Mail Day!

There is no mail service here in the DR,  but we are blessed to have Agape Flights. They fly our mail in every Thursday. The boys are learning the days of the week and they know Wednesday as church day and Thursday as mail day. We are so thankful for Agape Flights and the service they provide us. We were honored to host the pilots this week. When they fly in on Thursdays they spend the night and fly back to Florida on Friday morning. The missionaries here take turns hosting them. My kids love having the pilots here,  but the boys were a little confused last night. They were expecting the pilots to bring them lots of mail since they were staying at our house. I really don't know why they thought that, but they kept asking where their mail was. :) Thankfully they at least got a box of Goldfish that I had requested(Agape also picks stuff up for us and brings it in) , since we can't get them here and they are my boys favorite snack!
Thanks guys for spending a day away from your family to bring us our mail!!!

War on Rats!

Well, since I have officially declared war on rats the body count is up to 4 plus the one that I let go. I think in my last post we had found one dead and one spotted, but not caught. A few days later we found a dead one in the front yard, that was easy! Then we were doing some cleaning in my craft room and when the bottom drawer of my dresser was taken out a rat came running out. Stu and a guy that was here working on my washer shut themselves up in that room until they chased the rat out and killed it. Yay, another one gone! Then last night while Stu was gone on visitation, before dark, I went down to the kitchen to make sure everything was cleaned up and I heard something. I slowly started looking around and then I saw it! I huge rat on top of my stove! Gross!!! I quickly walked outside with the heebie jeebies!  I saw my neighbor out, another missionary, and asked if he wanted to chase down a rat. He came in and tried to find it but never could, so he set up a slue trap by the stove and blocked all the other ways out. When Stu got home we went on the attack! We brought in Myra, our German Shepherd, (who was actually a big chicken) and shut all the doors. Stu then started banging on the stove and pulling it apart to try to find the rat. After probably 10 minutes, the rat finally ran out and toward the living room where me and Juls were standing. I'm ashamed to say I took off screaming and running for the stairs. I came back down and Stu started flipping couches over and pulling everything out from the walls, as I stood guard by the stairs. :) We checked everywhere, banging everything and it seemed the rat had disappeared. Then I saw it! It had been hiding up  on a ledge under the table and had finally come down. After running back and forth for a few minutes it ran to the top of one of my dining room chairs and stood there on it's hind legs looking for a window to escape out of.  That made me think of every rat movie I had ever seen where the rat always seems to outwit the person hunting it. I think I will ban those movies from our house now. :) Anyways, it finally ran back into the kitchen with all of us chasing it and thankfully got stuck to the glue trap. Stu put it out of it's misery and got rid of it. He immediately wen to the store and bought about 10 more glue traps.
So now, we were up to a body count of 4. We checked all the traps this morning and hadn't caught anymore until lunch time...
This is what I found!

He was such a cute little rat that I decided to let him go!!! :)
So the war continues...

Rats!!!

We have still been crazy busy trying to catch up! We finally have all of the kids school work so they have been working hard at that everyday. I have been teaching the boys which has been a challenge. First of all, my talent is not teaching! Second of all, Jesse, well, let's just say he is a bit of a challenge. He can not sit still and will not focus and stops every 30 seconds to do something or check something out or ask a question about something totally off subject or pick up his pencil which he knocked on the floor. I think you get the picture. One day I was so frustrated because he would not say any of his letters or read any blends. Stu walked in and asked what was wrong, so I started to tell him but decided to show him instead. So I had Seth read through a blend ladder, he did it perfectly. Then we went to Jesse, who had not even got one letter right all morning, I told him to read the blend ladder and he read through it perfectly also! Obviously Stu couldn't figure out why I was frustrated. So now I know that he knows it and can do it when he WANTS to!
Speaking of Jesse, we took the kids to a new Wendy's here with a nice indoor playground (hard to find nice ones here). He was playing and he stood in front of the slide as a Dominican kid came down. The kid, in Spanish, told him to move. Jesse stood there, not moving, with a big smile on his face and said "si" (which means yes). So the kid punched him in the face. Poor Jesse hadn't understood what the kid said and thought he was doing good by answering in Spanish. :)

Doesn't he make you think of Dennis the Menace?

"Toothless Wonder"
He is actually missing two now, I just didn't take another picture.

Besides school and catching up on paper and office work, we have waged a war on rats! We started seeing evidence of them in our house and so we did some cleaning and put some poison out. A few days later we found a dead one in the school room, it was as long as my hand without the tail. Good Riddance! Then last night the boys were downstairs and started yelling, "a mouse, we saw a mouse!". I went down and couldn't find anything but a while later Juls was downstairs and I heard her start screaming, "a rat!". She had seen a rat in the kitchen longer than her had without the tail. So when Stu got home, he checked it all out and couldn't find it. He fixed a hole in the screen that we suspected it had been coming in and he shut the windows. This morning when I went down, it had already chewed another hole in the screen! Thankfully with the window shut it couldn't get in. So we are hoping to kill a few more of those in the very near future. I have been watching my step when I go down in the mornings. I will win this war!!!

Little Boys

On Sunday nights I teach the 3-6 year olds. It is a bilingual class since mine and Joy's little ones don't speak much Spanish yet. So for the past few weeks I have had a new little boy in there who is about 5 years old. He is very cute, but very talkative! The other night was a very hectic night in class, I had a class full of kids and was having a bit of trouble keeping up with them all. It was one of those nights that I felt like I would rather be somewhere else (admit it, we all have those days). Then this little boy walks up to me and starts whispering in my ear...."Tu eres la mejor profesora en todo el mundo" (you are the best teacher in the whole world). Of course my heart melted and I realized I was right where I was supposed to be.
Here at home, one of my sweet boys had quite the experience today. Seth and Jesse were playing and Jesse accidentally kicked Seth in the mouth. He hit him right on his loose tooth and it came out, and Seth swallowed it. When he came up and told me, I didn't believe him at first because Delayna had been teasing him about losing it while he was eating and swallowing it, so I thought he was joking. But, no, he really did swallow it. :)

School

I started the boys in Kindergarten two weeks ago and was not looking forward to it. It has been going ok, but yesterday Jesse was having a rough day. He couldn't seem to concentrate or do anything right. He kept getting frustrated and upset, and then I would get frustrated and upset. At one point I guess he couldn't take it any more and he burst into tears and said, "I want my Nanny!". It was so sad and cute at the same time. :)
We were hoping that Delayna's school work would come in our our mail flight yesterday, but it didn't. She now has another week with no school and is getting further and further behind. Please pray that it comes in next week. We are not looking forward to doing school all summer, but I guess it could be worse. Although I am trying to figure out how it could be worse. :)

Our Comedians

Our boys keep us laughing and I have tried to make it a point to keep a record of the funny things they say. This blog is where I have been keeping it, so here are their latest antics.
Stu had to fix a pipe and in the middle of cutting it his saw broke and water started pouring out everywhere. He was frantically trying to get it stopped and Jesse walked up and said, "Dad, what were you thinking!?". You can't tell what we ask him all the time, can you?
Then we have Seth, the quieter one. He was praying for lunch the other day and in the middle of his prayer said, "Lord, please help Jesse to close his eyes while I am praying.".
As you can see we are never at a loss for laughter in our house.

Furlough is finally over!

Well after a very exciting 7 (turned into 8) months on furlough, we have made it home. I know most of you have kept up with everything that happened on either Facebook or through Stu's letters, but for my own personal record (this is the only journal I keep) I want to recount what happened. 

The kids had been counting down for months, ready to be home. Actually everyone was ready to be home, to our ministry, people, and to our own beds! It was close, only 3 days to go! We left my family and headed to Kansas City, Missouri on Saturday, Feb. 25th. We arrived at the motel after dark, I had a sick headache, it was cold and windy and everyone was ready to get inside. We opened the U-haul trailer and just grabbed what we would need to get us through the night, and dressed for church the next morning. My head was hurting so bad that all I could think about was drugs and a bed! We closed up the van and trailer, backed it up against a light pole and went inside. It was a very nice motel and seemed to be in a decent area of town (although it was dark, so I guess I couldn't really tell). 

The next morning we were close to being ready to go and Delayna had forgotten to bring her church shirt in, so Stu and Juls headed out to the van to get her shirt and carry a few things out on the way. They came running back in a few minutes later, Stu frantically asked me if I had moved the van. Of course, I hadn't and when I answered he said, "It's Gone!!!". The van, trailer, 10 suitcase and 6 carry-on's were gone! We immediately went to the front desk to call the police. I called the Pastor we were going to be with and explained why we were' going to be there and then called the man who owned the van and told him what happened. We spent a couple of hours talking to the police and trying to remember all that was in the van, At the time I couldn't think of anything that was in the van! Ever since then, I have been remembering things one by one. In the middle of the night I will sit up and remember something new that we "lost". We lost Passports (11 of them, Canadian and American), Canadian citizenship cards, Dominican resident cards, a checkbook,  laptop, a projector, a GPS, a camera, a video camera, books, DVD's, pictures, School curriculum, toys, a guitar, clothes, shoes, stuff for our church, etc. We still start looking for something and realize, "that was before the robbery". That afternoon the man who runs Baptist Missionary Transportation Ministry (which is where the van was from) came and picked us up to bring us back to Harrisonville (about 30 minutes from where we were). We went to church there that night, which was the original plan anyways. The next morning a lady from the church took my kids out shopping for a few clothes and undergarments and also took them to a fun place to eat pizza and play. They had a great time. Meanwhile back at the mission apartment, I was on the phone ALL day long, with the police, airlines, US passport agency, Canadian consulate, etc. I felt like the phone was glued to my ear! After all of those calls, we realized we would have to go to Dallas to get our passports replaced. The airlines were kind enough to change not only the date of our ticket but the departing airport to Dallas and only charged us the $30 fare difference per ticket (which he worked hard to get that low) and not the $150 change fee per ticket. Someone from my dad's church in Ada, OK came and picked us up on Tuesday and took us back to my parent's house. We spent the next couple of weeks there, getting our passports replaced and replacing any necessities we could. Finally on March 16th we flew home! We have spent the last two weeks here cleaning, unpacking and getting the house back in order.  We are almost back to normal except we are still waiting on Delayna's school work to be replaced. This week is a big holiday here so we have no mail flight until next Thursday. The kids will be doing school all summer but we hope to be able to start next year on time. 

Please continue to pray for us as we still have some things to take care of. We still have to replace our Canadian citizenship cards (mine and the girls) our Dominican resident cards and a few things that were stolen. I have to redo all of my tax information, I had already had it all totaled up and ready to go, but it was on my laptop that was stolen, so I have to start all over. Please pray for the kids, that they work extra hard to get their school work done.

Thank you all for your prayers and encouragement and love offerings to help us replace stuff. You have been a tremendous blessing through all of this. We have such awesome friends and family!!!