Back home again in Indiana!

Our summer vacation has officially begun!  It will be different for us--Nathan started his summer landscaping job today.  He will be working 7-5 (or 7-6) every day, so I will be home with our kids full time!  I am excited...but I told Nathan I know this summer will help me to see big time how much I take him for granted!  Also, we will be without internet at our villa, which will actually be good for me:)  So if you want to contact me--texting is the best method!  We are excited to hang out with lots of family and friends!

We arrived in IN yesterday.  Then last evening, Kaine had his first tball game!  It was so fun to watch, and Kaine loved it.  He did such a good job!

Layla and Daisy are ready for the game! 

It was so cute to see them in a team huddle!

What a studmuffin:)

Up to bat!  Kaine only hit one time--the games are only an hour long, so he only was up to bat once.  He did a good job, though!

So glad he can be on his good friend Carter's team!!

Looking forward to this summer!!  Hope to see all you fellow Hoosiers this summer:)

random glimpses of our life...

Nathan is great at entertaining all 4 of our kids! (although it doesn't look like Daisy was feeling very entertained in this picture:) )

Kaine is so funny!  He built this elaborate "trap" for Daisy and lured her in with some Nerds...she crawled in and the 2 of them played in this thing for close to an hour!!  What a good brother :)

Halle never fails to entertain us by how adorable she is...

playing "photographer" with her babies

reading to her baby (and it is so cute how she just makes up all the words...she is very creative)

and the other day I went in to check on the girls during their nap, and Halle had fallen asleep with this Hello Kitty sleep mask on!  I thought that was so cute:)

Layla is so adorable, too.  Her favorite possession is her little black New Testament Bible.  She LOVES her Bible!  She even sleeps with it:)

I am convinced that Daisy is the messiest eater around.  She gets so dirty!!

and we found out that Daisy LOVES popcorn!

Have a great day!

thank you to some awesome ladies!

When we first checked out NTBI (a couple of years ago), I will admit I wasn't crazy about the idea of putting our kids in childcare every day.  It just wasn't something I ever pictured for our family!  But I have been SO pleasantly surprised at how good it was for our kids this past year!

These childcare worker-ladies are not just daycare workers.  They are missionaries--servants of Christ who want to really invest in our kids.  They want to see workers go to the mission field so they give of themselves so that moms like me can be in class!  And on top of that, they LOVE our kids. 

It is so nice that anytime one of our kids does something really bad (ahem...Layla), such as biting another kid (we are working on this!!)...we can receive a text while we are in class from Layla's teacher, telling us that we should come right away.  We can leave class and be there in less than a minute, and then we can take Layla up to our apartment and talk to her and deal with the behavior.  This is NOT ordinary daycare!  How awesome is it that we are right down the hall from our kids, and we frequently see them in the halls, gym, etc with their classes?  I think it is great.  Plus, it is only for 3 hours a day.  It has just been a blessing.

So today as I picked up our kiddos from their classes, it was kind of sad.  A few of these ladies are moving on after this, so they won't be here next year.  We will miss them!  When we arrived up at our apartment after picking up our kids today, Kaine and Halle started unloading our dishwasher as they do every day.  Suddenly, Halle started SOBBING and she couldn't even tell us what was wrong.  I was trying to figure out if maybe she cut herself on a knife or something!  When she calmed down, she was finally able to tell me why she was crying--"I am going to miss my teachers!"--and then she broke down into more tears!  So Kati and Wendy...know you are LOVED by Halle!

Kaine with his teachers, Miss Kaylee and Miss Andrea

Halle with Miss Wendy and Miss Kati



Layla with Miss Tabetha and Miss Lanna

and Daisy with Miss Kayleen and Miss Sue

Here are some group pictures of our kids and their classes:

(A staff lady, Keisa, took Kaine and Halle's class pictures)

(and another staff lady, Mandi, took this one)

(Also, a thank you to Heather, the childcare coordinator.  She did such a good job organizing everything this year.  I wish I could post her picture, but she is out right now after having her fourth baby, Felicity). 

Thank you, NTBI childcare workers! You have done a great job with our kids this year, and we appreciate all of you!

one more week...

It is almost unbelievable to me that we only have ONE more week of classes here for our first year at  NTBI!  This is bittersweet for me...I am excited for summer, to hang out with family and friends back home!!  That will be so awesome.  But we have made some really great friends here at NTBI who are graduating, so it will be sad to say goodbye.  And we are becoming close to some staff members, which is awesome.  But I know next spring will come quickly, and we will have to say goodbye to them, too!  Not to mention, we are one year of training down, and just 2 1/2 more to go!  This is so exciting, because we are pumped to go and do what God has called us to.  But that also means more goodbyes are coming...so that is hard to think about.  I know I talk about goodbyes a lot on my blog, but man, I just think about it a lot!  I realize that doing the kind of missions work that we are headed for means that our lives will be filled with goodbyes.  But studying the Bible so much here is helping me to really begin to understand God's faithfulness, so I am so thankful for these 2 years of training! 

Anyway...we are enjoying life here as the semester comes to an end.  On Saturday the school had a really fun picnic that lasted from 10am to 10pm!  Of course, we didn't go that whole time.  After our kids' naps, we headed out there and we had a blast.

It is always fun hanging out with Aaron and Jill's family!  Wow, I am so thankful that I have my sister here with me:)

Our friend Ricky helped Kaine across this tightrope thingy they had pulled between 2 trees.  One thing that I think is so awesome here...with ALL the missionary kids who are students here or staff kids, there are always kids in trees and climbing stuff everywhere!  I think it is great:)  (That is something Kaine is looking forward to in the jungle...climbing trees!)

Halle, Daisy and Ivy had fun with the swings...

Layla and her friend Sadie had a blast on the racing slides!  They climbed up and "raced" down soooo many times!  It was adorable:)  (Sadie's parents are some of the staff that we are becoming close friends with.  An amazingly Godly couple with 3 kids that our kids looove to be with!  We have appreciated Scot and April's friendship so much).

There was a bouncy house that was a hit with the kids.  I couldn't believe how much Layla LOVED it.  She jumped around for so long, no matter how many other kids were in it, too. Every time she got knocked down she just cracked up laughing:)

Here was a surprise...Daisy also looooooved the bouncy house!  I love her expression here...and her belly:)

Our friend Sue (another one of those amazing staff members!) loves Daisy so much.  She is one of Daisy's childcare workers and she truly loves the babies that she cares for.  She played with Daisy in the bouncy house a lot while I was busy with our other kiddos--thanks, Sue!

By the way, Daisy is officially crawling now!!  Yay for Daisy!  She is a little behind most kids, but oh well:)  She is definitely our latest crawler!  She was so content to just crawl (or try to crawl!) around the bouncy house.  It was amazing.

Our good friend, Alisha.  Alisha is so friendly and she helped me (and Jill) feel so welcome at NTBI when we first came.  She and her husband are seniors, which means they are graduating this week:(  We will miss them so much!!  One good thing--they are from Indiana, too, so hopefully we can still hang out every once in awhile! 

This is Alisha's husband, Ben...yes, he is IN the baby swing:)

The night ended with a campfire, complete with Reese's smores (soooo good!!!)

What a fun evening!

Our week will be very busy--filled with hanging out with lots of friends, finishing up our classes and homework, and packing for the summer.  I know I seem sad to leave NTBI, but believe me, we are super excited for summer, too!  We can't wait to connect with our families and lots of friends.  Nathan will be working at a landscaping job full-time, and I will be home (at the villa!) with our kiddos.  Kaine is going to be in tball, and we are involved in VBS in Bluffton.  I know the summer will go so fast, because it is sure to be extremely busy:)  Hope to see all of you Blufftonites this summer!

Thanks for reading my rambling blog post!  I tend to be a bit wordy:)

Have a great night!!

blessed by our friends...

It is an understatement that we have some amazing friends.  We thank God so much for our friends and we appreciate them more than we can say!

This weekend we were blessed by our good friends, Mark and Angie.  They spent most of their weekend to bring their family up to visit us at NTBI.  It was so much fun!  One of the neatest things to see was the growing friendship between Halle and Kaitlee.  It seems like the more these girls are together, the better they get along!  It was so fun for Halle that she could spend 2 days with her best friend:)

We spent Friday evening with pizza at Loomis Park.  We told Mark and Ang that Loomis would give them a good taste of Jackson:)  And anyone who lives here can imagine how many people were there on a beautiful Friday evening!  It was packed with people!

Aaron and Jill blessed us later that night by sitting in our apartment with our sleeping kiddos until after 11:00 so that Nathan and I could go and hang out with Mark and Ang in the guesthouse.  It was great to catch up with them.  Thanks, A and J!!

Today was spent hanging out at NTBI in the morning, then Mark and Angie treated our family to lunch at our kids' favorite place...McDonald's!  They loved the playplace!

When Halle and Kaitlee were at the top of the slide, we could hear them giggling like crazy!  As they tried to get situated into their sliding positions, they were cracking each other up and laughing uncontrollably!  It was so adorable.  They did this several times:)

Mark made Kaine's day by letting him play "angry birds" on his phone.  Kaine loved that--thanks, Mark!

We tried to get a picture of Daisy and Jace (they are only 4 days apart in age!) but this is the best we could do:)

Halle and Kaitlee.  Halle asked me last night, "Mom, is Kaitlee going to stay here until we move to Canada?"  It was so cute:)  Halle loves Kaitlee so much!

Hanging out with friends like this is so fun, but yet it is bittersweet.  Though we still have a good 3 years until we actually go overseas (which seems like a long time!) I know it will come so quickly.  It is awesome to have close friendships but it will be incredibly hard to leave all this amazing fellowship.  I definitely need to be praying all the time for God to give me the grace to handle leaving everyone--I wil need it for sure!

Thanks again for spending your weekend with us, Mark and Angie!  We love you guys!