Christmas Pageant

This past Sunday was our church Christmas pageant. I was really excited because this was the first year that the kids were able to participate. Usually we're overseas or something :-) Our son, the eternal ham, was thrilled to be a part of it, but our daughter was a little more hesitant. She clearly didn't inherit her mother's love of performance -- well, at least not the kind that appears on stage. She can be quite theatrical in other areas!

Our priest, (retired) Bishop Frey, dressed as St. Nicholas. The only other person who might be able to pull this off is one of our former bishops of the diocese, Bp. Robert Hibbs. I don't have a picture of him anywhere, but if you can recall what Kris Kringle looks like in Miracle on 34th Street, Bp. Hibbs is the spitting image of him. Beard and all.

Mia didn't really know what was going on, but she sure looked cute in her little lamb costume!

David was appropriately dressed as a star

Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus

Belly Laugh for the Week

I have a love/hate relationship with my updates from The Baby Center. Sometimes I think their advice is rather mundane and obvious, but I do get a kick out of the preggy cartoons at the end of the article. Here's the one for this week (I am now 34 weeks):

BUSTED!

This refers to the water main on our street. The bad news: we were without water for a good chunk of Monday AND Tuesday. The good news: PLAY TIME!!!


Does anyone else's "desert soul" cringe to see this much water flooding out onto the street? All I could think was, "I could use this to water my plants! Flush my toilets! Grab some buckets people, stat!!!"


Mia grabbed her rain boots and headed out to the flooded street. It was a little cool, but not too bad, so she had a blast playing and dancing around in the water.

They ran the fire hydrant for about twenty minutes to flush the lines, so the kids had a good chunk of time to play. I'm so glad my children love stuff like this and are happy with these simpler joys in life.


Even our neighbor Alyssa came out to join in on the action!

A Place to Settle

I think I've talked a little bit about this before, but one of the most frequent questions I get from people after returning to the States is, "How does it feel to be home?" I'm a bit uncomfortable with that term, since our home is in Nazareth, and it has been for the past two years. I wonder, is this a Texas thing? A friend of mine who moved up north TEN YEARS AGO says she still gets asked that question when she returns to the Lone Star State for a visit. Anyway, I got tired of correcting people, so now I just answer, "I'm happy to be around my family and old friends."

I refer to our term in the USA as my "temporary settling place" since we're planning on being back overseas next summer. And in a lot of ways, it's our home. We have a place to live, a car to drive, etc, so I'm very thankful for all these things. It's definitely taking a while to set up the place and get comfortable with a day-to-day routine, just like it would with any other move. I finally feel like we are settling after being stateside for almost two months. Part of it has to do with starting school, and part of it has to do with the fact that we are now in this house for the next several months. I've been furiously attacking the cobwebs and dust in this house, which hasn't been lived in for quite some time.

So, our time in Colorado was nice. My sis came to visit for a couple of weeks, and I really enjoyed spending time with her. My mother-in-law and her husband, as always, made us feel at home at their place, and our family got to go to a debriefing conference in the Springs after a five year term overseas. It was really great talking with other workers like ourselves and getting some idea of what the next 10 months in the States might look like.

Hubby and I got to go on vacation to Las Vegas, JUST the two of us, a couple of weeks ago. It was welcome, and probably long overdue. We hadn't been gone on our own since having kids over six years ago (with the exception of a couple of short, 24-hour excursions).

So now, it's on to normalcy, or some form thereof. Pregnancy is going great; I'm just very tired by the end of the day. I had my ultrasound and it looks like we will be welcoming another little girl into our family sometime around the New Year. Official due date is January 3, but you know how these things go :-)

Update from my last post

Without going into too many details, the doc has put me on bed rest for now due to some concerns he had at our last appointment. We leave for the US in 24 hours, so you can imagine how this has wrecked havoc on all our plans! Dear hubby has been wonderful, taking over the role as both mom and dad while I sit in bed, trying to think of things I can do to keep from being totally useless! So, I've been packing on the bed (with DH bringing clothes and suitcases, then carrying them away), sorting through piles of stuff, and occasionally getting up to help with something around the house.

I've been using a lot of my "free" time to pray, since I cannot chase kids around or do anything that requires any amount of physical work. I pray for our trip, for the baby, for our family members, for concerns at our church. It has been a real growing experience for me in terms of my prayer life, and I feel my fears and concerns ebbing, though some still remain. I'm nervous about our flight mostly. I have been repeating Psalm 121 over and over again -- "The Lord is your shade at your right hand/ the sun will not harm you by day/ or the moon by night/ the Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.

As the hours of our time in Israel draw to a close, and a new season begins, we continue to rely on the Lord and His grace to pull us through. On Sunday I got to share a song with our church here that has really spoken to me at various times over the past ten years, but is especially poignant now. I'll just post a little bit of it:

My faith is like shifting sand, changed by every wave
My faith is like shifting sand, so I stand on grace

Waters rose as my doubts reigned
My sand castle faith it slipped away
I found myself standing on Your grace
It had been there all the time

Thank you for all your prayers over the past few days, or months, or years. They have carried us through our most difficult patches of life.

Learning to live by faith not fear

These past couple of weeks have been a struggle. At the beginning of May, we discovered (to our extreme joy) that we were pregnant and would be welcoming baby #3 into the world sometime around the new year. In the midst of this excitement were strong concerns slowly building to worries in my mind... after two miscarriages, would this baby go to term, or would we lose this one too? What if something went wrong during our flight back to the USA? What if our insurance decided to drop us because we would be stateside for more than the customary six months? What if...? What if...?

Logically, I knew these fears were not exactly grounded, just my brain taking all the worst-case scenarios and compounding them until I was nervous about the smallest things. I became paranoid about what I was eating. I was meticulous with my vitamin intake. But all around me the stories were swirling -- "So-and-so just had a miscarriage, poor thing," "So-and-so's sister-in-law gave birth to a premature baby that is blind and deaf and has a hole in her heart," "my sister had a second trimester miscarriage b/c the baby had (insert rare defect)," etc. Just all the sad, scary stories we hear about from people having babies started weighing in on me quite suddenly, over the past few days. I never had these fears with my other two children; why now? It seemed like my spirit was being pummeled this time around.

It was only today that it dawned on me that this struggle that I'm dealing with is not me vs. myself It's a spiritual battle, and I am playing right into the enemy's hands. So, over the past few days I have made it a point to say a verse that has strengthened me time after time over the years: "For God has not given us a spirit of FEAR, but of POWER and LOVE and a SOUND MIND."

These thoughts I was having, they were not empowering me in my walk with the Lord. I was feeling defeated. They weren't thoughts of love, and they definitely weren't sound. I look around at my friends and family and see so many happy and healthy babies born to wonderful parents, and I wonder why I was so focused on these terrible things that were happening around me to others. Because that is what my enemy wants. And so I keep my eyes focused on Jesus and cling to Him, for He is my Rock and my strength. I no longer have to worry about what is going to happen because I know the Lord is taking care not only of me, but also of my family. It is so easy to succumb to fear rather than live by faith, trusting that He knows the situation, all the complications associated with it, and things will work together for good, for His glory. A hard lesson to remember when you're in the midst of several major life changes all happening at once!

So, keep our family in your thoughts in prayers. Pray that my energy level will be high enough to get everything ready to go, and that the trip will be smooth and safe. Ten days to go!!!

The last two months

Well, our time in Israel is winding down. In about six weeks, we will be on our way back to the USA. Here's what we've been doing for the past couple of months, to pass the time:

Jericho: The beginning of April was a good time for our family to go on a mini vacation, since the kids get two weeks off for Easter. We headed down to Jericho to have a short holiday. We met some wonderful people and got to go to a couple of tourist sites. My kids were assaulted by large groups of girls who thought they were the cutest things in the world. David, who is used to this kind of attention (and is a bit of a ham, anyway), was BASKING in it, but Amelia freaked out a bit.
View from the guest house in Jericho
David posing for his close-up
...while his sister hides far, FAR away

Handels' Messiah: Our concerts were a HUGE success. We had standing ovations every night, and we even did an encore of the "Hallelujah" chorus our second night in Jerusalem. Hubby was great and watched the kids for three days while I was away in Jerusalem for the concerts. I love visiting Jerusalem; I hate driving there. The construction is AWFUL, and half of the main roads are designated for public transportation only. I got lost so many times!


There's also a YouTube video here of us singing "Unto Us a Child Is Born". The end gets cut off, but you get the general idea. Keep in mind that the choir, by and large, are not professionals (with a few exceptions, of course). I think our soprano section rocked it, especially on the runs, but I might be a little biased :-)

So, now things are moving in a new direction. The rest of this month and all of next will be spent sorting, throwing away, and packing our stuff for the USA.