So Long Ordinary

This is a post I wrote to share on my new page - Life as an MAF Wife. Every now and then, I'll write a post that describes in greater detail what my life looks like as an MAF wife. Sorry, this is a long one! Better grab a cup of coffee and find a more comfy chair to sit in ;-) Okay, so maybe ya'll wonder what language school looks like, as in "what in the world are they doing all day? They don't even blog!" We go to class for a grand total of...wait for it.... two hours . Must mean we have lots of free time, lots of time to sit around sipping lemonade and soaking up all this tropical sun, right? Ha! WahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaHAha! Oh, that's a good one! *wiping tears from eyes* This is what I thought too. And, I suppose that might be a little more true if we weren't parents to three very active and needy children! But, alas, our day - more specifically my day - looks a little more like this: 5:30 a.m . Rise and Shine! I awake to Se...

Yeah, I got bored with my blog design and decided to switch it up a little. The background photo is a nearby rice paddie here in Salatiga. We've hit the ground running and are back into language learning full-swing. I'm happy to report that this unit is going far better than last, mostly because Sean and I are on the same schedule again. Paige (2) has now officially begun preschool! She's exhausted by the end of her half-day, though. We're only doing 3 days a week for now. We started potty training with Paige the day we got home from our trip and well... Potty training can wait. The only Spanish words I can still remember are the ones I haven't yet learned in Indonesian. It's always surprising to me how a stray Spanish word will still slip into my sentences and they seem to fit so nicely until I see the look on somebody's face. But ask me to recall a simple word in Spanish on the spot and I'll stare dumbly at you for a full minute and spurt out...

How's this for late? Here are a few pictures of the girls from our Christmas in Palangkaraya. We have about 4,000 pictures of float planes and about 10 of our family. I give Sean a hard time about where his priorities lie but the truth is, I did take along my camera and didn't take it out of my bag once. Every year I have really high hopes of taking daily pictures to share on this blog...and every year I fail before I even start! So, we'll take what we've got and thank Sean for being the family photographer ;-) Anyway, here are some from our Christmas Morning Opening Presents Extravaganza! The girls were quite pleased with their new loot. Fun times!

So. The other day, Sean and I went to the post office to buy stamps and mail a few postcards. Simple task. Right? Not! Not at all! We jostled our way to the front of the line and got through the buying of the stamps in relative calm. I mean, we were being watched and stared at the whole time, but that's become pretty natural to us by now. We sorta stand out. I can't say that I blame them. You'd stare at a buffalo if it walked into your antelope herd and tried to act all antelope-y, wouldn't you? Of course you would. Bad analogy, but of course you would. Anyway, once we had our stamps, we wanted to just quickly put them on the postcards and get out of there. It becomes somewhat unnerving to be the object of a roomful of stares and we were ready to move on. Sean and I scooted out of the way of the other post office patrons, divided up the postcards and stamps and began licking away. We licked the stamps and affixed them to the postcards. This is what we...

Hello! Well, I guess I took a bit of a blogging sabbatical. It wasn't exactly planned, but sometimes life goes that way! As I'm sure you probably saw on Sean's blog, we had an incredible trip to Palangka Raya. We are encouraged after seeing the ministry we'll be involved with there, as well as the city and our future house! The highlight, though, was definitely getting to hang out with our good friends, the Persenaires, and to get to know their little girls. Back when we first met five years ago, they didn't have any kids yet and we only had Brooklyn. In those days we were happy, idealistic and untried newbies to MAF and long-term missions, preparing for our first assignments. We've all experienced so much since then but it was like we'd never been apart, even after all these years. So blessed that we get to work with that precious family! We're super excited to return to Palangka Raya but, alas, we have at least 6 more months of language study t...

Can you spot the white girl in the photo below? I'm standing in line at a little bakery supply shop on a back alley in downtown Salatiga. Believe it or not, they have a somewhat passable version of chocolate chips there in that little hole-in-the-wall back alley store. (Now there's a sentence you never expect to type in your life.) I wish Sean could have captured the smells and sounds here...this is right behind the major meat market in town. It's a downright "ripe" part of town. Somebody showed me where this little shop is on one of my first trips to the downtown area - only she took me first through the street market and up the stairs and through the meat market and back down the back steps into this alley. I didn't know how to get back to this spot except by retracing our steps all the way through the bloody, stinky meat market until just recently. Whew! I'm so glad I know now how to avoid that unpleasant walk through bloody aisles! The things I...

We're getting ready to head out on our trip! We leave our house Tuesday afternoon and will spend the night in a nearby city before catching our flight at 6 a.m. Wednesday. We are SO excited! We've been Christmas programming like crazy around here. I wish I could promise great pictures or video but the internet isn't cooperating. I have video of Brooklyn's program that I can't get to upload and the pictures I got of Maddie's program are on my phone...but I don't have a cord to download them with. Technology is great. Sorry. I made fudge the other day and we had quite a bit left over. We had easily three or four candy bars' worth of pure chocolate in our fridge. Sean and I snuck out for some Christmas shopping today and left Maddie and Paige at home with our helpers. The fudge is gone . Not a smidgen to be found. Christmas shopping this year has been the pits. I wish I would have thought ahead better and ordered some things to be shipped to us lo...