Fate of the Blog

Our new blog is up! you can find it at morgansbubble.com. This new site will be our new blog home. I am leaving this blog up for those of you that want to see some of the older posts and also to share book reviews as I want to keep that separate from our missions themed blog.

The Update That Took 7 Months to Write

Really, this is the update that took 7 months to happen. It all started with a crazy question to the Reach Global missions organization In mid-December...but you can check out all those updates in the Living Faith tab. Today we are starting with last night.

Adam and I headed to Apple Valley where we met the lead of the Montreal team. He was visiting MN to teach at a missions training week. It was wonderful getting to know him. We talked for 3 hours about so many subjects. We chatted a bit about our faith and what works we are currently doing for the Lord. There was a little bit of budget talk and he asked about our technology needs and apartment needs. He also gave us some wonderful advise about the work we have to do ahead.

In the end the important things we came away with were that he is very encouraged about the works that we are currently doing and feels that we will be a great fit in Montreal. That he wants us to come for 15 months instead of 12 so we can do language training for those additional months. The immersion training that he wants us to do would involve our living in someone else's home for 6 or so weeks. The people in this home would not speak any English and we would be learning in survival mode. It sounds quite intense, but God would not put us into something he did not think we could do and so, with Him, we will make it through. Plus he is planning to have the team up there really train us on being missionaries so we won't be tossed out to the sharks alone, thank God for that.

We also learned that not all missionaries have the gift of faith. The gift of faith is the highest gift for both Adam and I and I can't imagine how difficult it must be to go into missions without it. The lead got to see a glimpse of this faith in us and he was really amazed, so far as to say he could learn a lot from us (commence blushing).

It was after 11pm when we finally made it home and I always check my messages before bed. There was a pile of junk mail, the lead's e-mail to us and our rep detailing our night's conversation, and a surprise for the lead and us...

I am very pleased to let you know that we are accepting you for an 12-15 month term to serve with ReachGlobal in Montreal!

What an exciting way to end the night! Let's just say it was hard to get to sleep and poor Adam worked at 5am this morning.

It is time for the 2 of us to get to work as the ideal leave time for us would be April. There is a lot to pull together, letters to write, people to connect with, and everyday life needs to be in there too. We wanted to share all of this exciting news with all of you. You have been a fantastic support team so far and we look forward to having you all continue in this journey with us!

Vacation

Last time I mention our vacation. We didn't take a moment to relax, but we had tons of fun and here is a photo montage of our trip...

Como Zoo in St. Paul on Monday

Driving School at Como Town (next to Como Zoo)

Science Museum on Tuesday

Mall of America on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. A certain little mister of our has become a fan of roller coasters with his favorite being the log flume...go figure.

Half the News

We came back from a 3 day vacation on Wednesday and the house and our routine are mostly back in order. The highlight of our stay in the Twin Cities was visiting the EFCA headquarters in Bloomington where we were able to meet our ReachGlobal rep in person. Yes, the Como Zoo and science museum were fun, but this was a big deal.

These past 6 months we have done all of our communications through phone or computer so getting to see our rep face to face was great. The most exciting, of course, was finally getting to talk to him about our acceptance. It was the reason we went to visit him after all. I will stop stalling now and get to all the nitty gritty.

ReachGlobal is very excited to have us on board and wants to send us out on a 1 year mission trip. The position that we are going into the field for is quite new and 1 year gives everyone a chance to feel out how it will work. There will be a possibility of a 1 year extension which we can apply for toward the end of our stay, any longer and we will be looking at making the transition from short term to long term missionaries.

We do not have our "official" acceptance yet. For that we need our location to be finalized. That is taking a little longer as Jay, the Montreal lead is just getting back from Haiti...possibly helping to translate for our own church's mission trip. How crazy would that small world connection be. We are meeting with Jay on Wednesday to chat and just start building a relationship with him. It is also a time for him and us to see if we will mesh well on the same team.

There is a lot on our minds right now. We are planning a trip back to the headquarters in August for orientation and training. With our trip being only 1 year we have to make a decision about what to do with the house. In the coming weeks we will be determining a shop closing plan for The Crazy Elephant, how and when to get our wordpress blog up and running, what technology needs we will need filled, and a plan of attack for how determine what to bring, leave, or get rid of as far as stuff in our house goes.

It is all a bit overwhelming right now to look at all there is to do and plan. We will be turning to the Lord to help us in all of this. It is a comfort to know that He will be guiding us in this journey. We want to thank everyone for your prayers over these months. Please continue to pray for us as we begin making huge life changes in preparation for our trip. We look forward to seeing how God uses us to change the lives of those we will be serving and those who will be serving with us.

Restaurant Love

Welcome to the blog hop! If you are just joining in you can find the starting line here: http://www.supporting-artists.com/. Get the whole code and you will win a set of Supporting Artists designed recipe cards. Keep reading to find out my letter in the code and where to go next...

I love going out to eat! We don't do it very often but we just came back from vacation and got to go a lot. We went to one of my favorite places, Rainforest Cafe.

Normally I prefer not to hit a chain restaurant but there is just something about Rainforest. They have got the most fun atmosphere. The thunderstoms while you eat, the moving animals, the aquariums, they just make it so memorable. Plus with our 5 year old, there is never a dull moment and the Cafe keeps him well entertained.

On this visit my husband, Adam, and I shared the Honey Mahi Mahi and Shrimp. Oh, yum! It was big enough to share and was fantastic. It was made up of bite size chunks of fish and shrimp battered and glazed with a sweet honey sauce. To be honest, the mahi mahi was kind of strange with the sweet sauce. The shrimp on the other hand was absolutely delectable. It may be one of my new favorite foods. The dish it pretty pricey ($20.99) and is on their special menu right now, but is so worth trying if you find yourself there.

Now that you are hungry, lets keep you moving along on this food themed blog hop...

My letter is: U

Now head on over to http://ourchildrensearth.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/edible-eco-friendly-play-dough/ to get the next clue in the code. Have fun and here is a peek at the card I designed for the package.

Still Waiting

Here we are 4 weeks since our missions interview and we are still waiting. We even got an e-mail this afternoon from our rep apologizing for not calling us while ON VACATION! What ever he has to tell us must be of great importance. Perhaps it is a yes, perhaps something else is going on.

A week ago the wait, and missed phone call, was eating away at me. I was going crazy knowing that we could have had our answer had we simply been home. God used that time to show me a thing or two. First of all he reminded me that this is HIS plan, not mine. God will see to all of the details, I simply need to come along for the ride and be a willing vessel for Him.

He showed us the peace we can have in waiting. We have really enjoyed this quiet week knowing the chances of our rep calling us while on vacation are slim. We have not thought much at all of our mission trip this week. Instead we devoted our time to bible study and family togetherness. I think God much preferred that, as did we.

He also laid out more of his design for us. God is already placing the support net on his plan for us to be missionaries. It is quite incredible to watch! With out any solicitation, we now have 3 churches and a fantastic business woman who want to talk to us about partnership when the time comes. While I am not willing to take that as a guaranteed yes. till I actually get one, I can see that this is God's work preparing us in advance for the next step.

There is a good chance we will have another week to wait. We decided a short vacation was in order after all these months of hard work. So we will be taking a mini trip to have some much needed fun and recharge our batteries. Then we can come back, get our answer, and get to work. In the meantime, I will enjoy the quiet stillness of the wait...and try desperately not to itch my bug bites any more (a result from outdoors family togetherness).

Extra Interview

It has been 2 weeks since our interview and we heard from our rep yesterday (2 weeks to the day). Sadly, it wasn't the definitive answer we were hoping for. Cue awesome facebook graphic...

https://www.facebook.com/busyhomeschoolmom?hc_location=stream

This morning we had yet another interview. This one was all about our family life. We discussed how we discipline, touched shortly on homeschooling, and talked about how we connect together as a family. It went very well! The rep was laughing and having a good time with us which put us at ease and made it so much easier to chat.

She said at the end that we are very wise parents for our young age (complimentary in so many ways). We said that we are always praying that God would make us wise in our parenting. It was wonderful to hear because most of the time we feel like we are total failures as parents. I guess it is like standardized testing for school. You don't know if you are doing well or not based on your own guesses on the matter.

We also learned that the highest number of missionaries leaving the field are families. It is the reason that they really want to make sure a family is right for the job. It does make sense as the position we originally applied for became open because the man currently doing it left when he got married.

She said that our rep would get back to us with an answer quickly (early next week) because they realize that this process has taken especially long for us. It has felt long, but has gone by quickly. We have been going through the application process for 6 months! It was nice to hear that they also think it has been drawn out and not just that we are impatient.

So, we still don't have an answer but have gotten some great affirmation. God answered our prayers of the Reach Global team continuing to be punctual in their communications even if the communications were not what we expected them to be.

We are looking forward to what God has planned for us this summer. It could be a very busy one. Over the past 6 months of application time we have had several people tell us that they believe our fundraising will take 6 months. If we get our approval right away next week that could mean leaving in November. That is by no means our goal, but it will be very exciting to see God put this all together and to see when exactly He has decided we should go.

This Week

God has definitely prepared our hearts for this wait and the upcoming answer we have been waiting months to hear. This last week since our Missions interview has been filled with peace and calm, over the impending decision any way.

We have been busily spring cleaning the house, something we had planned on anyway. The rooms of our home are getting a deep cleaning. I am talking scrubbed walls, floors, doors, ect. We have cleaned out a lot of clutter as well. There have been several bags of garbage, baskets sent to the thrift store and boxes to be donated. Some things are going back to their original homes and some are going to new homes to bless other families with things we are no longer using. This all makes great prep work if we are going to be selling our house and leaving and if we aren't then it means a beautiful clean home to live in.

We have also started fleshing out some of our plans for our potential trip. This weekend we are talking a lot about what items would be on our prayer list and what our first missions newsletter will be like. I have also been visualizing our new blog. Should we get a yes, we will be switching to wordpress as it will be our missions hub and we want our updates and projects to be easy to access.

Today I am prepping for the new homeschool year. Since we have chosen to school year round, our school year starts in 1 week. It is a good reminder that even in the midst of big life changes we need to keep our everyday routine going. It also reminds me how wonderful it is to homeschool. Should we move, school will not change and we can get back into our routine gradually if needed. God has certainly blessed us and we pray He is blessing all of you as well!

Gourmet Pizza at Home

This pizza looked beautiful coming out of the oven! I couldn't resist sharing it. Here are the layers in order:

Crust

Pesto sauce

Light coating of Parmesan cheese

Quartered grape tomatoes and dollops of cream cheese

Shredded cheeses (odds and ends of several bags)

If you have never had a pizza with cream cheese on it, you are really missing out. This is my new favorite pizza and the whole family loved it. We will absolutely make this again!

Mission Interview

Thank you to everyone that has been praying for us this week.We went into our interview today with calm and peace. 3 hours on the phone is a very long time, but we filled the entire time.

The first 2.5 hours we discussed our entire lives. That includes our past and current sins/temptations, our marriage, our ministry work, and most importantly our walks with Christ. We did our best and with help from God Almighty, we didn't fumble over our words and were able to speak clearly and decisively.

In the last half hour we talked about what will be happening should we be green lighted and move ahead in this process, training, funds, timeline, ect. We found our chat during this time to be very optimistic. Our rep is planning on putting together our mission description and budget during the 2 weeks we will be waiting for our answer. Since mission description and budget are supposed to be the next step after we are approved, we are feeling pretty strongly that we will be approved. Until we get a definitive answer, we will continue life as usual.

Life as usual means taking the next 2 weeks to do major and deep spring cleaning. Our house needs it and it is great ground work for putting our house on the market this summer. I am going to enjoy the peace of these next 2 weeks. Should we be approved 2 weeks from now, we are going to have a lot to do!

Bean Plant Experiment Finale

What did we learn? Sun and water give the best affect, of course. We also saw that water and sun are not equally important to plants. A plant can still grow and produce beans without water, albeit stunted. No sun and  the bean plant is doomed to death. Plants 1 and 2 both have bean pods growing now.

Tasty Menu for Outsmarting Diabetes

Ever since having gestational diabetes I have diabetic meal planning in the back of my mind. It really caught me off guard when I got that diagnosis and someday it could happen again and I don't want to go into it with no knowledge of what to eat. I found some fantastic information on prevention.com and it had a fantastic menu. We have tried many of the meals listed and they have been a hit for the whole family! I especially love that the ingredients needed are available at my normal grocery store.

This is one of my favorites from the menu. It really surprised me! I did baby spinach and it has chicken, honey mustard, and sliced grapes.

Am Nervous, Please Pray

I have got a serious case of nervousness! The next 2 days could completely change our lives FOREVER! I think a good dose of psalms and prayer could help braven me up a bit.

Please pray for us as we speak to the missions lead in Montreal tomorrow and have our 3 hour phone interview on Thursday. We need it. We want to follow God's plan and He is not asking us to take the easy path. But with Him we can do it!

Log Cabin Project

To round out our kindergarten year we are reading Little House in the Big Woods. Mister loves learning about "Great Great Great Grandpa times". He has enjoyed every book we have read that covers the late 1800s. We kicked off our book by making a cabin. We used straws that I cut in half. The roof is made with the bendy portion. We lashed it all together with lots of masking tape.

We added some brown paint to make it look more like logs.

Mister drew the boards onto our floor piece and colored the paper plate base green for grass.

 We used foamie stickers to make 3 beds, a table and chairs, and a red fire place. He laid it all out like in The Little House on the Prairie movie we watched via YouTube.

 The finished log cabin with removable roof, door, and windows.

Of course, no house is complete till it has been successfully turned into a squinkies play set  We have a winner on that front!

Wedding Gifts

I love making gift basket type stuff though I haven't had many chances to do it. We have some weddings to go to this spring and here is what I came up with.

Storage jar with marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers

Pitcher with a variety of Crystal Light packages

Ping Pong Science

We did a fun and easy experiment this week. Put a small dent in a ping pong ball. Fill a cup with hot (but not too hot) water. Put in the ball and cover. The air inside the ball warms up and expands, pushing out the dent.

A Video on Montreal

I found this video tonight featuring Jay, the Montreal lead. These are the people we would be working with and the place we would be living in if we do end up in Montreal. Take a look!
Jay and Kathy Pinney ministering in Montreal with ReachGlobal from Jay Pinney on Vimeo.

First Grade Curriculum Choices

It is almost time to start a new school year at our house. We are changing up everything. I am also happy to report that, wile it was not the determiner, we were also down by half for our budget too. We are really looking forward to trying out our new goodies, but for now I will just share with you what they are...

Illuminations 1 is our core model this year. It is kind of strange because it is just a downloadable file that includes your curriculum choices to buy separately and the year planned out for you. It has set up for 3-8 grade and high school as well as adjustments for younger learners. If we like this curriculum we can use it 3 times over! That is something I can wrap my mind around!

Mystery of History is the glue that will be sticking our whole year together. MoH is a chronological whole world history from a Christian world view. Bible history is included and put in with more common history for a chance to see what order it all happened in. Mister is a huge history buff, at 5, and so a curriculum focused around history is going to be right up his alley. All the readers on the reader list build upon the lessons learned in MoH. This can also be used 3 times.


Life of Fred is our math focus for 1st grade. Mister has fantastic reading comprehension and learns so much from reading books. Life of Fred teaches math through the story of Fred's life. It also shows how math is used instead of the typical worksheet format he will be learning the practical uses of the math he is learning. We can run through the books each year till he moves up in 4th or 5th grade.

The Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide is one I don't know much about. It can be used through graduation. I will have to give you more information when I have started using it.

Grammar Punk looks fun. We are going to give it a shot. It uses dice to write sentences. It can be used through 3rd grade. I don't have this one yet, so I can't give you much on this one either.

For Science we will be reading through the mass of free kindle books I have been collecting over the last year. Mister will be learning all about animals from all over the world.

Bible is going to be covered a bit in our history lessons anyway so I think we will just read a chapter from Mister's bible each day. Of course, we will also have to watch What's in the Bible too. After all it is fun and we all learn from it!

We will continue working with Alpha Phonics and then we have agreed to let him have Magic Tree House and Boxcar Children books to practice with after that. We are really looking forward to the next school year but for now we are just having fun finishing up kindergarten!

Kindergarten Curriculum Review

We are almost done with the school year and I thought it was high time I shared my thoughts on all the curriculum we were using. I should mention that we will not be using any of these choices again next year but that is not because we didn't like them. One main reason is that we want to be more compact for our move into the mission field. 

The Sonlight core curriculum has been mostly good. There were a handful of readers that Mister did not really get into but we did find some new favorites. I would definitely use Sonlight again and plan at least get some of the readers from future years. Their book list is very good.

 

All About Reading Level 1 was a big hit at our house. Mister loved the hands on activities and it all stuck. It is very slow paced compared to Alpha Phonics, which we switched to when he finished level 1. We have been very happy with Alpha Phonics. It is very basic but he has already advanced past what he would have learned over the course of a year in All About Reading level 2 and we are still doing kindergarten at our house. Plus, Alpha is available on the Kindle so that is great for compactness!

I have to say I am not a big fan of All About Spelling. Some of the beginning activities helped him get started, but it would be just as easy to just have him spell words as he learns to read them. I don't think I would do a spelling curriculum again for Mister.

SonLight science was okay. I was disappointing to find that there was a box of supplies that needed to be ordered separately on top of the box that was included. I did not order the extra box. We are nearly done with all the science and have added a large pile of science books besides as we read them all faster than the schedule suggested. I would skip Sonlight Science in the future.

We ended up skipping Horizons math (shown above). Instead we went with Math U See. Mister got it and whipped through the workbook with ease. He did not like the math blocks and we started using Squinkies instead for much more fun and homeschool happiness. I wasn't feeling the Math U See groove this year and with the added fact that they are conforming to common core standards, I will not be purchasing from them in the future.

Handwriting Without Tears was done quickly. It lasted about 1/2 the year but Mister loved it and his handwriting is looking great, when he makes sure to do it correctly and not just mess around. This was a great choice and I am glad that we were able to use it. I would absolutely buy HWT again!

Little Passports got cut in November and we started doing our own series on the blog (World Travels on the side bar). Little Passports was fantastic and I highly recommend it. We just felt that we could spend less and focus more on what we wanted him to learn if we created our own. Plus the goodies we buy are just for him and are things we will actually use and he will love.

Dance also got the boot. We felt Just for Kix was way to commercial. Every dance class they were trying to sell us stuff (t-shirts, bags, ect.). It was hard for Mister because it was all geared toward girls. We did start using some awesome workout apps on the kindle and we have been walking and biking every chance we get.

It has been a great year! We still have a couple of months to go since we are schooling year round. Most of his curriculum is going to be finished this week though. We are going to do a long unit on Little House in the Big Woods. Mister loves the book as far as we have read it and we will be incorporating lots of activities too. 

Want to know what we are using for 1st grade? Joins us again tomorrow to find out!

Afternoon and Evening

Another beautiful day to have school outside yesterday. We spent most of the day outside even though it was so windy out there.

We raced the clouds home from an evening bike ride and just moments after taking this photo the rain came gushing from the sky. Now there is a winter weather advisory...in May! You just never know what you will get in Minnesota.