Cinter Claus

I realize we are a few weeks late for CinterClaus but our dutch friends initiated us this year into their fun tradition (= One of the gifts for all the kids in our little community were these awesome face masks. Layla and Ryan are striking an appropriately serious pose.
 

 

Ryan and his serious superhero buddy (= I'm realizing that I think I already posted these photos. Ooops. It is the day after Christmas and we are relaxing in pjs!

Quick Christmas shots

I don't know if my parents felt the same about Christmas as I do, but it always feels like we didn't do everything we wanted to do and often like it went too fast. sigh. So here are some pictures that reflect our time. FUN with Jon and Vic our friends before we had babies when we first moved out here (=

They were here for a quick 24 hours and rolled right into present wrapping together!

Tom looking tough because he just hung that mammoth world map. I LOVE maps and have been wanting to get this hung for ages. I guess Christmas Eve seemed the time....

Vic making mincemeat pies. Yum yum! The kids were supposed to help but they were literally sobbing in their beds (= poor kids had so much fun they cried.

Probably our sanest moment....eating cinnamon rolls and eggs for breakfast!

wow. they finally all smiled!

More bye bye to doggie and more CAMPING!

Just had to include a few more photos of saying goodbye to Auggie the Doggie.

We are grateful that our kids sleep so well when camping!! One of my favorite parts is waking up together in the morning and snuggling with each other. Our friends were up at 6 and hiked for two hours before returning and waking us up at 8am (= Each family has its own rhythm!!

I love this picture of the kids. The two in the middle are our Dutch friends who we went camping with. The kids played and played and played. Ryan is totally himself in this photo "I'm up! I'm happy! I'm jumping up and down!" Layla "I'm sitting here looking pretty and sweet and totally confident in the moment" Such fun.

Bye bye doggie

We had a chance to dog sit for a few weeks! Tom and the kids LOVE dogs and I am willing to become a dog lover. This guy has been passed around quite a bit but it really a sweet dog. Alas, we have a pack of about 10 kids under the age of 10 around or house which is great for our kids but not great for a dog. Local kids don't know much about how to treat a dog and so usually end up aggravating them. So that in combination with the multiple random cats our neighbor feeds just made him bark too much. It was a real shame as we all enjoyed him and he was remarkably trainable.

 

The nice this is that he is able to go live on a friend's camel farm so he'll have quite a happy life wild and free. He really needed more space than we had as well. We were willing to try training him on a leash but the cat and kid issue was just too much to surrount at this point in our lives.... 

 

You can see some good shots of our front garden. It is quite small compared to other places here but I've bought plants everytime I hear someone is leaving (= So it feels quite green at this point. For some reason outdoor plants are really really cheap out here! You can't see it from this photo but the house wall is only about 6 feet away from me in this picture so we have about 15 feet of space in front of the house but it stretches the full width of the house.

Happy Belated Birthday Tom!

Tom was finally able to use his birthday grill! It is a HUGE amazing find on the local "swop and shop" Facebook page. There had been a big store which blew this against a wall and broke off some nobs. It was literally 85% off the new price (= The sweet little face you see in the picture is not Layla....but her best friend who plays with us every Tuesday.

 

And just in time I found a very belated birthday gift which we wrapped up and gave to him that night. Sue - we all loved them! Azeb wrapped them up in an empty tissue box and put tissues back in to confuse him. It was pretty funny (=

Thoughts on Suffering

**While I had a few minutes on the computer this afternoon (ryan was getting his haircut and layla had a friend over) I was looking at the posts I wrote that have never been published for some reason or another. This was one that I wrote AGES ago but the topic and thoughts are still so relevant and current for me. So here it is about two years and 4 months later....
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When I get time in the mornings (ie I'm not so tired after feeding Ryan at 7am that I just stumble back to bed) i love to sit in my brightly lit, pink kitchen and drink a cup of coffee and journal/do my quiet time/listen to a sermon on CD. Definitely a favorite thing of mine.....alone time, getting perspective, being reminded of truth.

Today's sermon by Tim Keller was on Hebrews 12. Tim calls this section "corporate pastoral counseling". Helping the church as a whole learn how to survive and thrive during suffering. Here are some of his thoughts as I processed and can remember them (huge caveat seeing as I have a 4 month old and 3 year old in my life....)

Life is meant to be an agonzing race. Several English translations have minimized the role that agony plays in the descriptions of what life should be considered in this passage. Suffering and agony crossing our path should not be such a shock to our systems. As Americans/Westerners, we have slowly drifted to believe the idea that life is about AVOIDING suffering. Much of our society and beliefs stem from this concept. Therefore Christianity is extremely relevant to our daily lives because it is one of the few systems (only system/religion/philosophy?) that provides a real and livable way to process and cope with suffering.

There is brokenness outside of us around the world and there is brokenness inside of us. Often the process of suffering or discipline is the perfect combination of these two things. The concept of discipline is the Greek word. Hold that thought, here comes my three year old.

These are the two youngest kids in our little community...Sofie is 18 months old and teeny tiny. It is so sweet. JD is about 5 months old. He is the baby that has had two episodes of not breathing for about 10 mins. It is very stressful as you can imagine and they are trying to sort it out with drs.

This is so Layla. She loves the movie Kung Fo Panda and especially Tigress. She got this mask at the Cinter Claus celebration our dutch friends put on. Sofie in the picture above is the youngest of four in the dutch family.

 

Yes - you are seeing a dog. We are dogsitting and trying to see how it works. I'm not much convinced but there are some nice pluses. We haven't sorted out the negatives yet. He is only an outside dog and doesn't run out the gate oddly enough. Those are two BIG pluses. And yes...Layla dances around like this all the time.

trying for tina

tina - do these pictures come through?

Wadis, Birthdays, Thanksgiving, ERs

This was Azeb's birthday. She is our nanny and house helper who lives with us. She is from Ethiopia and has been with us for almost two years. She is very much a part of the family and we all love her. She is a WONDERFUL addition to our life and allows me to do things other than just cook, clean and take care of kids....all wonderful things but I do want to do more while we are living out here! So we had a big celebration for her 30th birthday!

We have had several big rains out here. So a few weekends ago we went to a wadi for lunch. This picture above is a great one to illustrate a wadi....a deep valley cut through rock that water sometimes runs through.

Many of the roads were washed out for a few days or weeks depending on the area. Nothing is built to withstand rain so ANY rain means it affects life totally for a few days...cleaning up messes inside houses and out is a big job.

Just gorgeous (= 

Tom was gone for 6 days and returned home to a surprise birthday party! It was a week early and I had found an incredible grill as a gift. It was pretty beat up but we got it looking like almost-new and it was a huge surpise for Tom. He's been wanting a big fancy grill but we (I) kept saying no (= I found this one at about 85% off! 

And when daddy came home Ryan wanted to snuggle like this with his new quilt from Tutu Lisa's daddy. He loves to pull it all over his head. 

We don't always celebrate Thanksgiving and this year we only decided to do so a day ahead so it was a miracle we got it all put on the table.... 

....due in large part to Azeb's help (= 

This is Ryan wearing his Georgia Bull Dogs shirt pretending to be a baby bulldog and sitting under his daddy bull dog (= Ryan is getting very specific in his role playing and telling you how to sit and what to say etc etc etc 

This is Ryan and Iz who are both three years old. We were at the hospital while Isaiah's little brother got checked out for possible seizures or something. We kept him for the afternoon at our house after getting them settled into the pediatric department. His brother was sent home but they still need an EEG )= 

Camping, frogs and friends

One of the many good things about living here is that when the winter season comes it is FANTASTIC for camping. Because of needing water while camping one always has to do car camping here but we've gotten used to it and have our system down and really enjoy it.

Our two kids and house-helper are also avid campers which makes it all the MORE fun!

We went to a previous campsite that is close to home and it was desolate for the first day and then the second day a HUGE family of 5 white toyota SUVs pulled up next to us for a long lunch. sigh. THEN we went down to the water's edge and ran into some frogs...and then a friend and their ENTIRE family. One of the daughters used to be in Layla's class but had moved and I hadn't yet visited her mom to find out what was going on! So we hung out with them near the water and it was a great time. You've actually read about this family before here and here. They were super interested in our camping gear and set up walked back to our campsite to take a look and see us cooking hobo meals (= So fun.

Both of those are great links...the second one is that crazy one about playdates here!

Anyway - see below for pictures of our camping!

This is just about 30 mins from our house!

We've seen this little door in the mountainside for years but only just hiked up to it today!

Not sure why all the clothing is thrown out in front....I think the place was a store room.

Playing together in the morning...we are BLESSED with kids who like to sleep in and snuggle!!

grr..won't change orientation for some reason....but it is the kids flying kites.

you can see behind us some of the kids from the family we were hanging out with. Always hard to take photos with locals!

Behind Layla is the date farm and banana tree farm further beyond that. A great place to roam around!

This little man was Layla's same age and SUPER friendly. His mom is the one I knew the least but she is a forensic scientist in a crime lab!

snuggling in Azeb's tent. She sleeps in tom's one-man tent.