last game of the season, but they still have spirit! I hope you enjoy the video.
So many times we talk about ministry on this blog, but a lot of times we do fun things with Italians as part of building friendships with them before, during, or after starting to process the gospel with them. We also go on dates as a married couple, so there are many things in the city we do for fun.
1. Go to an awesome Pizzeria-
Trianon, Vaca d'presa, I Due Fratelli, Pummarola n'coppa, Pucciarelli: it doesn't matter just that you got some good pizza and good person or persons to share it with.
2. Go to the Market-
In one of our posts over the summer, there is a video of one of the few outdoor markets in Salerno.
3. Get some Caffe'-
Bar Rosa, Bar Trieste, Bar 089.....to me it depends if you want to sit outside, inside, or sit in a room overlooking the lungo. I am getting there with appreciating that caffe' tastes different at different bars. Yes, I said "bars" but bars here is where you get caffe'. In America, you go to a cafe' to get coffee, but here you go to a bar to get caffe'. You can also get Alcoholic drinks too. Its like if Starbucks had a full liquor bar. Crazy, huh?
4. Get some Appertivo-
In America, we eat lunch usually 12-1 and dinner 6-8. Here in Southern Italy, lunch is eaten 1:30-3 and dinner is 8-10. Breakfast is usually eaten on the run with you caffe' or cappuccino. There is need for appertivi. Basically its a snack that is meant to hold one over until dinner in the 5-7 range. We go to the L'Office for appertivi because we know the owner. Usually you drink a bitter drink with ginger in it to settle the stomach as you at snack food. You pay for the drink and usually the snacks are provided. I am still trying to get this appertivo thing down because I do not like to snack really and I do not like the bitter drinks.
5. Get some Gelato-
Nettuno or Gerrys? At night if you want to wait a while and be wall to wall with 40 of your favorite friends, Nettuno might be for you, the Nettuno flavor is my favorite flavor in Salerno, but Gerrys is my favorite Gelateria. The air condition does something to you in the summer when its so hot outside.
6. Go the Park
There is a beautiful park in Salerno with benches, shade, and fountains. There is no equipment for kids to play on, but they can run around!
7. Walk on the Lungomare-
Take it from these Italians, its the bomb.com, kinda creepy but hey they did it so I don't have to.
We got back late Sunday night from our Spring Conference. We took 2 big vans to fit all 5 kids and 10 team members in. In coming up and going back we had to pack both vans at the same time in order to get all the stuff in them we needed to. It also always gets me how different driving in another country is. On top of that it was raining on Sunday evening and there was a ton of traffic as we drove on the autostrada on the outskirts of Rome.
Grant's favorite toy as we drove up
It gave me time to think about a lot of the content of the conference. God works His big story in the small stories of Abraham, Job, and Paul. The most impacting was probably remembering Job's story. His story included incredible affliction, but the central message was not about trials and temptation but just how much he trusted God. He desired answers to all his questions of why he was getting tested when the Lord just wanted his trust.
This week is a little different. One of the leaders of our team is going back home to get married and start a new life. Amanda Craig is in her fourth year here and is considered long term staff in Italy. She is pretty close to fluent in Italian and she has gotten to know the culture here pretty well. We are meeting a few times to discuss the future of the ministry again this morning so we can get her input before she leaves on Sunday. Its somewhat of a debrief in order to bring structure of what the ministry is going to look like for years to come. Between all our team there is 17 years experience of living in Italy not counting Amanda and I since we just got here and Evin the Valiquettes babysitter this semester, so we feel like the dialogue that comes about on numerous different topics is going to be key in the framework of the future.
Some of the highlights this week is that we got to have Francesco and his girlfriend, Lucia, over for lunch this past Wednesday. I met Francesco when the vision trips were here a few weeks ago. A picture of me and him is on the blog a few posts back. This was the second time I got to hang out with them and the first time they got to meet Amanda and Grant since I met Francesco for the first time. They only know a few words in English so we only talk in Italian which is extremely good for my language learning.
We met Ambrogio on campus a few weeks ago. He is interested in studying the Bible and so we went through a lot of scriptures on how Christ is the fulfillment of the law last Thursday. He said for the first time he understood that the law is a guide and shows us our sin not the means by which we get to heaven on how good we follow it. We are going to meet again this Thursday. Please pray that it goes well and we are lead by the Spirit.
Newest Insieme- Agape Italia's Newsletter. I posted about it a while back. It gives you the best vision and reality of where the ministry is heading inside of Italy as a whole.
Another fun thing is this map of Italy made of words. Click on it to make it bigger. We live in Southwestern, Italy. There is great coffee and pizza is our region. The fun thing about the map is to see how diverse Italy really is region to region. The only big mistake I found on the map is that Good Pizza should not be above the Vatican.
Lastly are some interesting facts about the spiritual reality here in Italy.
DID YOU KNOW: • 32,000 (out of 33,500) Italian communities have no established evangelical witness • Only 10% (of expatriate missionaries) on average return for a second term • there are 616 officialreligions in Italy • there are an estimated 100,000 recognized fortune-tellers • less than 5% of Catholics are actually practicing • Islam is the second religion in Italy. Jehovah’s Witnesses are as numerous as all Evangelicals put together • 2.6 million foreigners live in Italy • in Milan alone more than 1000 teenagers commit suicide each year
Would you take a moment and pray about these things?
Has it really been two weeks since I have posted? Time flies these days. I have something say that I am very excited about! We finally got our internet at full power! A technical person came about a week ago worked on it for about two hours and our DSL turned on 3 days later! It makes Skype and our vonage phone way more consistent. So feel free to call if you want but do not call past 4 in the afternoon. The time in Salerno is on our blog so you do not forget :)
We have been trying to get back in a groove here being on campus without leading a bunch of Americans around who do not speak much Italian. We have gotten in some good conversations where we have built some relationships or shared the gospel or both. We try to rely on the Holy Spirit to guide our conversations. Please continue to pray for us.
Our Bible study with Marko, Gian Luca, and Andrea continues to go well. God has really blessed us with 3 guys that want to go deep and also understand a ridiculous amount of English so that we only have to talk in Italian a little. They converse in Italian about what we are talking about in English. I almost think it is better because it forces them to talk to each other for understanding and it is interaction between them and not just us. The first picture below is of Gian Luca and his band. He is the lead singer. Andrea is also in a band as a drummer. The second picture below is a set with him playing drums and his friend Mimmo playing base and singing.
God also has been dealing with me in the area of my repentant heart from one of the Bible studies. It is a deeper issue that God exposed to me through the study. It is an awesome thing that God has been growing me and humbling me because here I am supposed to have it all together, but I don't. This is one of things we are trying to implement. We need the gospel just as much as any Italian.
This past week we have gone at half speed as we want to continue to be intentional but it is our Spring Break and a week where Easter at end causes the university to be more empty. I got to spend more time with Francesco. His picture is below. Also Jaime and Tyler came in town and got engaged. They were interns on the team last year. The bummer of this week was that Grant was sick for a few nights and caused us to not get as much sleep. We missed a few days that were beautiful that we could have taken day trips. We do not always have a lot of time blocked off to do a whole day because a lot of times on Saturday or Sunday we will hang out with students or at least do church related events.
It was Pasqua yesterday and Paquetta today. Basically in English Pasqua is Easter and Pasquetta is little Easter or Easter Monday. The tradition on Pasquetta is to go some other city and have a picnic with friends and family. We met some friends at Marko's hotel from Battipaglia that attend the church there.
For Pasqua you give huge chocolate eggs to people. I asked a few people if they have had Easter egg hunts or heard of the Easter bunny and they said no. So it is weird that their is the tradition of the Easter egg. Wikipedia translated says that the commercialized Easter egg is more prevalent where there is more traditional Easter and thus Easter egg hunts have not become as popular. It is basically the same as the tradition of the Christmas tree at Christmas. It is the merge of two different traditions that happen around the same time of year. Here is some of the big eggs decorated beautifully with sweet surprises in them. The first picture are Juventus and AC Milan eggs which are big soccer clubs in Italy.
It has been sad to see the vision trips go back to America. It was good in some ways having a ton of Americans here in Italy for two weeks. It was really interesting also to see how both weeks were totally different not just because the trips were from two different places.
UCF was the first week. There was four staff and four students for a total of eight. Five out of the Eight had been to Salerno before. For them it was good to catch up with their friends on campus. The week was very rainy and cold so there were not may Italian students around to share the gospel with. We ended up doing Soularium with blown up 8x10 size pictures for two days on campus inside the buildings. Soularium is a tool that uses pictures to share the gospel. People relate their life, spiritual walk, and God to different pictures and allows them to explain more in depth because the pictures are very well done, depicting certain emotions. Moreover, I was able to meet a few guys through the outreach at the Cube that Thursday.
Mississippi State came this past week. There were 22 of them and campus was booming since it was some of the best weather this year. They were walking up to people and using a gospel tool called the Ransom Principle which focuses on the law and good works at the beginning more than the 4 Spiritual Laws that Crusade normally uses. The gospel was shared so many times this past week. We met a lot of spiritually interested people. The top people that I met and plan to meet up with again that you can pray for is Francesco x 3, Emanuel, Pierre Paolo, and Lello. Please pray for existing relationships with Carlo Alberto, Alfredo, Davide, and Orlando who plays semiprofessional basketball here and came to Christ in 2006. I plan on trying to reach out to all these guys within the the next two weeks.
As Rodney mentioned in the last post, we have two different groups coming in for a vision trip over the next two weeks. These weeks have the potential to be very exciting for the ministry here, but they also require quite a bit of work. The group from UCF will be here for the first week.
Monday:
Arrive in Salerno around 12pm
Evangelism/Cultural Training 3pm-5pm
(Please pray for this small team of only 8 Americans to be on fire for how God can use them this week on campus.)
Tuesday-Thursday:
On campus evangelism 10am-3pm
(Please pray for the team to meet English speakers on campus to engage in spiritual conversations. Also, please pray for the weather. It is supposed to be cold and rainy which could mean that there won't be as many students on campus just hanging out)
Thursday Night:
Outreach event at local hang out called the Cube
(Pray that many Italians will come to this event. Pray that the STINT team would connect with any new contacts that the vision trip team makes)
Thanks so much for your prayers. Please also pray that despite the less than perfect weather (40s-50s and heavy rain) that the team would be able to connect with students on campus.
This week has been very busy for us here in Salerno. First, Vision Trip is next week and since Amanda and I are the point people that have been organizing the events, making schedules, delegating tasks that need to get done for our team, and communicating with the vision trip leaders from UCF and Mississippi State respectively. We will put out a schedule on our blog this weekend so you can be praying during the exact time for some of the events. (We are 6 hours ahead of you in Eastern Time, you can see the clock on the right side of our home blog page for the time in Salerno.
The Crawford's also arrived back with their little one, Lila Grace, who today turns two months old. The Crawford's are the other couple on our team other than the Valiquette's. Please pray for them to adjust back to Italian time and culture!
Also this week Jutty and I met up with Nico on campus.
Nico is one of the guys who became a Christian in 2006 during the summer project when almost 40 people indicated decisions for Christ. Nico has been discipled on and off since then with two of his friends Andrea and Paolo. Nico would like to keep studying the Bible so we are going to meet with him on Thursdays!
(Here's Rodney on campus this summer when we bumped into Nico and his friends.
Nico is to the left of Rodney in the blue shirt.)
We re-started the guys Bible study this Wednesday at 3pm where it should continue every week. Marko, Andrea, Gian Luca, and Stefano are going to be a part of this. They are hungry for the word and are interested in being in a community of believers. Please pray that we can start other studies and this one will grow.
The biggest prayer request that I currently have is we are getting about 10 people together who have professed faith in Christ, who are currently growing in their faith with us, and people we see on a regular basis so that we can keep up with what God is doing in their lives. We are going to have a time that they can share about how God is using them and how they are growing in Christ WITH EACH OTHER! Many of them only know us and not each other. We are excited because this could the beginning of people seeing that there are other Italians that are sharing their faith and God is moving in their lives. This event is going to be at 7pm tomorrow, 3/5. Please pray that the Holy Spirit moves in our midst and that God would heal a lot of people of sickness on our team including the Crawford's, the Valiquette's kids, and Evin their nanny. Can't wait to update you guys on how this goes!
Here's a pictures of Amanda and Grant enjoying some sunshine. We haven't seen very much of it since we've been here so we've been trying to take advantage of every chance that we get!
Please sign up for the Agape Italia (remember Campus Crusade is Agape Italia in Italy) quarterly newsletter Insieme. It will give you more scope into the big picture of ministry here in Italy. You can view this months newsletter here. A lot of times we talk about things that are Salerno specific on the blog and our newsletter. I wanted to make a blog post that only talks about this because it is very important
Last summer my wife took a beginning language course to improve her Italian. I met with a tutor, really my friend, Andrea, a language student at the university here. We met for 3 months in person and on skype when I returned to America in August. We want to continue to meet but in addition I am taking a language course at a school here in Salerno to improve my Italian skills. I am way better in writing, reading, and understanding than speaking. In some ways my speaking is one level down compared to the other 3. So I am taking lessons in a higher level this week. I might drop down a level for next week so that my speaking might improve, I do not know I have not decided yet. UCF gave me a great foundation in Italian 3 years ago when I took two semesters my senior year of college. You guys can pray for me as I study and try to figure out where I should be as I feel inbetween two levels right now.
In the midst of learning language, planning for this semester, and getting settled in, I have got to spend some time with some students. Some of the highlights that you can pray for is: I will be meeting with Peppe to discuss John over the next month. We are going to look at 5 chapters every week. Pray that God opens his heart and that through the Holy Spirit I am able to answer his questions. If you know any good online resources about the book of John please shoot me a comment. I have an idea of how I want to do it but I always appreciate help. We arrived at this decision to study John after a long talk about humanity, the Bible, and the person of Jesus. I know God has the capacity to change his life as he has changed mine so please pray for us.
Also pray for Salvatore. He has become more interested in spiritual things over the times I have met with him. He wants to study the Bible in a group setting sometime. Pray that this would come to fruition and as sometimes students want to learn English and not necessarily talk about spiritual things. Pray that our talk of the gospel last week begins to change his life and will happen again.
Lastly I want to leave you with something that we have been experiencing in Salerno. Today is ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent. The period before this is called Carnevale. The word comes from "carne levare" which means to "take away meat". During this period kids dress up like they would for halloween and use silly string and confetti on other kids. Yesterday was the actual day of carnevale equal to that of Fat Tuesday. There are many parties and not just kids dress up. The weather was really bad so it was not as good as normal. I did not take any pictures because I always had my camera when the weather was bad but here are some pictures I found online of carnevale in Salerno.
Here's a funny little picture sign on a bus that we saw the other day. Some buses are more handicapped accessable than others. So I guess if you were waiting for this bus you would know that it was good for people in wheelchairs, with canes and pregnant people. Yes, the lady of the left with the giant circle is apparently the symbol for being pregnant.
I promise we'll be back with some more posts soon.
We finally feel like we're getting settled in and have a couple of cool things to be blogging about soon :)
We arrived in Salerno at 11:30am Rome time on January 14th. That is 5:30 am Eastern time. We were 30 minutes late on our last flight that was an hour and a half from Munich to Naples. It was a total of 17 hours of travel time from when we left the Tampa airport. Grant slept most of the way in my arms making me sweat profusely. I thought I would preempt this problem by wearing shorts and a t-shirt on the plane. Then when we got to Munich and it was 25 degrees Fahrenheit we had to go out into the snow and take a bus to the airplane. All the Germans and Italians in parkas were looking at me like a crazy American. I was not super crazy thinking that I was going to be in climate controlled airplanes and airports all the way to Naples. In a nutshell, Grant did not have any jetlag because he slept a lot but us a combined 1.5 hours of sleep during the whole trip. Grant the first week was sleeping into about 9am here which was awesome for us!
The second week we were here we had to go to a conference in Spain with all the interns across Europe. We flew out of Naples and we got Marko to take us to the airport since he was going to pick the Valiquettes up (our team leaders). So we got to cross paths at the airport which was cool and got to meet their new nanny Evan and her mom also. We flew to Barcelona and had to stay one night because of the flight times. We use Easyjet, Ryanair and Vueling when traveling in Europe because they are cheaper than trains usually. You have to be careful though because Ryanair flies into the Rome airport that is way out of the way and not way easy to get to anything. We stayed an extra night in Barcelona so we could do some sightseeing since we are not really going to get to travel to much with Grant being so young and trying to stay in Salerno this summer. We got a deal on Priceline where you can name your own price.
The conference was awesome. We got to get refreshed and got to get back on the same page with our bosses and our team. One of the highlights for me was the session about all the different things that we need to check up on in the Lord. These ranged from our eyes, ears, tongue to our minds. There are so many things in a new culture that might cause us to check out emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. We have to stay close to the Lord and trust Him and not our own strength.
We just got back to Salerno on Friday evening and are settling in again getting ready to jump into ministry this week part time and full time next week. In the meantime we have taken a few pictures of Grant below.
We hope everyone had a blessed Christmas and had great time bringing in the New Year. We did as we have had fun spending a lot of time with family as we are leaving to come back to Salerno in 9 days. That means that we are going to be crazy busy in the next week packing and getting ready to leave. We will be landing in Naples at 11am on the 14th. It is exciting and scary to be returning to Salerno. Mostly exciting because we have missed everyone and what God has called us to so much. Even with our child being born we know that being in Salerno and working on the college campus there is what we have been hand selected to do during this time in our lives. Scary, because we again have become familiar to the U.S. and its luxuries. We are going to miss our families and know that it is going to be hard for them to be far away from their only grandchild. We know that God will provide us an extra measure of grace to complete what He has called us to do.
Lately I have been thinking of some New Years Goals. Yes thats right I am a slacker and have not done them yet. No, I do not call them resolutions. There is a lot of stuff that I want to work on in 2010. A lot of stuff I am believing God to do in Amanda, Grant, and I's lives. Things I want to see happen in Salerno. For instance, I want to see a group of guys get together and study the Bible like the girls have been having before Christmas. We do have people we meet with to disciple. We have people we share the hope of Christ with and what He has done in our lives with individuals. We have not been able to have a consistent meeting with a group of Italian guys to only study the Bible. I have faith that God can do it.
Last I want to leave you with some photos of Grant, one from his dedication at OGC. He loves to stand up now, smile at you, and grab a few select things. Today he absolutely yelled while I was on the phone. Not upset yelled but just high pitched happy laughter. It was pretty funny.
