During our time here in North Carolina, our three oldest are spending the mornings with another homeschooling family that lives nearby. One of their assignments this week was to spend some time making photographs of anything outdoors–after they were done with the three Rs, of course.

Today’s post features two photos from each of our older ones. After they shot, we loaded the photos onto the computer and they each helped me select a handful of images to share with you guys.

There’s a baby goat on the property. Hero was adopted when he was one day old. He’s quite small, and very human friendly. Wolverine loves helping with his care.

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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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Hey guys…we spent the better part of today working to get everyone acclimated to our new temporary living situation. Miranda and I went and got our badges for building access, washed a couple loads of laundry, and then we went on a short family walk, which ended in the twins asking to be carried because they were too hot. For the first half of the day, there were planes constantly taking off and landing, as many of our organization’s pilots get training here as part of their assignment preparation–maybe we’ll go over and watch one day while we’re here.

We also stuffed a LOT of envelopes–Phoenix, Cyclops and Wolverine chipped in with folding papers, collating envelopes and cards and brochures and such, until we ran out of envelopes. I didn’t get any photos of the assembly line we set up because I was busy managing the process. But we do have a photo of their finished work, all stacked up, stamped with return address and ready to be labeled, stamped and sent out.

We spent about an hour today working to get these ready–look for one coming to a mailbox near you soon! (If we don’t have your snailmail address, though, you won’t get one–we’d love for you to email it to us.)

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After 18 hours in the car–which included driving through the night, some Chick-fil-a breakfast, two roadside state welcome centers and more than a few potty breaks–we arrived yesterday afternoon to the JAARS center just south of Waxhaw, NC.

We arrived after normal business hours, so we used the “night drop” check-in to get the keys for our apartment: a 3-bedroom, 1 3/4 bath ground-floor (yea!) place which will be our home for the next month or so. There’s a playground right next door, and lots of fun new-to-us things to explore, like the recliner in the living room–if the first 24 hours is any indication, this will be an endless source of fascination and entertainment for the boys…they haven’t been able to leave it alone for more than 5 minutes since we arrived.

Here’s the photo for today–all of us, in front of our new temporary home: happy to be here safely, and to not be sitting in a car seat. Thank you, all, for your prayers for our travels.

Our place is directly behind us, the bottom right of four apartments. The nearest playground is about 200 feet away, just across the parking lot.

We are officially on our way to training at the JAARS Center! Please pray for us as we travel through the night and day tomorrow!

As new other-cultural missionaries preparing to leave our home, we are experiencing many goodbyes. Today, however, I’ve had one of the most challenging goodbyes I’ve yet experienced:  I said goodbye to my trusty, faithful companion for the last two years–the Grey Ghost. AKA, my Mazda3.

I had the Grey Ghost detailed today for the buyer. I felt it warranted a photo shoot at the local park.

He came into our lives two years and 24,000 miles ago when the heart in the Radio Flyer (our 2002 Mazda Protege5) went out (it threw a rod). We’ve celebrated a couple of birthdays, enjoyed a few fun road trips, and rocked out a lot of music. Now that we’re making the transition to our new season in life, we realized that we needed to pass him on to someone else.

Three pieces of paper–that’s all it took from us to sign him away.

We were able, however, to keep him in the family. Maybe that means we’ll be able to have some visitation occasionally. I wish him and his new owners another 100,000 miles of driving excitement.

Zoom-zoom, Grey Ghost…zoom-zoom.