Anna's Christmas presentation at Little Stars preschool

Tis the season!!! Kids dressed up all cute and all the parents jockying for position to take the best picture of their little darling. Each class did 2 presentations. It was very hot and poor Anna had to wear a fleece with a hood along with her class. They sang christmas songs and danced. It was all very cute. Once again there was a ton of food. I love this place!!!! I thought I was going to lose weight here. No chance of that. Afterwards we chatted with parents and laughed about certain performances. Anna is quite the performer. Very, very cute!

Night time Christmas celebration at Payap Church

Food, food and more food. The Thai's love to eat and thankfully so do I. The atmosphere was festive with lots of people milling about dressed in their Santa hats. The church had performers doing skits about christmas with a little twist to it, Thai style. Traditional Thai dancing was performed, sorry I didn't get any pictures of them. The whole family had a lot of fun and look forward to Christmas again next year at Payap.

Christmas celebration at Payap Church

We attend Payap Church every Sunday. It is a predominatley Thai christian church on the Payap University campus. The entire service is in Thai language. They do however, have a translator and you can hear the service in English with a earpiece. I tend to not use the earpiece even though I don't understand everything, I just want to hear Thai and do my best at understanding it. Shelly has started teaching Sunday School here too. After the service there is a lunch of delicious Thai food provided downstairs. Then the girls run around like maniacs until we rustle them up to go home. We are slowly getting to know more Thai's and feeling more like we belong here. We had a night time celebration here on the same day with food, dancing,skits and a gift exchange. The girls loved it.

Working Thai

I wanted to kill 2 birds with one stone and this is what I came up with. I decided to combine a language lesson with a photo shoot. It turned out to be very fun and extremely informative. I was able to converse with some very nice people and felt more confident about my language skills. I also felt more connected with the people we are serving. The lady repairing the shoes has lived in Chiang Mai for 32 years and has 5 kids ranging from 13 years old to early 30's. She used to live in Chiang Rai. I believe her name is Pittapon (something like that)I told her about my family and what we are doing here. It was amazing because our entire conversation was in Thai. I also talked to a watch repairman for a while too and took some photos of him as well. It was a very empowering feeling to be able to converse in another language. I then meandered from place to place at the market and struck up conversations with random people working and then took pictures of them. I think this was a great way to reinforce my language classes and a way to build relationships with the Thai people. At the end of all this running around and flapping my gums I needed to eat so I gobbled down a traditional hamburger,fries and a coke and documented it with a self portrait. Enjoy!

Christmas time is here

I can't believe it is already the Christmas season. The girls couldn't wait to get a tree and decorate it. It was surprisingly easy to get a tree and decorations here. The predominant religion here is Buddhism. I thought it would be more difficult to find things for Christmas. Evidently I was wrong. That doesn't happen often. We all miss everybody and wish we could see family and friends at Christmas time. We hope everyone has a great holiday season. Remember, Jesus is the reason for the season. It looks like we will be spending the day after Christmas in Malaysia to renew our visa's for a 1 year visa. We anticipate spending around 8-9 days there and make it a combination holiday vacation and visa renewal. We are looking forward to our 1st Christmas in Thailand and wish everyone the best. God bless

Riding bikes and homework

The kids absolutely love riding their bikes in the moobaan (neighborhood) and their Dad loves to take pictures of them. So,it's a win-win situation. The kids have their routines now and seem to be enjoying life here much more. Homework, on the other hand, is a different story as Acacia sometimes balks at the mention of it. Anna seems to love homework and wants to do more and more. Kids...... Anna is always wanting to do what Acacia is doing because she loves her big sister. Acacia is always getting annoyed at Anna for copy-catting her. Needless to say fighting abounds. Sometimes I look into my girls faces and see God smiling at me and other times I swear to God it's the devil. You gotta love em though!!!!!

Farewell, Smokey

If you look again at our first ever blog entry you will see me with 2 of our newly acquired kitties. One is Lovebug and the darker one is Smokey. Lovebug is Acacia's cat and Smokey is Anna's cat. Unfortunately, during our island getaway, Smokey went to heaven. Our neighbor was watching the kittens and during the night she said she heard a cat fight. When morning came, Smokey was no where to be found. The poor guy already used up a few of his lives just from being man-handled by Anna. (Let's just say she is not the most gentle with animals). Lately, Acacia has been crying and very distraught about Smokey's demise. We decided to have a burial ceremony of sorts. Acacia wrote a note to God and sent it to heaven attached to a floating lantern. We prayed and lit flowered candles. Flowers with candles and incense are used in traditional Thai burial ceremonies. We finished off with tea and cookies and each of us spoke of what we loved about Smokey. It was very sweet and sad. We actually started to tear up when Anna was saying her prayer about Smokey. Something about a sweet innocent little voice praying about the death of a kitten to grab at your heart.