all the excitement in our house

THE LAST MONTH
Well, well, time certainly flies when you're not home! We've been down to Mexico and back. We built two houses for two wonderful families, stopped in Disneyland on the way home, lost my glasses somewhere in L.A., made it back to Saskatchewn just in time to head to Cypress Hills for a pastor's conference, back home again to go to Bible Study, Quilting, youth group and a fabulous training session called "Spiritual Protection for your Children".

THE LAST WEEK

Sunday morning I got to pinch hit on the piano for the worship team. Wow! That would never have happened before here. It was so fun and I felt God's annointing on me and I played songs I've never even played before with drums and a bass guitar even. IT WAS SO MUCH FUN I want to do it again. I might have to do something to the pianist on a regular basis - hee hee.

That wasn't very Christian was it?

Then we started painting our main floor! Woo-hoo my kitchen is now a stunning yellow and red concoction, my hallways are a rich buttery cream. The bathroom is blue and brown. My living room and porch are next - olive brown and almond wisp here we come. We'll have to restrain ourselves on flooring and furniture but we'll survive to pay in cash when the time comes.
Tomorrow I head to the city to get new glasses, a hunk of countertop (hopefully), some shelves, blinds and a few odds and ends to finish the kitchen off. We painted the word 'life' in 9 different languages on my wall (English, French, German, Spanish/Portugese, Hebrew, Chinese, Africaans, Russian) You could actually count 10 cause one of the characters in the Chinese script is the same as Japanese.

SKIRT STORY
So my mom made this skirt at the Lord's leading for a pregnant mom down in Mexico. She sent it along with the little girl skirts and I was supposed to watch out for someone to give it to. Well, asking someone in your own language if they're pregnant is one thing, asking in Spanish is quite another, so I waited and watched. As the houses were finished we decided to give skirts to the families since between the two families there were 7 girls. When I got to the mom of the house I was building on we had a lovely time picking out skirts for her girls, during the course of our 'conversation' I discovered she was expecting!! I whipped out my mom's special skirt and gave it to her. I cried buckets. Then she went and got pictures of her dear little girls and showed them to me and told me their names - Lolita, Flor, ?? (couldn't understand or pronounce that one) and Esperanza (which means Hope). So cool! They should have their little girls back by now we hope in a comfy new house with pretty skirts.
We were able to give the rest of the skirts to the orphanage because the lady who runs it just 'happened' to come to the base the last night we were there. That was cool. Can't wait to do it again!

THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
IN a few weeks we head to Winnipeg with our youth group for another missions trip, very different from what we just did. Inner-city North America. The very cool thing is that we get to take our oldest son with us - and he actually wants to go! I have to admit I was looking with a longing heart at all the families that were together on our Mexico trip, hoping that one day we'd get to do that - and here we are, just a month later, introducing our son to something we love so much to do.

YEAH GOD NOTE
After the Spiritual Protection session we sat down with our kids to ask them fairly directly if they knew if they were a child of God or not. They ALL responded very positively including our dear sweet Kathrin, who was not a believer when she landed in our country. We are so excited to have another family member in the Lord!! She's coming on the Winnipeg trip, too. Yippee!