Monthly Archives: October 2014

This is one of our papers from the impact awareness exercise. We’ll let you guys figure out who’s it is.

We spent a good deal of time in class this morning discussing topics like language learning philosophy, socio-cultural attitudes, and impact awareness. As part of our impact awareness session, we did an exercise where we wrote our names on the bottom of a piece of paper and then passed it around our group table, allowing each person to write two items about us, then fold it over (to cover those items) and pass it to the next person. The photo above is of one of our papers from this exercise. I’ll let you do the cyphering.

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Wow! Blogging and posting daily, while also doing all the normal family stuff we do regularly, and doing this training course is getting harder and harder. We had lots of fun over the weekend, but were not able to do our posts, so this one is a catchup post.

On Saturday, we had a mandatory training event where all the guys spent about 3-4 hours hanging out and talking at a venue in Charlotte. They didn’t confirm until we arrived to the venue that there would also racing involved! We got to channel our inner Ricky Bobby and burn some (go-kart) rubber. Some of the older, ahem, “kids” had lots of fun.

One of our fellow ICC’ers leads a desperate pack of go-kart racers around a tight turn.

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Friday evening, we went into Waxhaw to have a special dinner–ice cream! We were celebrating the completion of a week of changes, shifts, new schedules, new living arrangements and pretty much everything else. Everyone had a couple scoops of their favorite flavor from the Waxhaw Creamery, and it was pretty yummy.

We all enjoyed our ice cream from the Waxhaw Creamery. It was hard to get a shot with everyone looking at Daddy–there was ice cream to be eaten, after all!

After the end-of-week celebration, we made our way back to the apartment, where Dale put the kids to bed while Miranda met a fellow Wycliffe friend from a nearby city for dinner and quality hang-out time. After I put the boys to bed, Phoenix and I played a few rounds of Uno. She won all three games. I went to check on the twins, and they were NOT asleep.

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We had our first official day of classes today, and the kids had theirs as well. We mostly got out of the door on time today, although I apparently took a wrong turn going out of the center, which led to us having to go the long way around to the home of the homeschooling family we were leaving the older ones with. We had class for the first half of the day, and then had lunch together in the on-site cafeteria (after another run out to pick up the kids from “homeschool school”). We’ve got lots of homework to complete before tomorrow–it will be a challenge while we’re here to balance keeping the family in order while managing all of the outside-of-class work at the same time.

While we were eating lunch, an older gentleman came over to our table and invited us to come tour the hangar and see some airplanes. The kids all jumped at the idea, so we went over there this afternoon. Doug is a pilot who flew Wycliffe/JAARS missions around the world, helping Bible translators carry out the task of making God’s word available to the people He created. He was a great tour guide–he even told us about a homemade wooden tailwheel crafted by one of the local tribesmen in South America to help a pilot get his plane back home when his tailwheel broke on landing.

The wooden wheel was hand-made in the jungle for a plane that had a damaged tailwheel. It allowed the pilot to take off in the plane and get it back to the base, rather than having to wait for a replacement part to be flown out before returning.

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Today was the last “free” day before we start training in earnest. We got out early and did a “dry run” of our morning routine, to make sure we identified any kinks before tomorrow (Thursday) morning. We used the everyone-was-up-and-dressed-and-in-the-van-and-ready-to-go-somewhere opportunity to go over to South Carolina and get some additional items from the store.

We also decided to have an oil change and some other light maintenance done on the van while we shopped. We waited for what seemed like an eternity to our young’uns, so we went and played on a hill to pass the time. In no time at all, everyone found a stick and was very happy.

Sticks are awesome. Especially when the littlest kids have the biggest ones. We were very happy at the top of the hill.

After that, we made our way over to the home of some very good friends we met last year at Equip, our induction training for Wycliffe. They were gracious enough to allow us to borrow some very important equipment while we were waiting on reinforcements to arrive from Houston. There also might or might not have been fun had in a certain hammock.

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