Visit from a friend

One of my best friends from college who doesn't live too far away came for a visit a few weeks ago. I've been thankful that God has allowed us to see each other as often as we have these past 14 years considering where we thought we would be when we were in college. We weren't able to get out a lot because of the snow, but here is a picture of us with the Danube River and Castle Hill behind us.Stephanie took this picture of Ethan and me after walking back from having house church at a friend's house. It had snowed a lot on Saturday night, and our road wasn't scraped, so we went a block away and gathered with a couple of other families for church.

Birthday

So, once again, I am really behind on the blog. I have been real busy with a lot going on and probably shouldn't be spending time now to work on this. But, I know that family are waiting to see about Ethan's birthday... which I will post soon after this. I do want the posts to be in order. :-)

My birthday was the day after Gary, Ethan, and I all returned from Slovakia. We had so much to do and catch up on that I didn't really feel like doing much. On Monday, a few days later, I was supposed to go over to Kristen's for lunch. Well, it was actually a surprise birthday lunch (and Gary never let on one bit). It was such a shock when I walked around the corner and there were other women standing there.

It seemed like chaos with all of the little kids, but Becky and Vivian, whose children were grown or in school were very sweet to watch the kiddos.

Thanks Michelle, Kristen, Yulia, Becky, and Vivian for the wonderful food and fellowship! I had a great time!

Christmas Day

I think I forgot to mention that we had a Chinese student come live with us for 2 weeks right after we got back from the States. He is a non-Christian student in the high school who has been living with another family this year. That family was going to the States for almost a month and asked if we would keep him. It was very different having a high school male around. I'm even more thankful for Gary now. :-) Gary is very clean; he never leaves clothes on the floor, he cleans up any mess that he makes, he helps with cleaning. He even washes the shower down afterward. I'm so blessed to have such a wonderful husband and father to Ethan. Hopefully we can train Ethan to follow his Daddy's footsteps.

Our Chinese house guest left once school ended, so he wasn't here for Christmas. The Yaikos and Audrey came over for Christmas dinner. After we ate, we all went for a walk (except for Seth and Kevin, who stayed and took a nap). Sadly, the snow was gone, and it was raining. So, our walk was only a few blocks. After coming back we ate dessert. Gary and I enjoyed having Kevin, Kristen, and Audrey over. Even Seth and Ethan played together (which we weren't expecting with Seth being about 13 months older than Ethan).

Ethan getting ready to open his present. We waited until evening, after everyone left before he opened his gift. Gary and I have opened presents on Christmas evening/night since we've been married. Some of it out of time since I'm usually cooking all morning, and some of it in an attempt to try to not focus on physical gifts, but the gift that God gave us in sending His son to earth knowing that He would die. A lot of people know that I don't like all of the Santa Clause stuff because it seems to take away from the point of Christmas-- the celebration of the birth of Christ. I am enjoying thinking about and talking about traditions that Gary and I can do to have fun enjoying Christmas and at the same time focus on Jesus. One advantage of getting married and having a child at an 'older' age in life is that we can glean from what others around us have done.

As some of you have probably noticed, I seem to be posting stuff about once a month and trying to post stuff from the whole month at that time. Hopefully I can start doing it more regularly, but it's unlikely to happen before February.

Decorating for Christmas

So, here is a picture of God's decoration for Christmas-- snow. We actually didn't have any snow left for Christmas, but the same weekend that the East Coast got a lot of snow, so did we (though, we only got around 8 inches). The streets in the back part of Diosd hadn't been scraped, so the folks who go to our church and live in this part didn't go that Sunday. We did end up walking a block down the street and having church in someone's home.

On the way back, Ethan fell asleep. We don't have many opportunities to get a picture of the 3 of us, so we asked our neighbor, who was shoveling his walkway, to take this picture of us.
Ethan really enjoyed "helping out" with decorating the Christmas tree. He played with the box that the lights were in for a long time, and then he played with the lights.

My mom gave Ethan his first Christmas ornament, and Gary helped him hang it as the 2nd ornament on the tree (with our family ornament from my mom being first).

I was really amazed that Ethan didn't 'mess' with the Christmas tree or ornaments that much. We made sure to put nonbreakable ornaments without hooks near the bottom of the tree expecting him to mess with them a lot, but he only touched the tree and ornaments on it a few times while it was up.

Crawling up Stairs

Ethan has been pulling himself up more since we've been back in Hungary. Now, he's pulling himself up all the time and letting go with success for a few seconds. Below is a picture where he was very entertained by Gary playing the guitar and wanted to help Daddy play.
Ethan started crawling at the end of our time in the States, but he wasn't crawling around real fast or a lot. We have 3 stairs that go from the dining room into the living room. They go across the room, so they are too long to be gated off, plus, we want Ethan to learn how to get up and down stairs correctly. It would be nice if they were carpeted, but the houses in Hungary have the hard tile floors instead of carpet. Not too long after we returned from the US, Ethan made his way up the 3 stairs.And, of course, what does Mom do? She gets her camera out to take pictures of it. My first thought was actually that I wanted Gary to be able to see it.

He used the space of the whole stairs, but he finally made it up. I think it was the next day or the following that he continued and wanted to go up the "big stairs". Gary stayed behind him and let him do it. He climbed up all 15 stairs! We mostly wanted to see if he could do it, but decided not to let him do that again for awhile. Now, he is learning how to get down the 3 stairs. Once we get him started on the top one, he can get down the other 2 fine.

Ethan in the States

We were thankful that Ethan did so well in the States. He was so flexible, especially with us staying in so many different places and being around so many different groups of people. He got a couple of ear infections, and we had to fly both times. I warned people around me because I had heard horror stories and just knew he would be crying and screaming with pain. To our surprise, he never cried or screamed on either of the flights that he had ear infections (with the exception of one where he screamed before we were even seated :-), but then calmed down).
Ethan did well on the flight back to Hungary. It took him quite a while to get back on schedule once we returned, but we were glad when he started sleeping through the night again.

Here are a few pictures and updates about Ethan from our time in the States:
I gave Ethan his first hair cut soon before we left for the States. I didn't cut a ton off, so I needed to cut it again while we were in CO. Once we got to NC, we decided to take him into a walk-in place and have a professional who knows what they're doing cut his hair. I just told the girl to make him look like a boy. He did really well with sitting and not moving around. I can't believe he is 10 months old and has already had 3 hair cuts. He actually has hair going over his ears again.I think that I mentioned during an earlier post that we only had the chance to go hiking once while we were in CO. We had hoped to go in NC, but only got to do a little something for maybe 20 or so minutes. The minister of missions let us borrow his baby backpack while we were there, and there were hiking trails around the missions house, but we just didn't have time. We had about an hour one afternoon, so we decided to do a short hike. It had been raining in previous days, and leaves covered the ground, so it was pretty slippery on hilly areas. We got to one place where you have to hold on to a rope to go down the hill. Gary tried it a little, but since it was so slippery and he had Ethan on his back, we decided to turn around and head back. We hoped to go another day when the ground was dry, but we never had time.

These two pictures are when we were in Raleigh for a recruiting convention (recruiting staff for the school here). We met some friends for dinner at a mall. They have 2 boys, so they went to the little play area after dinner. We didn't figure that Ethan would get into any of this type of stuff, but he had a blast. None of us put money in the machines, but the boys all enjoyed playing with them anyway. Gary and I absolutely love this picture of Ethan in the red car.
This last picture is from when we were at the home of some ministry partners in Texas. They had a piano and then had this right next to it. I'm not even sure whether to call it a toy or not. Gary and I love this picture, and know that Gary's mom will too (she was a piano teacher). I've never seen anything like this before. All 3 of us (Ethan included) were impressed with this 'toy'.

Our Time in the States

We arrived back in Budapest on December 2nd. I had hoped to update this blog again while we were in the US, and definitely before now. I even made a folder of some more pics to post on here from our time in the US. It's 17 pictures, so I guess I will just post some of them.

My mom was thrilled to meet her only grandchild. She has waited many years for this.
We stayed at my church's missionary house. It was 30 minutes out in the middle of nowhere, but it was beautiful and very peaceful. Here are some pictures of 5 deer and 6 wild turkeys that were right out front. The turkeys only came 2 or 3 times, but the deer were around every morning. We were really thankful for my church and them having a place for us to stay. Even though we do stay with some people during our furlough, it's really hard on us to continually do so.

It's interesting when we go on furlough because so many people ask us if we are enjoying our vacation. We usually look at each other and laugh on the inside. Furlough is one of the most stressful parts of our ministry. It's great to see family and friends, and of course, go to Wal-Mart and get clothes and other things for much cheaper prices, but we have to cram a ton of stuff into a little bit of time and often run on fumes. We were real thankful for how well Ethan did considering that he was always having to adjust his schedule around, especially with us doing a lot of speaking in the evenings. I will do another blog entry and talk some about his time and post pics of him. I was also thankful that we didn't gain weight. During the last furlough many people wanted to meet at a restaurant, so we were usually eating out for lunches and dinners. We gained around 15-20 pounds from that (and not having time to exercise). We do enjoy going out to eat when we're in the States, but not everyday, and especially not multiple times a day. This time, there were quite a few people who invited us to their homes for a meal. One family even cooked a meal and brought it out to the mission house for us to all eat. I still can't believe that they went through so much trouble.