15th Anniversary Trip

Mid-June - John and Sophie took a special trip to South Luangwa National Park to celebrate their 15th wedding anniversary. We enjoyed a couple days of marveling at God's beautiful creation.

Becky's K5 Graduation

Becky celebrated finishing K5 with two other MKs.

Judo

For the past several months we have been doing Judo. A local christian man runs the judo club on his lodge property.

Several in the missionary community have been taking either Judo or Jujitsu as a form of either excercise or self-defense.

John, Joshua, Caleb, and Becky have been participating on Tuesday afternoons with Sensei Jonathan.

John has completed his yellow belt and is nearly ready for testing for his orange belt. The boys are almost ready to try for their yellow belts.

Becky has fun sparing with Sensei's daughter, who joins us most weeks.

Children's Bible Club April 2010

Zambian schools take three breaks during the year - April, August and December. During the April break we held a children's Bible club in our yard. A good number of the neighborhood children came, heard the Gospe, learned Bible verses and had fun too.

Boys Birthday 2010

Way back in April, Joshua and Caleb celebrated their 8th birthday with an all-boys (plus sister) party and air hockey tournament. I decorated their cake to look like an air hockey table. I loved their simple request this year. The boys had fun with the tournament. They also had fun with some of the presents. The handmade bows and arrows were a bit hit!

book on music

"Get a free digital copy of Scott Aniol's new book, Sound Worship! http://bit.ly/soundworshipfree"

Fun times and treats

It is always fun to visit a mom with a new baby and it is no different here in Zambia. Becky especially enjoyed this visit, because the mom is Auntie Beene, one of Becky's junior church teachers. The baby, Anna, was about 3 weeks old when we visited.

With the rains come flying termites. They emerge from the ground and fly around with their wings that are twice as long as their bodies. Then their wings fall off and they crawl around until they die. Up until last week, we have only seen the smaller ones. Last week, the large variety - called inswa in Bemba - invaded our yard one evening. One of them even made it into our bedroom! Our night guard evidently collected the inswa that were attracted to the light in the carport and outside the kitchen, but the large wings were still everywhere. The next morning, Caleb excitedly made the discovery that there were many that were crawling around in the grass under the light which is mounted in a tree in our back yard.

The rest of the kids and Mom helped collect quite a few of the creepy, but not harmful critters. Our daytime workers were excited, because the inswa are a special treat here and are evidently fairly expensive to buy in the market.

The termites are simply fried in a dry pot (they supply their own oil) and salted.

A crunchy and salty snack - more protein than popcorn! The kids were more excited about collecting them than eating them, however. We made them eat two each. Mom and Dad ate most of the rest, but we were able to share with another missionary family too. The boys in that family really liked them.

Joshua especially wasn't too keen on eating a bug. He looked at it for a while.

Then looked at it for a while more.

Then finally ate it. MMMMMM! They really didn't taste bad, or at least that's what Mom and Dad thought.

Water Slide!!!!!

We found a simple, though wet waterslide in the store here and got it to help cool the kids off on hot afternoons. We were pleasantly surprised that it worked the way the packaging showed!

Becky turns 6!

Becky's birthday is December 25th, but we have made a tradition of celebrating it on Christmas Eve. In the afternoon, a Zambian girlfriend from church came over to play, which was a nice treat. It was good that Becky had some girly time, because the evening was full of boys!

We went to the Washer's home for Becky's birthday supper and celebration along with Auntie Rachel's birthday. Her's is on the 24th. The Washers have four boys so combined with Becky's two brothers, she was rather outnumbered. She holds her ground well, though and enjoys the fun.

After a delicious meal, the kids played a romping game of balloon stomp. Then they each had a turn at hitting a pinata. Unfortunately, Uncle Nathan was mistaken for the pinata by Caleb. He wasn't hurt as badly as his expression suggests.

Becky enjoyed opening up some gifts from her friends. The second picture was taken when the power went off and all the children (full of cake, ice cream and sodas) screamed! You can almost hear them just by looking at the picture! Thankfully, the power came back on after only a minute or two.

The evening came to a close with the children calming down with a Christmas movie and the adults playing games. It was a great evening and we just might make this a tradition too.

ps-Becky has another birthday pal here too - Auntie Toni Hafler's birthday is on the 25th as well. We spent Christmas evening with her!

Christmas Fun 2009

Although we miss being with our families State-side during the holidays, God has blessed us with a wonderful group of fellow missionaries who have become our "American" family in Zambia. We enjoyed several activities with them this past Christmas.

The ladies and girls had fun decorating cookies and exchanging a variety of cookies.

A fun family activity was constructing a gingerbread structure for a competition. Our church won the best landscaped award. Also during this particular gathering, we enjoyed some fun games, a fabulous meal and great singing.

On Christmas Day several missionary families gathered at our home for supper, a children's gift exchange, games and more singing.

While the children played Twister, the adults and some older children had fun playing the Bible version of Apples to Apples.