Our Benjamin turned five last week, and though it was a little sad for mom, everyone else was totally thrilled.  🙂  On the day of his birthday, we spent the afternoon at a children’s museum, where Ben enjoyed “saving the rainforest” repeatedly and playing in the water room.  Afterwards, we all went out to dinner at a hibachi and it was fun to see the boys faces as fire leapt into the air and the chef tossed knives around.

A few days after Ben’s birthday, we had a family party where everyone came dressed as a superhero.  Ben, of course, was Ben MacDyver.  This is a superhero that Ben has invented and who has all kinds of superpowers.  He is a combination of many other superheroes, and it is endlessly interesting to hear about him. Here is a photo of Ben standing next to the “pin the letter on the superhero game”. He had a superman cake and ran around saving things all evening – it was so cute!

Ben has had a happy year here in America.  He has been home with mom, dad, grammie and grandpa for most of the time (when we are not traveling) and has been thriving with all the attention.  He continues to enjoy playing by himself with rescue hero toys, superheroes and cars.  His latest craze is star wars, though he’s only seen the first movie.  He is a friendly little guy, and goes around introducing himself to everyone at the churches we visit.  That incredible will of his rears its head now and then, but overall he is a much better-behaved child than he was even a year ago.  He is so pleasant to talk to and loves to cuddle and kiss, much to mommy’s joy.  He and his older brother play together quite frequently, and generally do well and are very imaginative.  Despite his exuberance and courage, we find that he is still unwilling to get on a bike and is not very interested in sports.  He enjoys playing with small pieces of things and making “setups” and we wonder if he will be an engineer!  He begins his first day of preschool tomorrow, and we look forward to seeing him grow and learn in the year to come, as he continues to bring us joy and a great deal of laughter. We have been learning scripture with sign language lately, and he amazes us in his abilities! -c

Toby and Cami are embarking on a new adventure – homeschooling.  He spent Sept-Dec in the public school system in Northwestern Connecticut, but since we were on the road for most of January, and didn’t move to our new home until mid-February, we felt it would be too hard for him to be put in a new public school for the rest of the year.  Therefore, each morning we sit down and work through the things he needs to cover before we return to Mozambique.

The photo at right is a saber-tooth tiger skull, and we found that there were all sorts of useful things to be learned during our travels.  We even found time to do some studies on tides, tide pools, the solar system, and history.

He’ll be entering fourth grade in Moz in September, and needs to know all the times tables, a whole bunch of spelling words, grammar, writing skills, and such.  We also hope to cover medieval history, plant biology, and some information about the planets, which his classmates in Moz are currently studying.  Since his fall class didn’t cover any of this, we have a lot of work to do in the next three months!  In addition, we have also started with reading Portuguese together, to help his mastery of that language.  He is a  good student and catches on quickly, though finds his little brother quite a distraction at times.  Mom is coping pretty well, though I have been surprised at how much time it takes to homeschool!

Benjamin will begin preschool tomorrow – a local Baptist preschool has offered him a place at no charge!  We are just overwhelmed by their generosity, and thankful that Ben will have the English-speaking preschool experience before he goes into Portuguese kindergarten in September.  He is so excited.  – c

We haven’t posted since Christmas, since we have been busy visiting loved ones and moving to be near our biggest supporting church in Fairfield, Connecticut.  In January, we enjoyed a trip west to see each of my sisters, and it was a very happy reunion.  My older sister hadn’t seen Toby or Kevin in five years, and the three weeks we spent at her house were the most relaxing we have had since our return to the states.  Many, many happy times and memories together.

We also had a wonderful time visiting my younger sister, who took us to see some very interesting Creatures at the LaBrea Tar Pits!  We had so much fun with her and she enjoyed seeing her darling nephews.  The whole trip was a real vacation for us, and we felt that it was truly a gift from God for our family.  We were also thankful to miss the worst of the winter storms on the East Coast.

It seems to us, wherever we go, we have just been bathed in love during this furlough.  People have been really kind to us, and interested in our work.  We feel so humbled and grateful, really.

On our return from “the big trip”, we enjoyed a few days with Kevin’s family (including his brother and family visiting from Ohio) before making the move to Fairfield, CT, just an hour south of Kevin’s parents’ house.  We are staying in the missions house for Black Rock Congregational Church, and it is nice to have our own place and some “quiet” months to focus on things that need to be done before we return to Mozambique.  It seems there are always habits and researching that you want to have in your life, and we just never seem to have the time to address those.  Now we do.  We are back into Portuguese study, homeschooling Toby, and looking forward to some spiritual refreshment and growth.  With only four months to go before our return to Mozambique, time is running out!

Our support level is still too low to allow us to return, but we believe that God will provide in his timing.  Meanwhile, we continue to move forward with plans until he shuts the door.  Our hope is to leave at the end of June or beginning of July, entering Moz before our residence permit extension expires on July 16th.   We appreciate your prayers! – c

What a wonderful Christmas we had!  I know I keep saying that about everything, but when you tend to spend Christmas in a very hot place, with very few shops to choose gifts from, with a very limited budget, and very far away from family, an American Christmas is like a bonanza.  And I’m not talking about gifts, but about choices, cheer, and beauty.

Kevin’s parents put up a beautiful 8-foot fresh-cut tree (which we helped choose and haul off the hillside) and we enjoyed decorating it, looking at it, and smelling it.  Christmas-cookie making was a fun activity for the kids, their cousins, and their grammie.  There was a Christmas pagent at the church, and Toby was  a shepherd while Ben was adorable as an angel.  We also went to visit “The Christmas House”, which is a local house that has hundreds of thousands of lights, displays, and animatronic Christmas stuff.  We saw the parade that brought Santa into town and to his Christmas workshop (though my kids don’t believe in Santa; we are not opposed to that, but it just doesn’t work when you live where we live).

We had fun shopping for Daddy, and then for Mommy, and making Christmas crafts to send out.  The Christmas Eve service at church had us lighting the advent wreath as a family, and had real lit candles for the boys to hold.  They thought that was the coolest.  Christmas morning, gifts were opened with much rejoicing, then I went off to the airport to pick up my younger sister, flying in from LA.  We had a great Christmas dinner with a wonderful turkey Kevin’s mom had cooked, with all the fixin’s, and then a gingerbread house building competition in the afternoon with Kevin’s older brother’s family.

The day after Christmas, a big storm brought in 8-12″ of snow, and we had a good time playing in it for awhile.  The kids had been outfitted by their grandparents in all manner of boots, hats, mittens and snowpants, and had a great time in their “first” big snowfall (the first they remember!)

We have many happy memories and are thankful for the good times spent with Kevin’s family and my sister.  Next year when we are in Malawi, sweating it out, we will look back this traditional Christmas with a lot of nostalgia. 🙂  Of course, there is something to be said for a tropical Christmas as well, but somehow it just feels more “real” when you have the snow and all the other traditional things associated with Christmas.  After being away for a few years, the commercialism of Christmas was a little overwhelming (the constant pressure from advertising to buy, Buy, BUY!!!), but all the other aspects were great. – C

Wow, there are a lot of things to enjoy here in America. Here are just a few that I enjoy:

Soft, deep carpets

Nobody stares at me, or points, or discusses me with a companion while laughing

Road are smooth and clearly marked

I can sleep next to an open window without fear of someone reaching inside

When dogs bark at night I think “animal” rather than “thief”

I don’t have to watch my purse constantly

I can wear shorts in public and lay on the furniture

Cozy homes with comfortable furniture

Cheese!

Fast food really is fast, and consistently pretty good

Internet connection is fast

I drink water right out of the tap!

So many convenience foods – cooking seems so much simpler here.

Electric Dishwasher!  Of course, I have a dishwasher in Mozambique, but her name is Teresa and although she is a lot more pleasant, she is also not there every day.

Planning things in advance with reasonable certainty they will happen.  In Moz, the plans change pretty frequently and it gets frustrating.

These are just a few of the things I am enjoying about America.  I’ll have to get the other members of my family to make some lists. – C

Everyone has been asking us:  “How are the kids doing with all the changes?”  The truth is, they are doing really just fine, though there have been many moments of angst for Toby.  He misses his friends in Mozambique, he misses his school, and he misses the familiar.  It has been much harder for him than for Ben, who is enjoying a lot more interactive time with his parents, and lots of fun time with his grandparents.

What Toby is experiencing is quite common for missionary kids.  There is a real pull between “home” (which is Mozambique) and America, which is full of people who share a similar culture to him, who speak the same language, and who look like him.  Many feel that he ought to be really at home here in America, but in reality there are a lot of strange things that are unsettling to him.

Toby had a great deal of apprehension as we approached our departure from Mozambique, mostly from the idea of attending public school and riding a school bus.  This would be unsettling to any child moving to a new school, but additionally he was aware that there were things those children knew that he didn’t know.  When the school bus approached on the first day, he didn’t know anything about it.  What did it look like inside?  What kind of seats?  Where should he sit?  Was he allowed to talk to anybody?  Was he supposed to open the window?  Put his backpack under the seat?  Where are the controls to open the door?  He’d never seen a bus inside.  He asked me what the metal arm on the front of the bus was for.

This kind of scenario was repeated frequently as we approached new situations, and we tried to anticipate and explain things that might be strange.  I took him to the school cafeteria and asked specific questions about how the children ought to stand in line, if they were allowed to choose food, what kind of milk cartons, what the paying procedure was like.  I did all of this because if it was a first-grader who didn’t know these things on their first day of school, that is understandable, but if a big third-grader didn’t know how to open his milk carton, he would be the butt of jokes.  I moved schools several times as a child and can well remember the sheer terror of being “different”!

Thankfully, Toby sailed through quite a few of the new situations without much trouble.  Although he was sad on the bus for the first week, by the second week he was moving from seat to seat on the ride home, visiting with different children before they got off at their stop.  He even had conversations with the bus driver every day, sinc Toby is the last stop on the bus route.  He has made a couple of little friends at school and been invited to some birthday parties.  We are so thankful that he is such a friendly little guy!

There are still things that he doesn’t know about, but we try to fill him in whenever such things occur to us.  He is almost like a foreigner in his “own country”, and that is a big characteristic of missionary kids.

What is most interesting is that Mozambique is also not his home.  He doesn’t fit in there either, and he is obviously a foreigner due to his skin color.  There are challenges on that side, which I’ve gone into in other posts.

Missionary kids exhibit a set of characteristics which are quite intriguing.  They have challenges as well as opportunities and advantages because of their lifestyles, and I’ve created a page to talk about those things.  You’ll see it on the menu to the right, titled “Third Culture Kids”, and I encourage you to have a look.  It will give you some insight into the challenges of our kids and how you can pray for them.  There are some things that will be lacking in their lives.  For instance, I felt sad a few weeks ago as I watched Ben enjoy the gymnastics class at the YMCA that we’ve signed him up for.  He can’t continue that sport in Mozambique, and if he has talent for it, it will never be realized.  However, there are other advantages that he will enjoy, and you can read about those on the webpage.

We so appreciate people’s concerns about our kids, and are so thankful for them!  We do feel bad when we don’t always bring them to meetings, because we know people like to see them, but we try to give them as much stability as we can and sometimes that means they stay home and enjoy their wonderful grandparents and have a normal routine.  We know you understand! – C