10:00 is the new midnight.....

I've heard new phrases like "40 is the new 30" and "50 is the new 40", so after this weekend I decided to coin my own new phrase: 10:00 is the new midnight. Why? Because the older I get, the more difficult it gets to stay up past 10:00 at night. Ten years ago, it wasn't too big of a deal to make it to mignight, at least for me. The bride's always been the kind of person who would be asleep on the couch by 8:30 on a nightly basis if she had the chance.

We ended up with five 9th grade girls in our home for the weekend, along with a college senior as their group leader. I think the loudest it got was any time that Sara was in the room "entertaining" them with cartwheels or dance moves. They did devotionals Friday night and Saturday morning. The entire group's service product was collecting food for the TN Baptist Children's Home, and as a whole they collected over 9,000 pounds of food. There's a good bunch of kids in our youth group, and almost 200 participated in the weekend event. And the youth ministry staff is unbelievable.

It made it to 78 here on Saturday, and it was so nice. Of course, back to more "seasonal" weather for the rest of the week, but spring is definitely getting closer. Makes me want to go out to the driving range just to see how poorly I can hit a golf ball.

A bit of sad news. The bride's cousin, Jennifer, and her husband Mark are moving. Mark came across a great opportunity in North Carolina, and they leave in a couple of weeks. So now we'll be about 480 miles away from each other instead of 18 miles. They will be very missed by our family of four. The bride and Jennifer are more like sisters than cousins, so this will be harder for them than any of the rest of us.

So do I feel any older today than I did Friday as a result of a weekend with 5 extra women in the house? No, I don't think so. However, you don't always notice missing brain cells right away, and there's a good chance I had a few of them burned away with all the hair dryers going in our house over the past few days.....