Fun Weekend and Lentil Soup

We had a very fun and busy weekend. On Thursday nights, we host our young adults home group from church at our house. We have dinner, Rick teaches, and we have discussion. We enjoy having everyone over every week. We try to do lots of social events with the young adults group during the summer because many of the people who are away at school during the year are home. So, we had our annual cookout at our house on Friday. Needless to say, we cleaned up from Thursday's event on Friday morning and started preparing for the cookout. We had tables and chairs set up on the back patio (and plenty of citronella candles because the mosquitoes can be brutal). We ate hot dogs and hamburgers and had a good time. We later played Catchphrase with the whole group and it was hilarious. We played boys versus girls and it is so funny to see how differently men and women communicate with the same sex. We understand each other so well. When the boys were giving each other some of the clues, the girls were furrowing their brows and the boys knew exactly what each other meant. haha!

We cleaned up and got in bed by midnight on Friday night, then, on Saturday morning, we went to a pool party/get together with our young marrieds with children home group. This group just formed at church and we recently joined up. Rick and I were just talking about how refreshing it is to be part of a group of our friends/peers that we don't have to lead in any way. Rick has been teaching youth and home groups for years and we have never gotten to be a part of one just for ourselves. We had so much fun at our friend Jose and Sarah's home. The have a nice patio and pool in the back. All the parents were swimming and hanging out with their young children. Little kids are incredibly funny and entertaining. We had fun but were so pooped after this we tried to chill the rest of the day and Sunday afternoon. Whew!

On another note, I have written a little about new recipes and/or foods I like. I get my recipes from two different sources: friends and foodnetwork.com. I like lentils and have eaten them in dishes at restaurants but have never cooked them myself. I went to Carrabba's with a friend the other night and ordered one of my favorite things there: Italian sausage and lentil soup. Yum! It made me come home and look up a lentil soup recipe on foodnetwork.com. It's not an Italian soup like at the restaurant but it's tasty and very healthy. It is vegetarian (I am not a vegetarian, but I don't like a lot of meat either) but filling. It's got all kinds of veggies and some elbow pasta. So good...