This week we spent two days at TEAM headquarters having our "placement consultation" which consisted of nine or so meetings with various ministry area coordinators with TEAM. It was nice to get to know the people there.

We had to take a language acquisition test that determines how well we learn a language and in what way we learn it. I was nervous as I hadn't taken a test since college 6 years ago! Nathan, on the other hand, was very at ease. Well, over the years, he's picked up some German, Pashtun, Swahili, Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew.... so, my competitive self was afraid he'd cream me on the test and that I'd do so poorly that they'd send me to Costa Rica for a year before letting me on the field with Nathan. (Did I mention I must have test anxiety?)

Well, rule #1 is "Get good sleep before a test," right? Well, God apparently had other plans as Levi ended up crying ALL night long. He's never done that before, and he acted like he was on the brink of death. After a 4am drive and hours of rocking, playing, and soothing, he fell asleep at 5am on Nathan's lap. So, at 7am, I was bright-eyed and bushy tailed (NOT!) for our test.

The test covered 5 areas of language: auditory number learning (of the Tajik language), memorization, pronunciation (also Tajik), sentence structuring/parts of speech, and another part I can't describe as it fried too many synapses. It was all timed... and after one brief melt down, a few tears, and a compassionate husband, I finally finished.

Nathan faired better than me in all of the areas, but I managed to score in the 75 percentile (Nathan was in the 97th.) The funny thing is, the test didn't matter that much. It was more of an FYI on how we learn language. It turned out not to be pass or fail. Leave it to me to make a lot out of a little.

Here are a few pictures of the boys enjoying our creek.