Summarizing...

Okay, if there is such an award...I think I would win the category for Most Absent Blogger of 2009. I think I have posted some 4 or 5 blogs this whole year. Yikes!

Everyone knows that transitioning from one kid to two brings a lot of changes. I was using this reasoning as my excuse for not blogging more. However, we were blessed with a relatively easy transition and Miesha really loves her little brother. She is always trying to help me by giving me his pacifier/dummy or patting his back when he is crying.

I told myself that I would get back into the habit of blogging once baby Titus started sleeping through the night. He started sleeping through the night around 1.5 months which is SO AWESOME! Now, I use another excuse for not getting my blogging current. I go back and forth between these excuses: a month ago we transitioned from the USA back to Africa and we are tired from the LONG (40 hr) journey and still have jet lag...or we are having yet another lightening storm and I am going to turn off my computer so it doesn't get fried by lightening...or we are still living out of suitcases (8 months now!) while housesitting for friends and I'll become a better blogger once we are settled into our own space again in early January.

Anyway - lots has been going on, so I thought I would catch you all up in one fell swoop again.

Since I blogged last - the very most important event was the arrival of our new baby boy - Titus Glen. He was born via c-section on August 24th and is the sweetest little boy ever. He was average weight (7 lbs) at birth, but proceeded to quickly grow into his strong name by almost doubling in weight his first month. He was 12 lbs at month one and 14 lbs month 2. He is a very happy little eater. As I mentioned before, he is a fantastic sleeper and already sleeps 8-9 hrs a night for me which is SO WONDERFUL! He is good natured, laughs hysterically at his parents when they make funny faces at him, tolerates his sister, has a bit of a snore, and sometimes even laughs in his sleep.

We had some wonderful memory making with family and friends in the States during our final two months after Titus was born. Here are a few picures:

When we arrived, we spent some quality time looking for a rental house. Through friend connections, we found an amazing house, for an amazing price and we will be moving in in early January. We are praising God for his provision. Also, the place we are housesitting for is available to us to use until January 9, so the timing is perfect!

On November 29th, we participated in the church service for World AIDS Day in Ennerdale with a very special group of friends. Pastor Wessie and his Compassion Team gave a heart wrenching overview of AIDS statistics in South Africa, complete with personal testimonies from the congregation and a powerpoint presentation showing all the projects where people are being served a helped by their church and ministry partners. OC Africa was recognized as a ministry partner as there are 3 missionary families from our team who all contribute to serving in Ennerdale and Finetown. (Finetown is the impoverished community next to Ennerdale where there is 80% HIV infection rate and where the majority of the Compassionate Care Team’s efforts are focused) In 2008 we took our short term team to Finetown for a week of service doing work in a pre-school, assisting at an orphanage, doing house visits to encourage and give food parcels, doing grief conferences, teaching first aid, and more. It was a blessing to participate! The few pictures we took turned out blurry, sorry.

On Friday we sponsored a Christmas party for the AIDS group I have been involved with in the past. This group is our “test group” for the Bible study lessons I have been writing. I haven’t seen the group since last year’s party since early last year we were preparing for furlough, packing up our rental house, my pregnancy with Titus made me exhausted, and we were in the states for 6+ months. I was so excited to see everyone again! In the past the party was at the church, but this year the venue changed since Pastor Bhembe left the senior pastor position at the church to attend Bible School full time. We arrived at the party destination an hour in advance to set everything up and then waited and waited and WAITED. Dan went with Pastor B to pick up a few people who needed a ride and then we waited and WAITED some more. About four hours later the party finally started, but the 25 people that I had planned the party for still had not arrived. Then we were told the lady who is in charge of the program, who I have worked very closely with in the past, was in the hospital. The van who went to pick up all my sick friends from the church didn’t come while we were there. After about an hour of singing with the local kids and a few grandmothers, Dan and I had to leave to pick up Miesha and Titus from a friend’s house who was babysitting them. The food packets that we made and the feast of a lunch we prepared were still on the agenda, but we were not able to stay any longer. We got a text message later the next day saying my friends from the HIV support group finally did arrive after we left and that everything was a big blessing to them. I have to be honest and say I was a bit disappointed since I wanted to see everyone and to celebrate with them, but obviously God knows best. I hope to get to see them in the New Year. Please pray for THELMA who is my friend who is in the hospital. They don’t know what is wrong with her yet, but she has been unable to keep food down for a week now.

Last Saturday was our Thanksgiving Feast/End of Year Party with our church. We celebrated how God has worked in our church, the growth of our members (we have gone from 80 people to over 300 in the two years Dan and I have been attending!) and there was a beautiful presence of thankfulness. We took a picture of the “small" group that we co-led the six months we were here and I have attached the photo here. About a third of the group wasn’t there for the photo, so you’ll only see about 30 of the 50 of us.

Tomorrow is Miesha's 2nd birthday! She is an amazing little girl and we love her so much. We are grateful to God for the gift of her presence in our family. Here are a few of the many faces of Miesha:

Thank you for your love and prayers for our family.

I hope to be blogging more in the New Year...I'll make it my New Year's Resolution!

Smiles,
Janell

my version of nesting

Our baby boy is due to arrive in 3 days and I am doing my version of nesting...catching up on Facebook, blogging, missionary correspondence, emails, scheduling stuff, etc. Nesting is very different when you are living in other people's spaces!

We had a GREAT time at the beach and for those of you who are my FB friends, pop over there to see some super pics. Here are some highlights:



This is Miesha seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time and sticking her feet in the frigid water. Such a cutie!

At Long Beach...checking out the International Kite Festival. It was far less cheesy than I thought it would be. Some of those kites were AMAZING and HUGE. Miesha's kite was neither amazing, nor huge, but we made it and it cost $2 - who can beat that? BTW, the Nemo kite in the background behind them - we saw it for sale in a store for $600 and in the air there, it is one of the "medium ish" ones. Yikes!

Miesha at the bubble booth

Stay tuned for some super cute baby boy Hartley pics early next week! Yippee!!!

Janell

quick update

Hello all,
We are counting down the days and hours now until our baby boy appears! At dinner with some supporters Friday evening they asked how we knew exactly when he was coming and we were teasing them saying that we were so busy we told the Lord it would be helpful if He could fit him into our schedule on a Monday evening and God said that worked for Him too (smile) …the reality is we actually have a scheduled c-section on Aug 24th. So close now!!! This is the part of every pregnancy where the mom wants to fit a fast forward button to skip this uncomfortable final phase and get to the part where you can hold the baby. We have plans to take Miesha with us to the coast for a few days to celebrate our 9th anniversary this coming week and we are hoping he’ll wait to make his appearance until our scheduled date. Dan and I were chuckling as we realized tonight that in the three and a half months that we have been in the USA, we have constantly been living with people/family with the exception of one night when we arrived a day before our hosts came home. We are really looking forward to having just the 3 of us in a beach house for a couple days. We also think it is important to have some quality time with Miesha before baby #2 comes and turns her world upside down.

Miesha has caught yet another flu bug and when I took her to the Dr to check things out, he said she has a combination of clogged tear ducts, a sinus infection, a nasty cough, and it seems her 2 year molars are coming in early…all of which are making her pretty miserable! Please pray that she’ll fight these bugs off soon and that she’ll be well by the time baby arrives.
Dan is enjoying a few days break from working on the house and is requesting prayer for his back. Now that he has slowed down a bit, he realizes that the project is causing an old back injury to throb a bit more than is comfortable.

I am doing good generally, with only the usual aches and pains from the final weeks of pregnancy to complain about.

Dan keeps telling us about the fun he had coaching at the kid’s evangelism soccer camp and he did a great job preaching last week (on a very challenging assigned passage – Gen 29-30!) – thanks for your prayers.

Janell

It has been a LONG.......time

I can't believe that it has been 4 months since I have written on my blog. I must confess that in the past, I have often copied and pasted other missionary letters I have written for the mission here since the news was practically the same. It seems that even that has been too much work!

Here is the last 4 months in a nutshell:

Africa to USA: we packed up our rental house and flew to the states the last week of April. It was a relatively uneventful flight and Miesha was a good little traveler.

Pregnancy update: we now have one month left till baby boy Hartley arrives. We have mostly agreed on a name, but we are taking our top three choices to the hospital and we'll see what he looks like when he arrives. He will come via c-section and it will be at Providence Portland near my parent's home in Portland, OR. I am still TIRED a lot, but most days I can usually sneak in an afternoon nap. Thanks mom!

Furlough travel: We have visited our WONDERFUL sponsoring churches and have put 14,000 miles on the car that was so graciously loaned to us. I deliberately have not counted how many beds we've slept in, but most of them have been really comfortable. We are mostly traveling back and forth between Seattle and Portland now, although we have a trip to the coast, a trip to ID, and a trip to Canada on the schedule before we fly back to Africa. Miesha now gets fussy when she sees me pulling out the duffle bags. I totally understand how she feels!

Building project: Part of the reason we chose to come back to the USA in summer was so that Dan could help his brother do a house remodel. They are working crazy hours and almost have the 3rd story framed.

Things we love about USA: times with our families, family pictures, chatting IN PERSON with so many friends, connecting with friends at our churches here, helping with camps/VBS, summertime heat (except for this week; sheesh... 105F!!!), ice cream, Mexican food, root beer, and more.

Things we miss about Africa: our church, our community group, my mom's group, our friends and missionary teammates, our pets, having our own space and privacy, cheap movies and meals out (date nights!), getting to do short term teams, our ministry partners, and more!

Hard to believe that our time here is already half over!

If you are lucky, I may add pictures in the next couple months. lol!

April update

We are still recovering from the 7 days that we invested into our church’s youth conference and family camp. On Monday, it took about 6 hours of driving to get there since all of us in our convoy were pulling ridiculously heavy trailers with sound equipment, freezers, camp stoves, portable showers and more. The place is actually a farm that God told a family in our denomination to purchase and convert into a conference center. Last year for the youth camp, it was in the middle of construction and kids slept on cement floors in the converted stable. (not ideal!) This year, it was much improved, but they weren’t quite ready to handle the 600 people that descended on them for Easter weekend. We had to bring in loads and loads of supplies to make the venue workable.

On Tuesday, they put Dan in charge and by the end of the day, the open field on the farm did resemble a proper campsite complete with the portable showers and makeshift toilets, electrical outlets, lights on poles, and generators to service the 230 campers. (We stayed at a nearby B&B since we vividly remembered how challenging it was the year before and frankly, at 5 months pregnant, anything that isn’t my own bed feels like roughing it!)

Dan worked approximately 14 hr days all week to get the campsites ready, the sound system up and running (in two different places), playing drums on the worship team, and then trouble shooting all the problems that cropped up all week. J He was highly commended for his contribution and our pastor told me that there was no way they could’ve pulled off this high level of an event without Dan’s help. Our assistant pastor said that all the men are happy Dan is going home to the states for six months so that their wives will stop placing such unrealistic expectations on them based on what they saw Dan doing!

At the youth camp, there were approximately 150 students ranging in age from 13-30 and they met with the Lord in a powerful way! Many committed their lives to Christian service and all were challenged to live out their faith in a way that would practically impact their communities for Christ. This is an applicable message for people all over the world, but especially here in Africa.

At the family camp 450 more people joined the students till we had 597 people walking around the property! We didn’t fit into the gorgeous conference hall where the students had met, so the church hired a tent that could seat 500 people underneath and we all enjoyed the Lord’s presence outside! There were two sessions a day and most lasted somewhere between 3-4 hours. The worship would last for 1.5-2 hrs and then the teaching was after that! We are used to this length of service now, having been here over 3 years, but I am telling you – the time seemed to fly by! It is incredibly liberating not to have to worry about time and just enjoy God’s presence together. We were challenged and encouraged and loved the extra time with church friends as we are transitioning out for a season.

I am SO sorry that I don’t have pictures to show you in this letter, but Dan is out of town and took the camera with my camp pics with him. I’ll post some on facebook when I get a chance.

Dan is in the Eastern Cape this weekend with his friend Rob on a hunting trip. Rob’s relative is a professional hunter and was happy to let Dan come for a couple days to go exploring and hunting with them for free. It was Dan’s birthday on the 18th and he is having a fabulous time. He text messaged me around 9am on his birthday and he had already shot a springbok. (see pic)

Talk about incredible birthday memories! (it isn’t too late to send him birthday wishes – danielhartley@oci.org ) Although as he was leaving he was stressing about all the things we still need to finish here around the house, this trip away will be restful and rejuvenating and just what he needs!

We get on a plane soon and we have been very blessed by all the friends surrounding us to help us pack and move things out of the house we have been renting. We can’t wait to rest with our families and to see all our friends!

Please pray for Miesha – our poor girl has been pretty sick since we’ve been home from camp. She was running a slight fever for two days, but I thought it was because she is in process of cutting 4 more teeth. On Thursday, about halfway through the day she broke out into a horrible rash on her torso and face. I took her to the Dr and they confirmed it was an unknown viral infection and that I should just try to make her comfortable until the virus runs its course. She was up lots of times during the night and this morning she vomited after her breakfast. I am hoping the Dr knows what she is talking about and it isn’t anything more serious. Please pray with us that Miesha will be restored to complete health again right away. It is challenging to pack with a sick little gal who needs to be held all the time.

Please pray that we’ll be able to find a family who will be willing to take care of our cats while we are gone.

We are in Swaziland Monday and Tuesday this week with Jasmine and with the Chomba family. Please pray we have an incredible time encouraging them.

Lastly and of most importance – please pray for South Africa this WEDNESDAY during the presidential elections. There is a ton of tension and there is always the potential for violence. Please pray for PEACE throughout the whole process.

Thank you! We can’t wait to see you all again soon.

Smiles,
Janell for us 3.5

PS. We had another ultrasound this last week and our baby is still a boy!