It's Christmas shopping time. I've bought a few things. One big department store (Marks & Spencers) had a 20% off day last week. I bought a bunch of clothes for the boys and Wayne. Lots of shops are having big discounts.

Wayne's Dad is in the hospital. Wayne might go to see him and that would really change our Christmas plans. Terry might go home today after having brain surgery for bleeding on the brain. We're very thankful it was caught in time.

It's 6 degrees Celsius outside. Very chilly and dry, no snow.

Jessica will be 18 on Saturday. Hard to believe. I've got one present bought, but need to get a couple more.

Monday morning

We attended a farewell last night for a couple from church who are imigrating to Australia. It was a really fun time and helpful for us to get to know a few more people in this new church.

The week looks busy as we have a guest coming tonight for emergency counselling. She'll be here for 3 nights.

Rhiannon came home Saturday morning from her 5 week trip in Congo & Rwanda. It's nice to have her back.

One of the new dwarf hamsters died yesterday. I guess we don't have it quite figured out how to keep a hamster alive.

Well, I've got to get the guest room ready!

A sunny day!

After a long wet summer we've finally had some sunshine but today it feels like fall. The wind has been blowing all night and the ground is covered with leaves and my unripe pears falling off the tree.

I don't know if I'm just not a natural blogger or if there is a better way to get into this. But with only 8 posts so far, it certainly seems like I'm not really getting the hang of it. I think I'll try giving my self deadlines. I could try going overboard and commit to posting everyday or try a more reasonalbe once a week. The funny thing is that I now have 3 blogs--why would I do that when I can't seem to get one working!?

Well, I'm going to work on it. And my next challenge is to get photos off my camera phone onto this blog. That will be my goal for next week.

Kim

Revive Us Again

Well, it's time to revive this blog. Looking at the last post, it's clear that I couldn't forsee the future! 9 months later and Wayne was not appointed as an elder, tomorrow is the last day of school and I have new glasses (vari-focals) so that picture will have to be updated!

So I'm going to revive this blog, partly just to get myself back in the habit (ha, ha, I don't think I ever had a blog habit judging by the frequency of posts!)

Now that I've remembered how to do a post, I'm going to set out on my task of setting up a blog for parents living cross-culturally. Yes, I know I've been threatening to do this for days--ok years! And today is the day.

I've also joined Facebook in the last month--hopefully that will also help my technical expertise increase!

The point of no return

You know that phrase, 'you passed the point of no return'. Well I just can't seem to get it out of my head lately. I've been doing lots of stuff relating to member care for missionary families. Long term planning is alway an issue when you've got kids in school in a foreign country. But mix up the issues involved in pioneering a new team and ministry with the complications of having 4 kids in a complicated school system, add in local church ministry and long term planning becomes quite a challenge--did I mention aging parents?

In a couple of months our church will have to choose elders and Wayne will probably be one of them. We were discussing the future of our church with a couple this week whose comments were something like this, 'you're missionaries here, you could leave anytime, do you really want to commit to eldership?' Oh LOL, jep, just leave anytime! Just pull those 4 kids out of their british education and transplant them to America! The programs that the girls are in leaves no room for a change of school, let alone town or country in the next 4 years!

Shouldn't ministry, calling, the thread of how the Lord has lead us the last 20 years have more bearing than an educational system? Yes, and it does, it's just that some days it feels like we are now here for the schools.

It's these kind of random thoughts that I'd imagined having time to put on a blog page. I hope it is more than just blah, blah, blah for those of you reading!

So 'the point of no return' it's that sense that you already passed it and there's no going back. I don't want to go back, I love what we are doing but maybe I've kept too much security in knowing there was a back door somewhere. There aren't any escape routes right now. We're here, right where God wants us--and these 4 kids, that God gave us.

The girls are at youth group, while Wayne and the boys watch the quarter final of the Rugby world cup. Life is full, God is good.

Pictures from Czech

This is Erika standing in front of the hospital that she was born in. It looks the same as it did on that snowy night in March 14 years ago!
This is me going into a little grocery shop that I used to buy food in when we lived in Czech. It looked exactly the same inside! I used to park the stroller outside with Erika in it while Jessica and I went inside to buy food.
And this is the apartment building that we lived in. It also looks exactly the same--actually it looked worse. 10 years has taken it's toll. But we could see that a modernization project was underway and that it probably won't look like this for much longer. We were in the ground floor apartment to the left of the entrance.

Czech Visit

I promised I'd write about our family trip back to the Czech Republic after the summer conference. We'll, it's October but it's still worth writing about!

So we were at the conference in the south of Poland. We set off with 3 other families to spend a few days at the Josiah Venture hotel, Malenovice. When we arrived at the Cesky Tesin border crossing we were a caravan of 4 vehicles. It was so wild--one of the borders that we had crossed so frequently while living in Czech. The same border that we had crossed many times during our bible smuggling days.

All the security ingrained in us kicked in. The buildings and the little booths that they took our passports into were the same--but everything was so different. Because we were 3 American families and one Australian family with a German thrown in there we weren't just waved through like the European Union citizens. We had to sit and wait for about 15 minutes. Wayne kept saying, 'just don't say the M word.'(smuggling) It was so cool and weird at the same time. We told the kids how sometimes we would wait at this border for 2 hours or more. They were trying to take it in but I'm not sure if they could understand it all.

We then spent 3 nights in the mountains at the beautiful hotel with our friends Jim & Lina Miller, Paul & Reinhild Sydnor, and new friends Brian & Christine Cotrell. Beautiful weather, lots of long talks over coffee, no cooking and children playing card games till all hours of the night.

One day we drove into Havirov, the town we used to live in and where Erika was born. Jessica remembered things and so did Erika, which is really amazing since they were 5 & 3 when we left. We knocked on one door of old friends and spent an hour speaking Czech as best we could.

Erika said, 'Wow, this really is a nice place to live.' Wayne said, 'I really can still speak Czech, we could live here again.' Another highlight was eating all the Czech foods that we miss, like deep fried cheese with tarter sauce.

It was only 3 days vacation but it was an amazing trip that no one in our family will forget. We were also blessed to have a meal with our former teammates Ken & Andrea Pitch while their kids taught our kids some violent card games! And just a couple hours before we had to leave we were able to have lunch with Dave & Connie our former team leaders. It was great to see the hotel and new offices for the team and hear what God is doing. Those were formative years for us when we were on the JV team and it was great to remember where we've been, see friends and praise God for his faithfulness.