Happy Easter! He is risen!

Check out Under the Radar's Easter episode. Click the link for some great indie music.


Hope everyone had a great Easter holiday, and I hope today you don't go back to normal and loving complacency. How's that for putting it bluntly!? Because He's risen, we have this hope so that we shouldn't to live like He's still dead. We don't have to live like we're dead! I really believe, based on all that's happening today in the world, that He's coming back soon. If you have chosen, at any point in your life, to become a Christ follower and accept His forgiveness of your sins, He took care of that for all time. There's so much freedom in that, knowing He came just for you, and you alone were worth it. He knew every wrong thing you'd ever do and thought you worth saving anyways, so why do we hang on to our past like we are still in bondage to it?

Spring has spring part 2: We have chickens!!

 It's official! We finally have chicks! We have been wanting to get them for a couple years, and knew this would be a great learning experience for the kids. When we went to pick them out, we each ended up picking out a completely different breed, which is kinda neat! When we looked at buying slightly smaller chicks at Tractor Supply, we were going to have to get at least six chicks all at once, and if we wanted a female chick that was a good layer, we'd have to buy 6 of the same kind that they had that week. This way ended up being much better, and especially much more fun after months of research and getting ready for them, we got to get all the ones we had decided we liked over the last few months!

So without further ado, here are the girls.

Spring has sprung!! Part 1!

Sooo, we've been home for almost a month that has flown by faster than just about any of the other months recently.

Here's what we've been up to as of 3/12/14

We finished (finally!) Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. Yay!!!
We've been sick quite a bit for the last month. In fact, every week, at least two people were suffering from sickness at any given time. This resulted in us missing many of our weekly activities, rescheduling playdates and visits with friends multiple times, 2 trips to the doctor and 1 to the emergency room, since we've been back from Haiti alone!
We've been working on our backyard and garden area. It's a work in progress, but we put a fence up to keep the dog out of the garden area which we are expanding. FYI: It didn't work well, so we are going to have to reinforce it. We started our chicken coop, and there's been a pretty large learning curve, but we hope to have baby chicks here by the end of the month!

This was us laying the fencing down.

Trip blog #5

So Friday was our R&R day. We hadn't gotten to see much of the area except the drive to and from HOA, so Friday after a week of hard work, Fenel rewarded us by taking us to not 1 but 2 beautiful beaches.

The first beach, "the cove" is where we got to dip our toes in for a few minutes earlier in the week. We came back again for a few minutes to do a little souvenir shopping for family and friends. They had pretty bracelets, hand carved boxes, figures, wooden machetes, and even (albeit extremely inaccurate) hand made wooden globes. It was funny because the places on the globe were distorted at best, but it was still really cool. I know I could never do that any better!

Trip Blog #3

In continuing to recap our recent Haiti mission trip, I wanted to talk about what we did last week a little bit more each post. It's still hard for me to believe we've almost been back a week already. It feels like we were gone much longer than just a week, and it also feels like it was so much longer than just one week ago. It's a strange feeling that I can't really explain except that I'm sure other people who travel out of the country for something like that do feel out of sorts for a little bit.

Back to the trip, though!

Day 3 found us getting ready Monday morning for the first work day. We headed to the work site and the kids ran out to catch the action any time they had a brief break from their schoolwork.

Trip blog #4

Days 5 and 6

Wednesday and Thursday we got more time to play with the kids, and more work to do! Thursday was an especially busy day for the team, as we divided into 4 teams to get all the jobs accomplished. Jim worked on welding

Trip Blog #2

For those wondering, here's a summary of our recent trip to Jacmel, Haiti. If you have questions, feel free to leave them as a comment and I'll be happy to respond. We had such a jam packed, overwhelming week of new experiences, sometimes it's hard to really put it into words, but I can try!

Saturday: We got up bright and early at about 3 am to get ready to go to the airport, and my dad picked us up early because of all the snow and ice on the road. Once we boarded the plane, I wasn't sure what to expect. The only thing I knew was God had taken my fear away and replaced it with excitement and eager anticipation. It was more fun and less scary than I had assumed. Kind of like a big charter bus with wings, if that makes sense!