Some Thanks and Some Giving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We were invited to celebrate with some families from our church and the food was fantastic, as was the fellowship. 

A highlight from the day, though, was shortly after we’d finished eating and had settled into the ages-old tradition of watching our favorite YouTube videos on the big screen, Matthew’s dad and his wife arrived!  They flew in all the way from Atlanta to spend the week with us!

They enjoyed some food and we all dug into the pie before heading home with our very first house guests.  Matthew had spent the previous several nights up late readying the bedroom, which needed new drywall patches, paint, a baseboard heater, new light fixture and carpet.  Whew!  But, it was done [enough] for their arrival and we were excited to share Axel with them.

We spent the weekend relaxing, seeing downtown Boise, and Matthew’s dad helped with some projects.  My favorite was a lovely string of Christmas lights across the front of our house!

Sunday we celebrated Axel’s baptism.  We are so grateful for such a wonderful church family that supports us here and looks forward to supporting us spiritually while abroad.  Did you know that between our church family and our MAF HQ family, we had a meal each night after Axel was born for two weeks!  Incredible!

This week we are back to training and our family leaves tomorrow, sadly.  Levi and Amelia have had such fun with FarFar and CiCi!

In other news, last week Axel and I went to see the midwives for our two week checkup.  Axel was not yet back to birth weight and this was not great news.  Without going into too much detail, we figured we knew why, with some feeding and supply issues, but I’ve also spent the last week with a sweet boy constantly eating, or pumping.  It’s a lot of work, and tomorrow we shall see how much it has helped.  Please pray with us that he will be back to 8lb10oz or more (he needed to gain 6oz) so we know he’s just been growing!  With the amount he’s been eating, I can’t imagine what else he’s been doing with it!  So, that’s my part on giving (in reference to the title), because constant nursing is certainly a giving thing to do.

And now we have just a week and a half more of training before breaking for a while to focus once again on growing our ministry support team, and for Christmas, of course.  Yay!