Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to you from our family! We hope you are treasure Christ this Christmas. He is the long-awaited Savior, the Prince of Peace, Mighty God, our Advocate, the seed of Abraham, and so much more. We have been studying some of the names of God together during advent. A dear friend stamped these names on coins and gave them to us as a gift before we left. We have all enjoyed learning more about God and hanging each name during our family worship in the evenings.

Cousins in their Christmas jammies. We were heading out to see the Christmas lights in our PJs.

Tim and I laugh so hard at the Holderness family videos. If you need a good laugh check our Christmas Jammies here or another one of their videos.

All our family with us celebrating our commissioning.

Month in Review

The past month has been very busy as we wrapped up our time in Virginia and have been traveling around visiting family for Christmas. It's been almost a month since we celebrated Ezekiel's birthday. He turned 9 the week of Thanksgiving. We were blessed to be able to celebrate his birthday over Thanksgiving with ALL of our family. Our sweet friends at training also threw him an amazing party in our quad. Enjoy the pictures of our celebrations.

Ezekiel with one of his birthday gifts. He's really in to The Hobbit right now even though he has never seen it. He and Tim are reading the book.

He requested breakfast in bed. We had to make him get back in bed because he gets up so early.

9 birthday spankings, and one to grow on.

There's always a birthday call from Papa, aka The Birthday Bandit.

BJ Bear helped us celebrate. This amazing R2-D2 was made by one of our very talented quadmates. Thank you so much Stephanie.

Mei Mei enjoyed the party with her cheesy fingers.

The boys sword fighting with balloon swords. They had a wild and crazy time.

Is that K with her ears plugged in the background?

My family graciously drove to NC so we could celebrate Thanksgiving and Ezekiel's birthday with Tim's family too. Aunt Emmy and Damaris always take such good pictures together.

The birthday boy with his Lego Movie cake that Emmy and Dustin made for him. It looked great and tasted amazing. How did 9 years pass so quickly? I love the boy he is becoming. He has his struggles but he is very caring and loving of others. He really enjoys reading Bible stories and Awana books. Sometime the house is quiet and I go looking for him and find him reading the Bible. His heart is very sensitive to the things of the Lord and he says he loves God and believes Jesus took his punishment on the cross. We pray God will continue to mold his heart and mind and grow him into a man who loves God with all his heart and finds his joy in Him. Happy Birthday again big guy!

Sweet Didi enjoyed the party and these great hats Emmy and Dustin made.

Cousin Jason! Doesn't he look like the kid off The Christmas Story?

Damaris sporting Wild Style off The Lego Movie.

Yay for cousins Heath (above) and Jude (below) coming to celebrate. 

The famous Stephanie who is a balloon artist and Hobbit expert.

Appomattax Courthouse

Last weekend we took a day trip to Appomattax Courthouse with some of our new friends. This was a really great learning experience for us and our children. They (or maybe we) worked really hard filling out an entire book of information related to the Civil War in order to become Junior Rangers. This was a big deal as they had to say a Ranger Pledge and received a nice certificate, badge, and special cards.

Ezekiel working hard on his book making a map of Appomattax Courthouse.

Waiting around for our tour and working hard on those books.

I can only imagine what these two are discussing. They both have proven to be class clowns and there is always a lot of laughing when they are together.

New friends.

Damaris and her new friend. It has been really fun for Damaris to have so many girls her age here. We had a group of girls over to make bracelets last Sunday. These girls are always doing cartwheels, flips, or hanging upside down from something. 

Didi's reenactment

In the background is the place where the Civil War officially ended. We were able to see the room where Grant and met. We learned about the silent witness, a baby doll, and were able to talk about how this home was different from our own homes.

The road through Appomattox Courthouse.

Heading back to the courthouse, now turned visitor center.

This place was beautiful.

Group photo. For once the girls outnumber the boys.

Mei Mei didn't cry the whole time, in fact I think she had a good time, as long as she had her chips :)

Me and my love. A rare photo together.

Fall Festival

Last weekend our group here at orientation put on a really fun fall festival for all the kids. The festival was a week after Halloween so we were able to find four brand new, fun costumes at Target for 90% percent off!!! That was four new costumes for less than $10!  The kids were super excited and they looked really great in them.  Below are some pictures of Mei Mei in her monkey outfit, complete with banana and all.

Profile pic of Mei Mei to get the full effect. The tail was attached with velcro so everyone kept pulling it off. It spent more time in her hands than attached to her.

Ready to go!

Pumpkin roll. Try to roll the pumpkins into a square taped on the floor. That was not an easy game.

Balloon animals. Dietrich got a turtle to match his ninja turtle costume.

Pin the pumpkin on the pumpkin patch. Our friends graciously ran our game for us so we could follow our little ones around and help them. Do you see Peter Pan in the background? Captain hook and the Tick Tock Crock were there as well. Two of my favorite costumes were three girls dressed up as Rock, Paper, Scissors and a young couple who were Indiana Jones and one of his girlfriends. 

Face painting. Is this what he is going to look like in a few years?

Greek Goddess or Pretty Princess

Always the clown. Tim had some hair painted on his head :)

Halloween Fun

Since we weren't at home for Halloween this year we didn't go trick-or-treating. The kids decided they wanted to decorate our apartment so we went to Hobby Lobby and found some crafty stuff to do. 

Damaris cutting out our Halloween print for our door. We also used this at the Fall Festival for pin the pumpkin on the pumpkin patch.

Zeke coloring his bat.

Didi picked out a pack of these cute bat finger puppets. He even made one named Nana.

Daddy and Didi. I love that Didi is wearing his crown. The boys in his class all made these crowns and they have "Who is your King?" written on them. They all walk around with these crowns on all the time and they will tell you their King is Jesus when you ask them.

Mei Mei and Mommy. More fun with bats.

Happy Halloween from Mei Mei. The "Halloween" on our sign won't stay up so we have just kept the "Happy" banner up. It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings "Happy Monday!"

Preparation

Two weeks ago our family moved north to participate in special training before we move to our new country. It has been a very busy, but a very fruitful time. We are being oriented to our new company but more importantly being equipped for the tasks that lie ahead. We have downsized again :)  We have gone from living in a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house to a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, and now we are in a three bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment. We are really enjoying our tighter quarters. Our family loves being together so we don't mind being on top of each other. Surprisingly, having only one bathroom has not been that difficult yet. We are all learning a lot of patience and how to be gracious to each other.

Ezekiel working on 7 days of creation story in our new language.

Damaris working on the same assignment.

The kids are all in school from about 9-3 everyday. They are all enjoying going to school and learning about the different places they and their friends are going. The teachers here are wonderful and are doing a great job opening our kids's minds to the seeing that different things and different people in the world are just that- different, not bad. 

Our kids are loving the fact that they are living right next door to so many of their new friends. They are constantly asking to go to the gym or the playground or over to someone's house. We also eat in a cafeteria here and it has been fun for them to have dinner with their buddies regularly, and fun for me not to have to meal plan for my family of six :)

Our company encourages us to try new things, which we should all be doing since EVERYTHING will be new soon. I am surprised how compliant the kids have been with this. Damaris has officially learned how to use a squatty potty! If you don't know what that is check google images.  She was very proactive in learning this skill. Way to go girl!

Beach Trip

I can't believe it has been almost a month already since we were swimming in the ocean, outdoor pool, lazy river, and kayaking on the intracoastal waterway with our extended family. Below are a few pictures of our time in North Myrtle Beach. This was our last vacation with our family before our big move.

Four generations: Me, Damaris, my mom, and my grandmother. Love these ladies and hope I am as active and thoughtful as they are when I am their age. 

Daddy and Mei Mei on a boat ride.

Mei Mei and Ezekiel. They really do love each other a lot.

Sweet Didi. He always has a great smile.

I don't think this picture needs a caption. It speaks for itself.

It only took Mei Mei four or five days to warm up to the water and waves.

Fun playing bocce ball with the cousins. This picture of them celebrating pretty much sums up the whole week. They had a great time playing together and always wanted to be doing what their cousins were doing. 

We really enjoyed our time with family during this week. God blessed us with amazing weather again this year. It was such a blessing to be able to spend time with my sis and her family, my parents, and grandparents before we leave.