Scenes from Equip #2

Working hard at our newsletter...trying to make wording make sense!
Worship time
M and O in their class of littles...the childcare was GREAT.
George ...one of the original guys who knew William Cameron Townsend, the founder of Wycliffe. His stories were incredible. He also was one of the founders of Young Life.

One of the many skits/illustrations we learned
Our fearless Equip leader, Carl
Diana, with a sleeping O
Daniel yukking it up after dinner (and I chased M through the dining hall while she chased Micah and buddy Gracie)
Daniel hanging with a Wycliffe Hoosier (indy dude) :)

Menu Plan for the week of 9/28/09

We're back! Just like they warned us though-Equip was like a mountaintop experience. Easy to come back down to real life and feel like its all downhill. Happily, not everything was downhill when we got back- our church is still a source of encouragement to us. We missed everyone. But the girls are sick, we are all struggling to get back in this time zone and the house is still challenging to live in. Good thing God has mercies new for us every morning:)

Here's what we're eating this week:

Breakfasts: cold cereal, scrambled eggs and toast (w/homemade bread from a wonderful friend from church!), quickbreads or pancakes from mix

Lunches: leftovers, salad, pineapple

Dinners:

Mon: @ friend's house for dinner

Tues: Quick crockpot meal (baked beans in Slow cooker, hot dogs & salad) before meeting w/Pastor

Wed: Spinach Rice Casserole

Thurs: Sicilian Tuna Marinara Pasta

Fri: Homemade Easy Pizza

Sat/Sun: We'll be at my parents to celebrate M's second birthday! I will likely come back with zucchini, tomatoes, apples and pears-yay!

Menu Plan Monday:)

Family Scenes from Equip #1

Family scenes, minus M. Oops. These are from a huge collection that were taken by the leaders of Wycliffe's Equip. I have lots more, so I will look for some more with us in them:) We are back home now and we had a great time. Honestly-were sad to leave, but we missed our home church. Our actual home...now that's another story:) We came back to a lot of work still to be done and no where to put stuff, but we are motivated to get some organization because we are so excited to get to mission field!


Justin is another aviation guy-his daughter got to be great friends with M. Their family will be going to Cameroon too!
Teething.

Wycliffe with grandma and grandpa C

No internet all weekend...so glad to be back!

The most awesome expressions two grandbabies could have for a picture:)

The fam in front of the beautiful Wycliffe building

M and new friend Gracie at dinner. Yep, about to smooch.

Coolest grandpa in town. Hip hop happenin'

Grandma and O sharing a laugh and an inside joke

Thanks for the fun weekend Grandma and Grandpa C! We love you.

Deals-I still love you...

I have to admit I am having a bit of bargain-hunting withdrawls. I have to shut my bloglines quickly when they scream of amazing bargains I am missing. But as wise friends reminded me, they will be there when I get back. As another wise friend told me awhile back-no coupons in Cameroon, so I had better get used to it:)

Anywayz...because i love me some bargains and many of you are wondering why this blog got hijacked by missionary ramblings suddenly-here is a picture of my last great bargain before coming to florida. All of the above was from Rite-Aid. I put a little over $7 on a giftcard for all of the above. My total was $7 after coupons for all of that! Whoo! I used a $5/$25 coupon, a free Huggies coupons, free Mars coupon (thanks Bev!), and a $2 off Nescafe, and a $1.50 off wipes coupon. Yep, it was a sweet deal. Oh and I will be getting $1 back in a single check rebate.

So for once, Rite Aid came through for me. Better step up Walgreens! :)

Smiling Children a must for cute pictures.

Pictures. I should have some for you, but we took a look at our semi "professional" pics from the last couple days and M was having bad times and didn't smile! O isn't looking at the camera either so the pics are almost all duds. Bummer. We're going to try again today.

Classes were good again today. We learned about MK (missionary kid) issues and had a class about resillience (sp? too lazy to look up). We've also spent a lot of time practicing sharing our testimonies and sharing about Wycliffe and related stuffs. Public speaking is getting less and less scary.

Today we had about 15 minutes to create a 2 minute talk and then we shared it in front of 15 people. That's not a lot of time, people! Anyway, it went okay and we get to continue to polish and prep so that we can be ready to share anytime.

Which brings me to the fact that all this sharing and preparing is getting us excited to go! The cares of life had swept away some of our passion for missons for a time. Daniel and I were talking this morning about how its sinking in that this is really happening. Its not a distant abstract idea of "someday" anymore. God willing, we WILL be going to Cameroon in the near future!

Many pictures...soon

We've had our picture taken several dozen times since coming to Equip. By tomorrow many should be on the network here so I hope to have some to post here.

We are halfway through the first week! Some people have said that it seems to be going by slowly-long days etc. But we are loving our time here so much that we're sure it will go too fast.

The kiddos are getting worn out by all the fun they are having in the childcare program. We feel blessed that since the beginning the workers have looked forward to seeing our kids because they've been the only ones not crying most mornings. No glory to us as parents though-some wise person once said that if you claim the good behavior then you ought to claim the bad as well (as I remember the horrible plane ride here;)!

When not engaged in classtime or other actvities they have for us here (visiting the translation Discovery Center, sharing our testimonies, etc.) we've been able to immerse ourselves in missions videos, books and have family time. I pretty much couldn't ask for a more awesome way to spend our time. After dinner tonight we saw some new muli-media that is hot off the presses from Wycliffe. We are excited to share the videos with our churches and friends/family when we get back.

Not only that but we have been able to make friends with the other missionaries-to-be (translators, teachers, boarding home workers, administrators, recruiters, other aviation personnel to name a few) and will be hanging out with some of them in the future evenings.

This weekend Daniel's parents will be joining us here for our free weekend-so we're really excited to see them and spend time with them.

Can you tell we're having a good time:)!?