A hard day April 14, 2013

This is a hard post to write. So, actually, I am not going to write it. I am copying below an e-mail Dan wrote to some of our family members (with just a little bit of editing). I will write more later. Thank you for your prayers.

We are okay.  Sarah started to have some bleeding on Friday afternoon.  We went to the local clinic on Saturday evening and got an ultrasound.  Sarah had gotten an ultrasound there 2 weeks ago.  The doctor confirmed that the baby had not grown at all over the past two weeks and was probably not alive anymore. 

This morning (Sunday morning) was pretty scary, as the miscarriage was in full swing.  A Canadian midwife was here to help Sarah.  Together, we monitored her blood pressure and were in nearly constant contact with Sarah’s dad (Roy, who is a medical doctor) in North Carolina via cell phone. 

Sarah was losing a lot of blood, and her blood pressure was going down.  I asked my co-workers to get a plane ready so we could fly Sarah to the coast where there are “better” medical facilities there, but it quickly became apparent that Sarah would not be able to make the 1 hour flight. 

Because it was Sunday morning here, everything is closed.  All of the pharmacies are closed, most doctors are not around, and I think the local “hospital” is pretty much closed too.  Thankfully, after a bunch of calling around, the doctor who gave Sarah the ultra sound the night before was willing to see her at the local clinic. 

We got Sarah over to the clinic.  The doctor wanted to do a D&C procedure, to remove the baby and all that was causing her to lose so much blood, this would require her to be put to sleep.  I was really not excited about this.  Roy told me on the phone that this was probably what Sarah needed, that it would probably save her life.  So, we had the procedure done.  I was able to stay at Sarah’s side the whole time.  She came through like a champion, though there were a few times I was scared that she had stopped breathing.  Sarah finished one more bottle of IV fluid at the clinic, then we were released to come home.  Sarah has been resting on the couch since, and has done a good job eating and drinking. 

We are okay.  I am very thankful Sarah is still with us.  Of course we are very sad that our baby is not, but my fear was that today was going to be much, much worse than it was. 

A message from Natalie and Claire… March 13, 2013

For my blog followers who are not also on my Facebook… a little announcement from our family  

Yes, the shirts mean what you think they mean!  Due in late October (which means I’m almost 2 months pregnant right now.) We are very excited!  We will most likely be returning to the States for baby’s birth. Please pray for health and for all the decisions we’ll need to make related to this exciting change in our lives!

PS YES our v-sat system is now installed as of just a couple of days ago!  The internet isn’t going to be as fast as we had originally anticipated but at least it will be stable!  Hopefully that will mean more regular posts from me! Maybe starting with some from our little family vacation to Disneyland

We’ve been busy! February 21, 2013

Okay, trying this again since evidently it didn’t post correctly the first time around…

 

Since we’re only a few days away from leaving, I thought I would post some pictures of what we’ve been up to since we’ve been in the States!

We’ve been busy…

…reading books with Granny

…playing on the kiddie rides at the mall

…swinging at the park

…playing with Buddy the dog

…dressing up as pirates for Wednesday night Kids’ Adventure Club at church

…eating ice cream at the local dairy

…hanging out with  long-time friends

…playing Wii at Grandpa’s house

…eating lunch at Red Robin (evidently they have the BEST mac-n-cheese ever!)

…playing with our cousins

…getting warm and dry after a bath in front of the fireplace in the MAF apartments in Nampa

…eating delicious Mexican food

…shopping for produce at Jabbers playplace

…watching Krispy Kreme donuts being made

…playing in the snow

…yes, Mommy too

…making snow angels

…swimming at the Y with Uncle Peter

…decorating cookies at a Valentines’ party at a playgroup

…eating yummy serve-yourself frozen yogurt (complete with lots of gummy worms on top!)

…drawing and coloring an ABC animal book with Gramma Ringenberg

…taking pictures with Ronald McDonald

…playing at the park on a beautiful spring day

…rock climbing

…enjoying beautiful sunsets

…driving through snowy mountain passes

…having a fancy tea party at Aunt Laura’s house

…in our fancy party dresses

…and fancy party hats!

And, in the last couple of days we’ve been awfully busy being sick. Ugh. So if you think of us, will you please pray for Natalie and Claire? They had colds, but yesterday and today they have been much worse instead of better (running fevers, lethargic, etc).

We’ll be here in Washington until Sunday (Dan is still in Nampa doing some more training) when we’ll head south for a few days of family vacation in Southern California before heading back to Indonesia the end of next week.

January 21, 2013

So here we are in the land of fast internet, but somehow that doesn’t translate into having time to blog!  I’m at Dan’s mom’s house and will try to get some pictures posted of our trip in the next few minutes

On Saturday January 12 we flew from Wamena to Sentani. Dan was able to fly us down, but due to some unforseen circumstances the flights were a bit delayed so the kids had some time to play at the hangar before we left

On  Sunday we took the girls out to have some fun. We went to the mall where we spent some time at TimeZone, the local arcade. Claire especially enjoyed riding the little rides. Not too expensive at about 15 cents a pop

Of course we couldn’t go through Sentani and not go to the pool! Some friends (newly arrived in Sentani from language school) accompanied us, the girls had a great time swimming with their friends.

Monday morning was time to embark the beginning of our long journey to the States!  We started off on a Garuda airplane from Sentani to Jakarta, with stops in a couple cities along the way. Thankfully, although the plane was a bit delayed at the beginning, there were no other problems with that part of the trip.

The girls enjoyed some treats along the way

On our approach to Jakarta, I noticed that another airplane was landing on a parallel runway exactly at the same time we were landing!

We had some time to hang out in Jakarta before catching our flight to Singapore. After picking up our luggage, the first thing that caught the girls’ eye was an A&W restaurant! Of course, the first thing to catch MY eye was Starbucks!

(Claire took this most excellent picture of Natalie and me )

After waiting in Jakarta for several hours, it was finally time for our flight to Singapore. Unfortunately, we waited a bit longer for the airplane to arrive from Singapore before we could fly it back to Singapore! So we arrived in Singapore about an hour late, and headed straight to the transit hotel to catch a few hours of sleep.

We awoke early – about 5 am on Tuesday morning - to catch our early-morning flight to Tokyo. Unfortunately, we were to wait even longer for another delayed flight. While we waited in the Singapore airport the girls had some fun…

 

The entertainment on the United flight from Singapore to Tokyo kept the girls busy!

Our flight to Tokyo took off about 2 hours late, and as our layover in Tokyo was only 2 hours long, I was pretty worried that we would miss our connecting flight! Thankfully we landed with about 40 minutes to spare, and after waiting in line for security and running to the gate, we made it just in time to board our flight… and then sit on the plane for over 1 1/2 hours before we took off! Ugh!   Thankfully the girls did a great job!

When we landed in Seattle on Tuesday morning, Dan’s mom was there to pick us up! We were exhausted but happy to be here!  The first night we all went to bed at about 7:30 pm and didn’t wake up until 11 am the next morning!  The 2nd night the girls were up for a couple hours in the middle of the night, but since then they’ve slept through the night, and we have all just been catching up on our sleep.  We’ve had fun shopping and hanging out with Dan’s mom and are looking forward to Dan’s arrival tomorrow!  I’ll post more pictures later

Merry Christmas! December 26, 2012

Better late than never! Merry Christmas from our family to yours!

These last few months have been BUSY at our house! I have been helping out a lot at Natalie’s school. Another missionary mom and I decided to put on a Christmas program with the school kids, so that meant 3-4 music practices every week at the school (the 1-4th grades and 5-8th grades have separate music times). My friend was the one actually leading and directing the kids for the most part but I was able to put my rusty piano skills to work and help some of the kids to learn harmony parts to the songs. It was a lot of fun! The picture above was taken just before the Christmas program performance at the beginning of December. If it looks like Claire is wearing lipstick, it is because she just got done eating a red lollipop that came in the mail from her Aunt Laura

I also have been helping out with Natalie’s class (1-4th grades) by teaching art once a week. One of the other moms also comes in and helps me.

In the new year we will be doing some traveling. Dan has been asked to go back to MAF headquarters for some training, and the girls and I will go with him. He will also take some vacation, so our time in the States will be about 6 weeks long. We will be gone from mid-January until the end of February. This will mean Natalie will miss school (school starts again for the 2nd semester right when we plan to leave) but we will be able to bring some of her schoolwork with us. We will be mostly in the northwest Washington area and also a couple weeks with Dan in Idaho while he is doing his training.

Natalie has been doing very well in school so far. She is reading very well and also loves math. One of her favorite subjects is Indonesian!

Claire is doing well at home – she has friends here on the base to play with. I am still doing preschool with her on and off, but mostly only if she is interested in doing so. She is already writing her name very well and I don’t see any reason to push her harder if she doesn’t want to!

I hope that our internet situation will improve in the new year as well. Unfortunately our satellite dishes are STILL stuck in customs with no hope of getting them out in the forseeable future. So, MAF has ordered another satellite dish through a different provider and shipping method, so hopefully we will bypass the customs mess altogether. We’ll see!  If all goes well the new internet should be in place by the time we get back from the States, but you never know…   So hopefully my blogging should improve from very sporadic to a little more regular

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!

Family update November 2, 2012

Maybe I will just give an update this time instead of complaining about how slow the internet still is, do you think that is a good idea?!  But if you could, please pray that our v-sat dish would be released from customs. It has actually already been released TWICE but then pulled back in for reasons unknown (cough*corruption*cough) and so that means we are still limping along on very slow internet here.

In other news…

Natalie has really been enjoying school for the past few months. Her favorite subjects are math and Indonesian!  She is in school every day from 7:45 to 2:30. The school is only a few minutes from our house which is wonderful! Some days I pack a lunch and take Claire on the motorbike and we eat lunch with Natalie – so fun to see her in the middle of the day!
We have been fighting some illnesses in our family the last few weeks. First Natalie started off with a cold, and then I got sick. Nothing serious, just low energy and a mild cold, but enough to not be able to do my usual daily activities like exercise. And then Claire got sick, too, with high fevers. After a couple days of fevers, she started having some other symptoms, and so I thought it might be a UTI (urinary tract infection) which she has had a couple times before, the first when she was only 4 months old. So she got started on antibiotics. And Dan wasn’t feeling well, either! So we were all a pretty miserable bunch for awhile. And unfortunately it wasn’t just us… a lot of other people in the mission community here in Wamena were sick, too – with a lot of different things. Thankfully just about everybody is doing much better now!

So a couple of weeks ago when a lot of people were feeling sick, the two teachers (husband and wife) at the school here also got sick (not with the same thing, either!) In a larger school, that wouldn’t be a big deal at all. But at our little school, where they teach all the grades between the two of them, it is a huge deal!  We had several days without school, and then a couple of half-days that first week. The next week, they went down to Sentani to seek further medical help for the wife (the husband was better by then). Thankfully there is a Dutch missionary who is also an elementary school teacher, and she was able to teach the younger grades, while one of the men stepped in to teach the older grades. We had a week of half-day classes while the teachers were in Sentani and getting medical treatment! Thankfully they are back now and feeling almost back to normal.
I have been helping out at the school a bit recently, too. A friend and I are leading the school Christmas program, and so three times a week we teach music classes to the kids (twice a week for the older kids, once a week for the younger kids). It has been fun and I have also been able to revive some of my rusty piano skills (no, I’m not playing accompaniment! But I have been able to help some of the kids learn their harmony parts.) I’ve also started helping out with the art class for the younger kids. I filled in while the teachers were gone, and since then another mom and I have been helping out to teach art together. Always something new!

I have also been doing a bit of preschool with Claire at home, although  not as regularly as I’d like, especially with the not-so-normal schedule these past few weeks! Her friend Ryan’s mom homeschools him in kindergarten every day, and sometimes Claire will go to his house and “do” kindergarten together with Ryan. The other day I asked Claire if she obeyed Ryan’s mommy when she was over at his house, and she said, “Yeah… but sometimes not!” So then we had to have a conversation about obedience… Never a dull moment with Claire around. She is just as happy to play dinosaurs and light sabers as she is princesses and unicorns!
We are looking forward to having a new family move to Wamena in December. We actually attended the same small group while we were both young childless married couples in Tennessee at Moody! And now they have finished language school and several months of training in Sentani, and will be moving to Wamena!  They have 4 children – a daughter a year younger than Natalie, a son a year younger than Claire, and 1 year old twin girls! So they will definitely add some more life to this base!

Well, I think it is about time to wrap up this post. Last time I posted, I was so excited that I could get on early in the morning and the internet was faster. And then I think I was up early every morning for a week, trying to post pictures, and the internet did not want to cooperate, even early in the morning. So discouraging. So sorry it has been so long since an update. I think I will try to post this and then try my luck at posting pictures!

Look! Some pictures!!! August 25, 2012

Whoa, I really need to get up early more often! i can’t believe I was actually able to load some pictures! (And I think it helps that WordPress has a new “quick post” feature that doesn’t take as long to load. So thankful for that!!!)

First up, a picture of the girls on my Scoopy. Some friends from a church in the States (Hi, Randy & Ann!) saw my picture from 3 months ago of my new Scoopy and decided it would be fun to send me some fabric with little motorcycles on it! And instead of having something made with the fabric, they thought it would be best if they would just send me the fabric. I guess they know me better than I thought!  They were very generous with the fabric, and I had enough to make Natalie a dress and Claire a skirt (their choices) and still have quite a bit of fabric left over! So, for Randy and Ann, here is a picture of the girls with their new outfits sitting on my Scoopy

 

 

 

 

For some reason I can’t get the cursor to go between the two pictures above so i can type, so I will write below this picture   Last weekend Dan had two extra days off (Friday was Indonesian Independence Day, and Monday was the end of the fasting month) so we decided to take advantage of the long weekend and go to Timika for a little break. We were able to get a reservation at the hotel there (we haven’t been there in almost 1 1/2 years – there has been some stuff going on at the huge mining company that’s there, and they weren’t allowing “outsiders” to use the hotel for quite a while) and so on Thursday afternoon Dan flew us down there in a 206.  Above you can see how much Natalie loves flying in the right seat next to Daddy!

It was actually kind of chilly, rainy and cloudy quite a bit of the time we were there, but that didn’t stop the girls from enjoying the pool! As you can see, Dan rather enjoyed himself, too!

 

Sunday was our one nice, sunny day, and we took full advantage of it, spending most of the day at the pool! 

 

 

 

We loved being able to order lunch right next to the pool. The girls tend to be grazers anyway, so it was fun for them to be able to swim, hop out and eat a few french fries, and then get right back in the pool!

The other highlight of our trip (for the girls, anyway!) were the frogs! Every night in Timika the frogs come out. So each evening the girls had a blast chasing the frogs around. They thought it was especially fun to chase them into the pool, and then watch the frogs swim around the pool. The smaller frogs were easier to catch, as Claire shows us here.

And, one last stroll around the hotel grounds before heading back to Wamena on Tuesday morning. We had such a nice, relaxing time as a family. No, this is definitely not what our everyday life is like, but it sure is a nice break every once in a while!  You should come visit us, we’ll take you to Timika