Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to our Engaged Encounter family! We had a great time at the Christmas party at Ventura's on the 12th. They do such an awesome job hosting this party in their gorgeous home. Homemade sangria and yummy eats! The white elephant gift exchange was pretty good, only a few steals! We ended with a game of trivia.

We hope you have a wonderful Christmas break with your loved ones. Try to relax and enjoy each other's company and your many blessings. Don't forget to sign up for a weekend in the new year!

November Gathering

Our November Gathering was pretty light this week. We did a Thanksgiving potluck with a smoked turkey from Mojo's. YUM! The biggest take away from the meeting is that we now have a storage unit. So, when it's your turn to work a weekend, you need to go to the storage unit to get all the stuff. The Oehmann's did an awesome job of organizing the space and labeling everything to make it easy to pick up and drop off on your way to Marywood. Thank you, Jamie and Dawn! Don't forget about this fun enrichment just in time for the stress of the holidays. Go over it by yourself first, then come together to discuss as a couple (just like on a weekend). Here it is in case you missed it.

Celebrating 40 Years of CEE with a beautiful mass and sandWITCHES!

Happy 40th Anniversary, Catholic Engaged Encounter! We had a special mass at Marywood on a beautiful Saturday morning overlooking the river. Fr. Tim and Fr. Donal celebrated mass for us, some of our presenting priest pals. After mass we did a sandWITCH potluck. We loved catching up with each other, being outside on a pretty, Florida fall day and coming together to celebrate marriage. What a great way to spend a Saturday morning!


Our special mass at Marywood

Conference Call

We had our first conference call last night to discuss some business. Back at the Discernment in March we discerned some positions and wanted to make sure everyone is on the same page. The Venturas are the finance & prayer couple. Perezes are the Database couple, Berrioses are the Social Media couple and Pendletons are the follow up couple. The call began with each couple telling us a High and a Low in their lives right now. We did an Opening Prayer, then discussed the 40th Anniversary- instead of the family challenge, we decided to still celebrate the 40th Anniversary with a party after mass at the Marywood outdoor chapel October 31 at 11am. A blurb will be in the bulletins inviting everyone. So much love it's scary!The October 16th Enrichment is cancelled. The Nov 6th Enrichment is still on. For finances- Mike created a reimbursement form to use here. This is also on the Job Responsibilities page. Ron & Patty have plans to meet with the marriage prep guru at each church in the diocese. They are going to send out an email to give a heads up first. They will start with thanking those who send lots of couples on weekends. The goal is to tap in to the large parishes who send few couples on weekends. We need a media committee to edit advertising literature and work on advertising pieces. We also need a supply committee to keep an inventory of materials and purchase needed supplies. Bravos will send out a group email for these needs and invite others to join in future calls. Steve closed with a prayer. The call lasted about an hour and a half.

Happy 40th Anniversary Catholic Engaged Encounter!

The Venturas represented us the last weekend in August for the Unit meeting in Tallahassee. The most exciting thing to come from that weekend is our preparation for next month- the 40th Anniversary for CEE! At our September enrichment this past Friday we discussed our plan. We'll post the daily prayers that we passed out at the meeting on the blog and Facebook. Instead of the enrichment scheduled, we're going to have a 40th Anniversary party on October 31st (Halloween). Fr. Tim Lozier will preside a mass at 11am at the outdoor altar at Marywood. Then we'll have a party afterwards (details to come). We also talked about taking it up a notch to celebrate 40 years by giving back. We're going to choose a family to help. Maybe it's yard work and doing a "honey do" list for an older couple or bringing gifts and a Christmas dinner to a family with children. As a ministry, we will get together and give back to a family in need. Then, we are going to challenge other ministries in our diocese to do the same. Our goal is 40 ministries and 40 families! Game on!

Summer Fun

The summer is busy for us in CEE! It's always a great time to enrich your marriage, right? We had 3 families from our group fly out to San Angelo, TX for the District III Convention. They had a wonderful time connecting with each other, getting tips and coming back all fired up!



Great representation from our group!

We presented on the June weekend with the Pendletons and Fr. Bernie (and his hilarious jokes!) and 11 couples. The Berrioses rocked behind the scenes. They do such an awesome job creating a fun and romantic tone!

The June dream team, love in the air and what happens when you leave your phone laying around

To keep cool in the summer heat we threw a pool party at the Hampton Park clubhouse and pool. The rain didn't bother us, just gave us an excuse to go eat some pulled pork & fixins! We loved catching up with everyone

We presented the August weekend with the Gibsons and tech-savvy Fr. Tim. The Venturas kept us in line behind the scenes. We had another great weekend with 16 couples finishing.

The August dream team, Phil's favorite game on the weekend and beautiful Marywood scenery

For the August enrichment we had fried chicken! We played a fun kissing game. Wives had one minute to kiss their husbands. Here are the 2 winners:


Andrew and the Birthday boy, Dave!

Thank you to everyone helping us make this such a fantastic ministry- for the couples completing a weekend as well as all of us behind the scenes!

May Enrichment

We think our first enrichment was a success! Enrichment is what we call our (monthly) meetings. We met at St. Matthews in the new parish center, which was super nice. We picked up a bunch of Firehouse subs and everyone brought their fav side. It was fun catching up with everyone. I was sorta stressing about making it all happen. We had an afternoon marathon of school pick up, swim team, showers and PJs, Firehouse run then off to open the building. Once we got together with everyone and dug into the subs, I took a deep breath and knew we were good to go. We sang "Happy Birthday" to sweet Jack and shared his cake. After dinner the nursery workers arrived and we started our meeting. We did a special thank you to the Oehmanns for their hard work as past coordinators and gave them a hot date night out. We heard about the May weekend. It sounds like they had a very spiritual group. The May dream team should be following up with their group, which will be cool. We ended the gathering with the chair game. My favorite ice breaker, with a twist. You had to move as a couple and we made cards with questions. It was cute and made everyone get up and run around, which is always fun. The June dream team is already prepping for their weekend later this month. We hope to see you at the pool party in July. Let us know if you haven't seen the evite.

We have a blog!

Our first official act as new local coordinators is to set up this blog: BAM! This blog is intended for use of our St. Augustine community ministry. If you are looking to go on a weekend, you are in the wrong place- look here. This is for those of us on the "inside" prepping for the next engaged encounter weekend. Did you miss a community gathering and want to hear how it went? Can't remember when you signed up for a weekend? Having a tough week and need some marriage enrichment? You are in the right place!
The calendar of upcoming events is right over here to the right --->
We also have a Facebook group, so don't forget to chatter there as well. Do you feel more "in the loop"? We hope so! We can't wait to hang out with you soon!
Love, the Bravos