Another week and no update...

Hi everyone! My weeks are flying by and it seems impossible to keep up with everything. I need to write a newsletter and that hasn't happened, I need to get my hair cut, hasn't happened, I need to go to the grocery store, answer e-mails, write thank you notes and 100 other things that just haven't happened. SO....please forgive me oh faithful blog followers, I am still here and still have tons I want to share, just not much time to share it!

Okay, I could have done it last night after church, HOWEVER.....The Amazing Race came on and well, I am a HUGE fan and will one day be on the Amazing Race! If anyone wants to run it with me, let me know. I thought it would be neat to run with my husband, but I would want to be married after the show and I don't know if it is really possible. So... maybe I should look for someone else. Little fun fact for all of you to know.... I have met 3 of people who have actually run the Amazing Race and I am getting closer to one of them now. She is actually becoming one of my friends. Heehee... so I plan on getting as many tips from her now as I can for the one day when I WILL be on this race! Am I confident or what? I might lose the first leg, but oh how I dream of being on that race. Okay, enough of that.

So last week Greg had fall break, so we took the boys on a field trip to Wilmington, NC to visit the North Carolina battleship. We had a great time and learned a lot. It was a fun trip and the boys really enjoyed having this time with me and Greg without their precious sister for just one day. My roommate in college, (pictured in post below) Amy, took care of Annie for us and that was a huge blessing! Thanks Amy!!

The rest of the week was spent with football practice, home school, more football and some family fun. We ended the week with another win! The Saints are now 5-0! I must say their team is REALLY good! They are just so fun to watch too! I won't bore you with any tackle pictures this week, but we are really enjoying the whole football experience. They have a concession stand that the parents run. I volunteered this weekend and Annie thinks that working the concession stand is super fun! Football games and Saturday are just something that we all look forward to lately! We will be sad when the season ends! Which reminds me, if you think about it you can start praying for the readjustment for our family back to village life in June. I think it is going to be tough for 3 children I know! It has been mentioned by 2 of them already! You are probably thinking Jerod and Alex, NOPE.... Jerod and ANNIE! Alex doesn't seem to care one way or the other. Interesting, huh? Anyway, come June.... life could bring with it some interesting changes.

I know I haven't mentioned this little girl for a while now. Her name is Marnie. She is 5 and has cancer. It just isn't fair when a child has cancer. It just isn't. I can't stop thinking about her, when I brush Annie's hair or when I send her off to school, when I watch her run and jump. It is hard for me not to hurt for Marnie and her parents. Please pray for Marnie's healing and for her parents as well! You can follow her progress at her caringbridge site. This is the address: www.caringbridge.org Marnie's website name is marniehowiler Please send them your blessings and if not, then PRAY!!

For some reason, my pictures are not uploading today. I could only get the one to upload. I will try and upload more from our field trip later. I love you all friends! Have a great day! Do something good for someone else, it really makes you feel good, even when you feel bad! :o) My thought for the day, I know I am really deep!

Birthday fun!

My birthday dinner at Fiesta Mexicana. Singing to me in Spanish, music to my ears!!


I really don't feel 39!

After dinner we headed next door to Kroger where Greg had this cake waiting for us. Happy 39th Birthday, Love G,J, A,A ( Greg, Jerod, Alex, Annie)

Me and my cake! My honey is so thoughtful!

Annie in the Disney Store, what a cute Nemo she makes!

She really liked being Mini Mouse!

Annie with MamaSay

My precious parents! Aren't they cute?

YumYum!

My presents from Amy, my roommate in college.

This is my roomy, Amy. How fun to be close to her again!

Jer, Alex, and Annie with Amy's children, Virginia and James.

Jerod, the serious one. If you know Jerod, you know I am KIDDING!!!

Alex, our thinker. HA!!

Annie, the calm one!

Annie thought this was an orange apple on her shirt. Whew, we have a lot of work to do!

Jerod is the second one from the left. We won this game again. We are now undefeated and they are doing very well!

Jerod on the run. He is doing a great job, there just aren't a lot of fun pictures of the offense!

Skip down 4 pictures and then scroll up. I still can't get the order correct. Sorry! ;o}

I guess this is what they were worried about! He didn't make the tackle, but he was OH sooo close! Maybe next time! I know this is blurry, but it is really hard to take pictures when you are yelling, "GET HIM, GET HIM!!"

Alex is proving to be quite quick at times!

Well, Goliath was big, and YES he is lifting Alex off of the ground here, but..... big isn't EVERYTHING!!

Okay so remember the giant in the first game? Here he is again. Same guy, against my little man. They started off the game with only one guy blocking Alex and then they added another guy. Hmm... you think they were worried?

This is Alex getting advice from "Honey" (Grandfather)If you are noticing that he is wearing a DUKE shirt, we got it for free and we ONLY let him have it because he was going to wear it under his football jersey! :o) He is a TARHEEL fan and doesn't really know that he shouldn't like DUKE! So innocent!

Hi friends!!

We have had a great past few days! It started off with a wonderful celebration of my birthday on on the 1st! Thanks to all of you who sent me birthday wishes and for those of you who didn't, you are off the hook, because I am sure I didn't send you one either! :o) We ate at our favorite Mexican restaurant and they sang to me in Spanish. It was fun! Then I spent some time with one of my roommates in college and she blessed me with my favorite treat, Krispy Kreme doughnuts! We also had fun picking out some pumpkins and taking pictures!

Then my parents arrived on Friday and we enjoyed seeing them and they enjoyed seeing the boy's game on Saturday. We celebrated my birthday some more and Annie learned what Halloween was all about. ( The dressing up part that is!) We went to the Disney Store and she had fun trying on some costumes. Annie is very Americanized now! VERY!! We plan on attending every fall festival and candy give-away that we can find! I think I might dress up this year too! :o)

So we have really had a good weekend and are loving the fall weather that has started to come this way! I love this time of year, it is my FAVORITE time. Annie ran up to me the other day and showed me the first leaf that had fallen. She had never seen a leaf that had changed colors before. We are sure to experience many firsts over the next few months! How exciting!!

Our time in Asheville

We finished the weekend off with KFC! It was OH so good and we were so appreciative of the families that provided all of the food for us throughout the week! We love you all!


This is Kathy and Roy. They loved on us this weekend like they had known us all their lives. We want to thank them for their wonderful hospitality! Kathy's eyes look closed in this smaller version of the picture but if you click on the picture you can see they aren't! :o)


Opening my birthday present from Grandma. She always does so good!!


What a blessing! A precious lady named, Barb gave us her little cabin in the woods to stay in while we were there. It was AWESOME!!!

We worked at having a good booth this year. It worked! The kids continued coming back to play the bean bag toss.

The real reason we do what we do!

Alex, a true Colts fan!

Part of our display showing things from our people's culture.

We had a lot of fun visiting with old friends! This is my friend, Allison.

This is our new friend, Dottie who was a trooooper and face painted all day long!

Joe and Heather are dear friends of ours and have recently adopted 2 boys from Ethiopia. They were precious!

My mother-in-law, Charlene came to visit us in Asheville and she had a great time as well!

Our friends, Jeff and Debbie are serving the people in India now. God is good!

They aren't married! That is Greg with our friend, Keri. Mike was home with some sick boys and Keri was getting some time away for the day. She and Mike and their class too, have been so good to us!

Our old neighbors came by to see us. This is Mike and Brianna. Sorry if I have spelled it wrong! Joanne, her mom was working that day but we enjoyed seeing them all! (we saw here when we went to see our old house)

This is Greg doing a wonderful job of sharing about our people.

We had a great week and enjoyed every aspect of the Global Focus Impact week. We had a great time seeing old friends and making new ones! Now we are smack tired and ready for a rest! Thanks to our Church for loving on us and for supporting us! Thanks to Keri and Mike's class!! I really think your class treated us as good as was physically possible! From salsa and chips to Reese Cup cereal to the cookout on Friday, you are AWESOME!!So...THANK YOU!! Love to you all and hope we can see you all again very soon!

Love you, Miss

So much to tell!

This is Salvador! We are so proud of him!!


Here is Cesilia and her family. Please pray for them, it is rainy and cold and they don't have a well sealed home, so the water is dripping everywhere.

This is Barbara and Icho. We are so proud of Icho because he has been going to Salvador's home each week 3 times a week to take him to AA. God is GOOD!

Angelica is soooo happy with all of the changes that have been made and she is giving God all the glory!

Annie has been having a great time at school! Ya never know what you are going to find her doing, but today it was coloring balloons in our hallway.

Studs! I said they were number 77 and 33, but they switched Alex once he got there to number 19!

Skip to the bottom and go up it will make these next pictures more fun to view.

This guy is saying to Alex, "Hey dude, thanks for letting me get by, it was my first touchdown!" Alex says, "Won't happen again!" :o)

"Oh, man I almost had him!"

This was Alex on the ground after number 55 slipped through his fingers!

"Hey Mom, watch this!!"

I know you can't see it very well, but on the other side of those two boys is my Alex grabbing the pants leg of the guy with the ball. You can see his little hands on his thigh. He was soo close!!

This was Alex before that play saying, "Hey Mom, check out that score, remember we are guest!!"

This is Jerod blocking!

Jerod blocking some more.

Oh, I have so much to tell you. I have been too busy to even write which has really made me mad because I really have wanted to share lots of news with you. We started the weekend off with a Dr. visit because my leg was infected. SOOO stupid! Anyway, then we had our football game and of course we had a blast watching our boys having fun! They won again, but I can't remember the score. I think it was 21 to 14. Then the boys had a sleepover. We had our friends, the Mims boys sleep over and Annie spent the night with their daughter, Ila. It was her first night away, she had a blast!! So our weekend was pretty busy. I will upload the pictures of the 5 boys playing later, I am too tired.

Yesterday we decided it was time to call our friends in the village. We started out with a call to Angelica and Salvador. Angelica started laughing when she heard our voices and said that she was just saying that morning that we had forgotten them. So we were glad we called. She said she was so happy, there was peace in her house. She told us how Salvador had started attending AA with Icho, another friend of ours and he had gone 5 times in 2 weeks. Salvador got on the phone and told us how he needed the help and he was finally getting it. Praise GOD!!

Next we spoke with Icho and he told us all about the church and how everyone was attending. They seem to have everyone that they had when we were there and that there were 3 people teaching the children. He said it was just really going well and they always had a full attendance.

We then called Cesilia to see how she was doing. You may remember we had asked you to pray for her because she had quit going to church and I was really bothered by this. She was so happy to talk to us and she said that for the first month she didn't go and then she felt like she really needed to start back and ever since she has been attending every Monday and Friday and she said she is really enjoying it! So, your prayers really do work! She even said, "I don't know why, I just started going again and really like it. " So, we were so encouraged to see that God is moving and everything is going well with our precious friends! I will say I found out that our sweet mutt (the one pictured in the post below) died on Friday. He really was thinking about me, he was hungry! So, that made me sad, but I wasn't too shocked. So, that is how everything is going in our neck of the woods!

We are heading to Asheville tomorrow for our church's Global Focus. We would appreciate your prayers over the next few days. We will be busy, busy until Monday when we will return home. Love you all! Missy