A nice busy weekend.

This past weekend was really busy in a good way. Friday and Saturday, I attended our Oregon Diabetes Educator association's annual conference, which is an opportunity to get a lot of continuing education credits that I will need to renew my certification in a few years. The topics this year were quite good and I enjoyed the company of my coworkers who also attended. Some of the subjects this year were:

• Continuous Glucose Monitoring - what it is and how to use the info (This is the latest tool that we have for managing diabetes, it's not used widely yet, but we believe that it will change how we treat the disease in the coming years.)
• Why your patients hate to test their blood glucose and what you can do about it. (This was presented by a psychologist who specializes in Diabetes issues.)
• Diabetes and Exercise. (presented by a very fun physical therapist)
• Inpatient Glycemic control (This is very applicable to my job, especially the special projects that I work on)
• Current trends and controversies in nutrition
• Type 2 diabetes in children (a growing problem in the US!)

I learned a lot and came home inspired to make some changes in my own eating habits.

While I was at the conference on Saturday, Denis helped out at a disability ministry event sponsored by our local chapter of Joni and Friends. I think I heard that over 30 people from our own church volunteered at this event, which is so exciting and encouraging. It was a great opportunity for people to get some experience with this type of ministry. On Sunday, a few special guests from JAF came to our church to speak and it was great to get to speak with them afterwards to keep "picking their brains" about how to keep things growing at our church. They were asking Denis and I if we would like to go to the July family camp as the medical personnel. Please pray for us for this. We would really like to do it, but will have just used up three weeks of vacation pay for our June trip cross-country. It would be a significant financial cost to us when you consider the lost pay.

After church Sunday, we bought our last supplies for the chicks - food and water containers, chick feed and wood chips. Denis has been working on the enclosure, so I'll post pictures of the finished coop when he's all done. And of course, chick pictures will have to be posted!