Please pray for us as Andrew & Ieva stay here in Klaipeda for the next week & as I travel to Florida to present at the Institute of College Student Values. To read about the institute or see the abstract of our workshop, click here. I'm excited to present in a new venue, as I've never attended this conference before. We're also hoping to make some good recruitment connections for LCC.
As much as I'm excited to get some Florida sun in the middle of a cold, dark Lithuanian winter (and to gain professional experience), I'm not excited about leaving my precious family here. Thankfully I'm traveling with our colleague & friend, Casey, so I'm not making all the bus, taxi & rental car rides or flights alone. But Andrew will be back here flying solo with Ieva.
Thanks for your prayers for babysitting. We still don't have a full-time person, but have found 2 students who are giving significant hours of their week to Ieva. One is here for a bit every day & the other is here every M-W-F afternoon. 3 other girls fill in the rest of the gaps. We're so thankful & hope it continues to work out (and that Ieva remains flexible).
I'll write more when I'm back in Lithuania again!
Sunshine, here I come!!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
An Oregon Angel
Thanks to so many of you who have prayed us through our recent difficulties with the miscarriage. God has truly healed our family & is daily opening our eyes to what He has in store for our future!
The support & prayer we recieve from so many faithful friends & family makes our ministry here in Lithuania so much more meaningful! Ačiu Labai! (Thank You in Lithuanian)
We thought you'd enjoy some recent photos of our joyful Oregon Angel! Ieva loves to wear her ballerina skirt & shoes and her angel wings & halo and then dance to music like a "dancing princess" (her words - not ours)!
Her Daddy is her biggest fan!
Friday, January 11, 2008
A rough start to the new year...
It's with great saddness that we share our most recent family news with you. On January 3rd when we went to my doctor for my (nearly) 3-month pregnancy check-up (I was at 11 weeks), the doctor discovered that we had lost our baby. From the ultrasound the size of the fetus showed that it stopped developing somewhere around it's 6th or 7th week...somewhere around the 1st week of December. For some reason, my body hadn't given me any indication that the baby wasn't alive & I still very much felt as if I were pregnant.
Because of that, the news came as quite a shock to us. We spent the next few days reeling & processing with family over skype. Telling Ieva was difficult - probably one of the most difficult, yet tender moments we've had together in our small family. Since her favorite line to proclaim to everyone has been "Ieva's a big sister!!" we explained that the baby in mama's tummy isn't there anymore, but instead is in heaven with Jesus. She looked into our tear-filled eyes & asked sincerely "Ieva big sister??" "No..." we told her. "Not now. But you will be later." In the days to follow her new line has become: "Mama & Daddy so sad...baby in heaven with Jesus...Ieva big sister later." It's pretty precious what our two-year old is able to come up with, and this loss makes us love & appreciate her all the more.
This past Tuesday we went to Vilnius so I could have the D&C procedure done at the Baltic American Clinic. We continue to be extremely impressed with the care & skill used there, which is what keeps us driving the 3.5 hours when we have major medical needs. The same doctor who delivered Ieva did my procedure & was very caring during the entire experience. She gave me a good report after it was all done & we were on our way 5 hours after coming in! I was pretty nervous about my recovery...how painful it all might be, how long it would take to feel normal again, how I might feel emotionally...but it really has gone amazingly well!
We've received loads of encouraging emails & phone calls from friends & family, all ensuring us that they have been & continue to pray for us. And we are convinced that it's only through those faithful prayers that my recovery has gone so smoothly. Physically I feel pretty good & emotionally I am in much better shape than I anticipated being (and than I was last week). Truly, we praise the Lord for this!! He has shown Himself faithful to us once again through this difficult process and is even beginining to open my eyes to some of the reasons why He may have allowed us to experience this loss.
So for now, we will continue to covet your prayers as we readjust our plans for the future and settle back into a new semester of work at LCC. If you could also add the loss of our nanny to your prayers, we'd be thankful. I'm currently writing on Friday evening & we're scheduled to both be at work full-time starting Monday and don't have a replacement nanny lined up yet. We've got a few phone calls to make over the weekend & are trusting that God will continue to show us His faithfulness to our family has He has so many times before. Thanks for joining us in praying for this crucial need.
And thanks again family, friends & faithful blog-readers, for supporting our life & ministry here in Lithuania is so many ways!! We truly could not be here, doing what we're doing, without you. Labai Ačiu.
Because of that, the news came as quite a shock to us. We spent the next few days reeling & processing with family over skype. Telling Ieva was difficult - probably one of the most difficult, yet tender moments we've had together in our small family. Since her favorite line to proclaim to everyone has been "Ieva's a big sister!!" we explained that the baby in mama's tummy isn't there anymore, but instead is in heaven with Jesus. She looked into our tear-filled eyes & asked sincerely "Ieva big sister??" "No..." we told her. "Not now. But you will be later." In the days to follow her new line has become: "Mama & Daddy so sad...baby in heaven with Jesus...Ieva big sister later." It's pretty precious what our two-year old is able to come up with, and this loss makes us love & appreciate her all the more.
This past Tuesday we went to Vilnius so I could have the D&C procedure done at the Baltic American Clinic. We continue to be extremely impressed with the care & skill used there, which is what keeps us driving the 3.5 hours when we have major medical needs. The same doctor who delivered Ieva did my procedure & was very caring during the entire experience. She gave me a good report after it was all done & we were on our way 5 hours after coming in! I was pretty nervous about my recovery...how painful it all might be, how long it would take to feel normal again, how I might feel emotionally...but it really has gone amazingly well!
We've received loads of encouraging emails & phone calls from friends & family, all ensuring us that they have been & continue to pray for us. And we are convinced that it's only through those faithful prayers that my recovery has gone so smoothly. Physically I feel pretty good & emotionally I am in much better shape than I anticipated being (and than I was last week). Truly, we praise the Lord for this!! He has shown Himself faithful to us once again through this difficult process and is even beginining to open my eyes to some of the reasons why He may have allowed us to experience this loss.
So for now, we will continue to covet your prayers as we readjust our plans for the future and settle back into a new semester of work at LCC. If you could also add the loss of our nanny to your prayers, we'd be thankful. I'm currently writing on Friday evening & we're scheduled to both be at work full-time starting Monday and don't have a replacement nanny lined up yet. We've got a few phone calls to make over the weekend & are trusting that God will continue to show us His faithfulness to our family has He has so many times before. Thanks for joining us in praying for this crucial need.
And thanks again family, friends & faithful blog-readers, for supporting our life & ministry here in Lithuania is so many ways!! We truly could not be here, doing what we're doing, without you. Labai Ačiu.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Happy 2008!
Here in Lithuania, the New Year is welcomed with celebrations & fireworks equivalent to our American 4th of July. Evey city does a massive fireworks show, but many pedestrians do shows of theirs own that still offer quite a lot of pizazz!!
We started our evening with dinner at our friends home - Gregg & Sharon Brubaker & their boys, Erik & Augenijus (who are Ieva's good friends). Around 9 we took Ieva home to put her to bed and around 10 our friend Chad came over. We played games until 11:45 and then went out on the balcony to see what we could see in the sky. It's days like this that we are SO thankful to have a balcony (many people don't)!! We lit sparklers & waved them around while watching at least 8 different firework displays going off in all directions around us. It was extraordinarily loud (but amazingly quiet in Ieva's room - it didn't phase here a bit!) and extraordinarily beautiful. I really think the States needs to adopt this tradition of fireworks on New Year's Eve. What an explosively colorful way to start the new year!
Happy 2008 to all of you! We wish you a year full of God's unexpected & fabulous surprises!
We started our evening with dinner at our friends home - Gregg & Sharon Brubaker & their boys, Erik & Augenijus (who are Ieva's good friends). Around 9 we took Ieva home to put her to bed and around 10 our friend Chad came over. We played games until 11:45 and then went out on the balcony to see what we could see in the sky. It's days like this that we are SO thankful to have a balcony (many people don't)!! We lit sparklers & waved them around while watching at least 8 different firework displays going off in all directions around us. It was extraordinarily loud (but amazingly quiet in Ieva's room - it didn't phase here a bit!) and extraordinarily beautiful. I really think the States needs to adopt this tradition of fireworks on New Year's Eve. What an explosively colorful way to start the new year!
Happy 2008 to all of you! We wish you a year full of God's unexpected & fabulous surprises!
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