Sunday, October 26, 2008

Atom or Adam?


The other day Tanner brought me a science book and pointing to an image of an atom asked, "What's that?" I told him that it was a picture of an Atom. God used Atoms to make everything in the universe, everything that we can see and touch. Laura overheard this and with a puzzled expression asked, "Even the sun and Jupiter?" When I answered, "Yes, even the sun and Jupiter", Laura said, "That can't be true because God made many things before he made Adam."

~Cindy

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Boys will be boys

A day (or two) in the life of Tanner...

Tanner and his cars watch "Cars"...











Helping dad wash the car...











Natural progression of boy meets bucket of soapy water:

Hmm, that looks like fun...
Just one finger, 'K mom?











Maybe just one hand?
Ok, I'll just go ahead and play with the water!











Playing in mud and water, what more does a boy need?























"Look mom, I'm an engineer and this is my train!"
"Now I'm 'Super Sir Topham Hat'!'"
And best of all, building tracks and playing with trains! ~Cindy

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Prayer requests/Praise reports


It has been some time since we listed our prayer requests. That's mainly because they haven't changed much. We thought it was time for an update!

We are just about a month and a half away from finishing language school! It's hard to believe that we have been here for almost six months! Life in Tuis has been good. Tuis is a peaceful little village surrounded by beautiful farm covered hills. Everyone knows everyone here or seems to be related somehow. People are friendly and bend over backwards to help us when or if we ever need it. Several people have adopted us into their family. It will be hard to leave, but we are so thankful for the time we have had here!

Our Spanish is coming along. Tim is progressing rapidly and his teachers are impressed. I am needing to work on confidence when I speak, but this is improving with more practice in my classes. The kids' Spanish is great or so we hear from many others. They don't (or rather won't) speak much Spanish around us. We speak Spanish at lunch and dinner but they often speak "Spanglish", mixing the two languages. Please pray that we will have sufficient ability to communicate in Spanish by the time we leave language school.

Our car is doing great with no major problems. We had another flat tire that only cost $4 to repair. Our car radio/CD player stopped working and a favorite CD of the kids was stuck in the player. It is the only Bible memory CD they own so it was a bummer to think that it was gone indefinitely. Well, Tim and I took the car to go on a date yesterday and in answer to prayer the radio worked perfectly! I took the CD out before it got stuck again and the kids have been listening to it over and over again today! Please pray that our car continues to be the nearly trouble free blessing that it has been to date.

Our sink faucet was broken for a couple of months. We have been using a screw driver to turn the water on and off, but as of a week ago even that didn't work. For the last week we've been washing our dishes outside where we wash the laundry. We had told our landlord about the faucet and just last night prayed again about what to do. We were thinking it was time to hire the work done ourselves when today, in answer to prayer, the landlord came to put in a new faucet! It is so nice and works great!

A big praise is that we are now officially temporary residents of Costa Rica and our residency cards will arrive by mail on the 29th of this month. We'll each have an ID card with our picture on it. At the end of two years we can renew our residency simply by paying something like $20/person/year. Please pray that our ID/residency cards arrive safely in the mail and arrive at their expected time.

Once we have our residency cards we will try to buy voluntary insurance here so that I can get my medication and we can be treated within the social system. It has been amazing to see God provide my medicine since the company that makes Coumadin closed down in Costa Rica shortly after we arrived here. People who don't even know me have been helping me get my medicine. I do not have it in my hands now, but a total of 3-6 months supply of Coumadin is waiting for me at the local hospital right now! This is enough to get us through the process of getting insurance and to make our visit to the States in December! Please pray that we will be approved for the insurance here so that I can get properly set up with a doctor, a protime clinic, and be able to more easily get my medicine.

We have been watching flights to find the best "deal"on tickets to come home for Christmas, but with gas prices so high the flights are more expensive than we expected. Our hope is to go to Oregon for the month of December, but we are also trying to visit some friends on the way. Please pray that we can find some good tickets and soon.

I think our biggest prayer request is for patience and wisdom with our kids. Laura is pretty homesick and has been sad a lot lately. As a result she is often grumpy and easily irritated or offended. She gets canker sores in her mouth when she is stressed and she has eight sores right now! Poor thing! It hurts to eat, hurts to get her teeth brushed, hurts to talk. Her best days are when she has time in prayer. I will find her praying with beside her bed or in a quiet room. Sometimes she'll suddenly jump up from what she's doing to go pray. She tells me mostly that she prays that God would help her to make good choices. I can always tell when she has been praying because she is so loving, cheerful, and helpful!

Tanner is happy, but very much a stinker. Costa Ricans don't like to say no to children and he has taken advantage of this. To keep him happy, Tanners nanny often will let him do what he wants. Things he knows are not ok with mom and dad like watch T.V. all day or eat candy and cookies for snacks, just to name a few. This has not been good for him as you can imagine! I'll be cutting back at language school again next month. He'll then be with the nanny for just two days a week.

Often I feel like I don't have the wisdom and patience it takes to do the job of parenting God's way. Well, that's because I don't have what it takes on my own! I'm daily knocking on God's door, asking for wisdom and patience. He is faithful to give just what I need when I need it. I'm often amazed how just after praying an idea will pop into my head and I'll try it with the kids and it works! Thanks to God! Often friends give such great advice, too! I'm reading two great parenting books right now: "Don't Make Me Count To Three!" by Ginger Plowman and "Shepherding a Child's Heart"by Tedd Tripp. Both books focus on getting to the heart of behaviour and with changing the heart and not just the behaviour. Both books are excellent and I highly recommend them!!

As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read our blog and to lift up our family up in prayer!

~Cindy (and, as always, edited by Tim)

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Grandma and Grandpa come to visit!

Last week my parents came to visit from Oregon. It was so nice to have them here!!! It makes them seem so much closer now. It was the first time for either of them to travel to another country aside from Canada or just over the border into Mexico. They loved it here and plan to come again soon and often! Yeah!!

Here are some pictures from their visit~~


We went to the beach for the day. The water was clear, warm, calm, and perfect for swimming and playing in. We found a nice shady spot close to the water, perfect for playing in the sand.
























We visited the produce market in Turrialba where we do our shopping every week.












We saw the sights of Cartago, visiting the Bacilica de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles, a pilgrimage site as well as Las Ruinas de la Parroquia which are 16th century ruins of colonial Cartago.












Lastly, we went to Atenas to show my parents the eMi office and to let them see our future home town. We stayed at a B&B where we all shared a room, enjoyed a yummy breakfast, and the kids and I had fun swimming in the pool. Thank you grandma and grandpa!

Cindy

Ramblings about school...

Over the last month our home has turned into a classroom as we have been working with the kids daily on home school work. Our walls are decorated with charts, school projects, and Laura's artwork. Our time has been very full with our own Spanish studies as well as teaching Laura and now Tanner who was begging us to do school with him, too.

It is very fun and rewarding to teach our children and to watch them learn and grow. It is also a lot of work and is very tiring! The biggest challenges are keeping Tanner from distracting Laura and working around Laura's short attention span.

Laura likes best to write, draw, do hands on projects, and memory work. Tanner likes anything from workbooks to puzzles and games. I think he loves the attention more than anything else! Tanner is also doing early reading and writing which is exciting for him and for us! The lessons we do incorporate songs, poems, chants, artwork, and/or hands on activities.

In Math we play store to help Laura learn to count money and to add two digit numbers. She got to set up a store and called her store "Old Maid Checkers". Tanner likes to play cashier. Another thing we do is sing a silly song we made up called "The Congruent song" where Laura finds shapes around the house and sings whether or not they are congruent to a particular shape that I hold up.









In grammar Laura learned to classify groups into subgroups using things from around the house.











In History Laura got to be an "archeologist". I buried things in the dirt and Laura got to dig them up and talk about what she could learn about a civilization if that was all the information she had. She later played archeologist on her own and found a toy in the yard that she cleaned up and brought inside to show me how she discovered that a little girl used to live at our house. I tried hard not to laugh as I told her that it was her own toy that she had left out in the yard the previous week!

















In Science we decorated the house using fall decorations and dried leaves from Oregon and the kids also got to hang up a mobile, stickers, posters, and a border of outer space. Today Tanner didn't want to get dressed because his pj's were his spacesuit and he wouldn't be able to breath without it. I told him that his room was a space station with oxygen and that it was safe to get dressed into his new space suit (his clothes for the day)! For Bible Laura made a collage of the earth and drew pictures of what happened each day of creation. She is memorizing the days of creation along with different Bible verses about creation. Laura usually learns her Bible verses in one sitting and then tries to teach them to Tanner who isn't so interested and says "I can't do that, I'm not in first grade."




In Penmanship Laura is learning cursive writing. She loves it and is doing so well with it. I keep finding little pieces of paper around the house with her cursive signature written on them.











Laura still does kindergarten at the local public school from 7-10:30 am. She then has free time to play with friends and do as she pleases (within reason) until we start homeschool after lunch at 1:30 pm. We then do homeschool for 2-3 hours. After school we do outside activities like go for a walk or play at the local soccer field until it gets dark at 5:30 pm.

In Spanish both the kids are doing great! Tanner knows the difference between Spanish and English so often translates his Spanish into English for us in case we didn't understand his Spanish. Laura knows many Spanish songs from school and church that she sings while she's working and playing. Their teachers from school and church say that they understand everything and speak well.









We have started to incorporate Spanish in our home by speaking in Spanish during lunch and dinner. It's fun to hear Tanner and Laura converse with each other (and us) in Spanish.

Tim and I are feeling like "we're going to make it." It is less work to understand things and we are able to converse with relative ease. We are far from fluent and still make many mistakes (which we often recognize as soon as the words are out of our mouth), but we are happy with our progress. When do we have time to do our homework? I do mine when Laura is working on any written school work or after the kids have gone to bed at 7pm. Tim gets his work done any spare moment he has. Our lives are full of school these days!

Cindy