Sunday Snapshots

I think I am going to try to post some snapshots from our week every Sunday night. That way you can feel like you were right here in the middle of the action 😉
This week is skinny pickings since I only had this bright idea on Friday. So I guess this is a snap shot of the weekend.
In other news, things are going great here. We are slowly getting the office ready and will soon be starting the first discipleship classes.

The first glimpse of spring, and yes, those thorns are on most trees…

David and Marye working on the bathroom overhaul.

Some of the succulents in our garden.

Saturday at the watering hole.

The view from my kitchen.

Reese’s nine month shot.

Our new home.

I thought it might be interesting to show off some pictures of the place we now live. We live on the YWAM farm, or base, 20 km outside of town. The farm has over 11 homes filled with families, and singles, from all over the world. All who are doing ministry in some capacity in Windhoek.
There are cows and goats, and baboons, snakes, eagles, warthogs, leopards, kudus, all sorts of birds, and a scary amount of creepy crawlies!
We love living here, there is such a great sense of community, and now with all the families with kids on the base I have a great resource if I have any questions.

View from out front door.

Road up to our house, past the corral.

Right side of the house, the washing machine stays outside.

Reese checking out the baby goats.

Our house, you can see out awesome porch. (left side)

View to the right of our house. You can see the dorms and dining hall.

Sweet home Namibia!

We made it home. About three weeks ago. So it is high time for me to tend to my lonely little blog. We live out on the YWAM farm, where there is limited net so I am going to have to blog when we are in town. We do have an office at the BK site in Katutura and I plan on going in at least twice a week, so look forward to more blog posts in the coming weeks.
We are finally in a place where things are getting back to normal. Or at least our new normal with a new ministry and living out on the farm. Reese has adjusted to the time changes, but is now teething and he is still not used to the “new” place he is in so we are still having some rough nights. He has never slept through the night yet, but last week we had some nights where he was up at least once every hour.
Things at the base (the ywam farm is called a base) are going great! We have a bunch of new neighbors. The Hunters’ son and daughter in law, along with their three kids, moved onto the base. Christian Hunter is a cardiologist and is teaching in the brand new medical school in Namibia. There is also a South African couple with two kids, they live in the house behind ours. They are a great resource as they have lived in the bush before and Quinton seems to know a little bit about a lot of things!
We have spent the last week furnishing the office, we still have to buy a few things but it should be ready before long. We hope to find a little couch to make it a little more comfortable in here for when we have meetings with people. We have also been dreaming about some new ideas to further the ministry here. I am hoping to be able to teach a cake decorating class. It would be such a great way to teach someone a skill that could take them farther in life. We were at the mall a few days ago and a child’s birthday party was happening at the restaurant we were at. They had two cakes, from bakeries, and they were just awful, think cake wrecks awful. So I know there is a market for it! I will just need to get some cake decorating supplies. Anyone know if Wilton donates?
We were welcomed back with much love and open arms on both the YWAM base and at the church that we attend. It was a great feeling to be back home!
We enjoyed out time in America. Time spent with family is priceless, we got to meet our new sister in law, see our awesome (and totally gorgeous nieces), Reese absolutely fell in love with his aunt Candace, and best of all Reese got to spend lots of time with both sets of his grandparents.
Also meeting with supporters and churches was a huge blessing. After two years on the field getting to see a lot of you face to face was very encouraging, and a huge blessing to us. Now we are waiting for some of you to come on over here!

Meeting Reese

It was a sweet moment when Reese finally got to meet the Reese he was named after. I had to hold back tears. We then had the absolute privilege of spending the afternoon just chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Reese about everything from the ministry in Namibia to their latest family reunion. We were absolutely blessed!

SRCC

Hi! We are still here, out in the hot and dry USA, and we are busy busy busy!
I thought I would put up some quick posts with some details from our travels. We landed in CO on May 9 and we spent a few weeks in Colorado laying low and resting up. Then we went out to MO for four weeks to raise support, meet with people and catch up with as many friends as we could squeeze in. Now we are back in CO getting ready to spent several weeks with the good people from Pikes Peak Christian Church.
During our visit in MO we visited Southern Randolph Christian Chapel. Our old stomping grounds!
It was great to see so many familiar faces, but the kids from church seemed to have grown much more than just two years!
David preached the sermon, he spoke about the Church and how it should impact all aspects of a community. After the main service we both had the opportunity to present on the work we had done in the last two years. It was so much fun to get to share some pictures and stories about our adventures, but more than that it was great to finally share gace to face with out supporters what God has been doing in Namibia.
SRCC feels like a family, probably since everyone knows everyone else, so presenting was very laid back, and we had A LOT of questions, and no one minded when we went over by 20 minutes.

Thank you so much SRCC, you guys are amazing and we are so blessed and lucky to have you supporting us! We love you all and will see you in 2014!

Greetings from MO!

We have been in the USA for almost five weeks now, this furlough is going by much faster than we could ever have anticipated!
We spent the first three weeks in Colorado, we were able to rest and take some time to help Reese adjust to the new time zone, and all the new faces. We did get to go to the church services at PPCC, we were quite impressed with the new building, it is very nice. But more than that, it was great to meet some people face to face. Over the last two years I have had the opportunity to meet people from PPCC on facebook and even though we have been able to pray for each other, see each others pictures and other such things nothing compares to meeting face to face, and being able to share a hug.
Mark invited us out to the Colorado Springs YWAM base for a worship and prayer meeting. Their base is in a re-purposed Hilton hotel. So it is quite different from our Namibian farm base. The first thing that struck me about their base is all the kids and babies. Mark had said that we did not have to worry about Reese ebing noisy as there were a lot of babies there. No kidding! I wanted to take some pictures, but I did not want to seem like a weirdo so sorry no pictures of the mounds of babies and heaps of toddlers!
David was able to share about who we are and what we are doing. It was great to have people surround us and pray for the work in Namibia. We are so excited about the future, but there are some days when we question our sanity. So it was so good to have people who work and have worked around the world come around us to encourage and pray.
We then left for MO, we had an eventful car trip, and we have had some busy days. I will write more about what we have been up to, and add some pictures later this week. Gotta run now, we are off to the CCCB campus to hopefully see some of our professors, and then we have dinner with the Finchers! 🙂

Tears and Joy, the difference in a year.

Picture from that morning.

A year ago today I was getting ready for church with a heavy heart. I was up early in the morning after spending the night making peace with God. The Thursday before we had been told that our medicated cycle had not worked, we were not pregnant, and that we had a long road ahead of us. I had spent the night in tears, praying and surrendering. It was a long painful night at the tail end of two long and very painful years.

Anyway I got up, and on a whim decided to take a home pregnancy test. People who have dealt with infertility know what I am talking about. The hundreds of pregnancy tests, staring at it from all angles, even taking it apart and shining a flash light on it to see if a magical second line shows up.
So this test was different. A second line showed up, after a negative blood test. Without dragging the story out too much, I can say that we were shocked. David tried to look at the test but I kept grabbing it out of his hands. We went to church in a daze, after I took three more tests. They all came up positive.

I remember feeling the black cloud lifting, like I had been waiting to breath, our morning had finally broken.
May 15th will always be a day that I remember as a day God worked a miracle in us. The dr. said we had less than a percent chance, Ha! What did he know?!
This is a day to celebrate!

Can you see the little line that changed our lives?

Furlough!

We made it to the USA! After 30 hours of flying, layovering, and more flying we made it to Colorado. We have been taking it easy this first week, and we will be spending rhe rest of May in CO, we plan on being in MO for the month of June and then back to CO for July.
Give us a call if you want to hang out, meet Reese, or hear about what God is doing in Namibia!!

Tour d’ Afrique

Imagine riding your bike from Cairo to Cape Town in a race that takes four months!
This is exactly what Alaric Britz is doing. The race is 11,800 km long, goes through ten countries, and takes a hundred and twenty days to complete!
He is doing the race to raise support for CHS. Right now the race is passing through Namibia.
So the school set up a little ceremony to welcome and thank Alaric.  It was on Wednesday night. Hundreds of people came out for the night, including the national news crew.
It was a great night.
Alaric seems to be a quiet, shy guy. When he walked into the hall the people cheered with abandon.He smiled sheepishly as he was herded to the front of the hall. I heard one of his team mates say that she was getting goose bumps! Four of the kids had written an essay for him, so they got up and recited it to him.
 The man who wrote the Namibian national anthem was there, and he played the piano while the school sang the anthem. The kids had it rehearsed so only a few sang the first part, and then the rest of the school jumped in half way through. It was a powerful moment. I was overcome with so much love for the people that we have come out to serve. Hearing a while hall full of people sing out with such pride was just amazing, I wish you all could have experienced it.
The night ended with the school choir singing a song about hope and of course a lot more thanks and cheers to Alaric.
If you want more info on what he is doing you can check out his blog here.

At four months…

It is about time I get around to posting this!

At four months Reese is being a little ham. He loves to laugh, smile, giggle, snort and just have fun. Every day he learns something new. He now blows raspberries when we do, and a time or two he has tried to wave when someone waves at him. He i a very social little guy and loves to smile at anyone who will give him attention 🙂
 At four months Reese weighs 14.5 pounds and 63cm long. He is in 3-6 clothes, but there are some 0-3 outfits that still fit him, and there is a newborn out fit that still fits him. It just depends on the brand.
At four months he is slowly catching up to other babies his age, he is now starting to want to sit up, and has rolled over a couple of times.
The dr. thinks he is doing great and will have no lasting issues from being born seven weeks early!
I have been waiting to write this, the jaundice is out of his system completely! And his umbilical hernia has healed. He is our little rockstar!
He still takes at least three naps a day, if he does not get his naps he gets cranky. It seems the only times he really cries is when he is tired or over stimulated. When he gets all his naps he will wake up happy and smiling from them. At night his bed time is at 7:30. He will then sleep for six hours and then wake up one to three times after that. Last night he only woke up at 2:15 and then again at 5:30. So we got a lot more sleep than we have been getting!
He still loves to take a bath, and now will cry or fuss when we take him out. We have to make getting out of the bath fun too. So we both cheer and sing as we take him out. Most days we can trick him into having fun when his bath is done, but he would prefer to just bath and bath and bath.
He still is exclusively breast fed. Our LC wanted us to start on solids a few weeks ago, but our dr. would rather we wait until he is 5 and a half months old. I think he is ready for it, but I think waiting until we are in America will make it easier on us, since there are going to be a lot of changes in the next few weeks.
We are a bit nervous about the trip to the USA. We will be taking two ten hour flights with a seven hour layover in Germany. Please pray for easy uneventful travels for us, and that Reese will enjoy the flights too.
We are terribly excited about him finally getting to spend some time with his family around the world!