I'm Back

It has been brought to my attention that my sister has now listed me under her "Blogs... That Don't Update Often". Okay, so it's true. But I think I have a good excuse this month (two kids aside:-)). We've spent the last week reorganizing the house and getting over jet-lag after a 10-day trip to Germany... yeah, a European vacation... makes us sound filthy rich. Privileged though we may be, thanks goes to my parents, who provided us with two of four plane tickets, room and board, transportation, tour guiding, and a marvelous time which we otherwise would not have been able to afford! I've been twice before, but this was Nathan's first time in Europe (not counting 7 hours in Amsterdam on our way to Kazakhstan for missions work). Now that my parents live there though, I'm quite sure it won't be the last time! They moved to a small city near Frankfurt (the only German city with skyscrapers!) in September, after my dad accepted a position teaching at the Freie Theologische Akademie (the only evangelical seminary in Germany). He's also overseeing church plants in Frankfurt and Berlin (sorry all those links are in German, but, well, they're aimed at Germans... what can I say?:-)). It was exciting to visit the church in Frankfurt (with 30-40 people), as well as a more established church of 80-100 in Lich, and see what God is doing in the country where the Reformation began and yet is now only about 2% evangelical Christian.

We also thoroughly enjoyed traveling around the southwestern part of Germany, seeing several castles, hiking up to the 900 year-old cloister on the hill near my parents house, eating lots of good bread, meat, cheese and sweet stuff (no refined sugar limitations that week!), and just hanging out with my parents and youngest sister. We also celebrated my birthday and Susanna's (can't believe she's two already!). I'm sure I'll have more to say, and pictures to post whenever I remember to take the film to Walmart!

I do want to say that the kids behaved very well on the flights, seeing as that's one of the first things everyone asks. We were praising God all the way there for graciously giving us the "bassinet seat". What's a bassinet seat? I asked the same thing when the flight attendant asked if we had been placed there. Apparently, they reserve the first row of economy class for parents traveling with infants, and they actually have a portable bassinet that hooks on to the class-divider. We had fully expected to have both kids on our laps the whole time (part of the reason we went now was because Susanna was turning 2 and we wanted to get the lap-kid discount before her birthday). But we ended up with 5 seats to ourselves, plus a place for Jacob to sleep comfortably! And leg room, because there were no seats in front of us! And we got the same thing returning, even though we were so late for our flight that I heard the one check-in attendant say to the other, just after we checked in, that no more people were going to be allowed on our flight! The only downside was that from where we were sitting, we could see what was going on in business class - offerings of ice cream, hot towels, fresh fruit and sweets, dinner on a real plate with real cutlery and linen napkins... :-) But I can't complain - we had 5 seats for 3 of us!