It has been a long time since I have posted so there is a lot to catch up on. My last post was at the end of May. Since then we have been busy. We went to Austin to see Andy’s brother DJ graduate from law school at the end of May. We were blessed to get to spend time with Andy’s family including his aunt and uncle from St. Louis! We came back to Dallas and worked a lot of shifts and watched a lot of basketball since the Mavericks went all the way this year. Then, our beautiful little baby girls turned two. I guess they are not really babies anymore. They are turning into these precious little people who say and do cuter things everyday. We had a Mickey Mouse cake with Duke, Nonni, Papa and Yaya in Lubbock and Uncle Ben and Aunt Naomi came from California! After that was the Lake. For the last 37 years, my mom and all her sisters and their kids have met at Lake Travis in Austin to spend a week together. It was a wonderful week of swimming and playing with cousins! We came home and said goodbye to Suzanne (my wonderful cousin who moved to Chicago on July 2nd). That was hard. I am really thankful that Aunt Judy, Jaclyn, and Kayland visited the next week. They made it a fun week and helped us get through week 1 with no SuSu. Then our sweet big girl turned 4! It doesn’t seem possible that she is 4. Papa, Yaya, Duke, Nonni, Uncle Ben and Uncle DJ came to help us celebrate. Now we are getting back into the swing of life in Vickery.
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| Family Picture at Lake Travis |
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| Betty and Lucy are 2! |
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Some of the kids from our complex help us celebrate Ruth's birthday!
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Life continues to be full and sweet. We love our new home. It has not been an easy couple of months, but it has been good. God is teaching me lots of things. I am being changed and molded by this time in a way that will hopefully make me more of the woman God desires for me to be. Most of the time, I feel like we thought we were moving in to help refugees and God is showing me that there is more for me to learn than there is for me to help with. We are incredible blessed to have our small group walking this road with us and helping us grow.
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| Playing with our friends Julia and Thim Ding (who knew 5 kids in a pack and play was so much fun) |
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| Jaclyn cutting purses with Indira |
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| Jaclyn with our 11 year old girls (just sewing for fun) |
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| Fun with friends |
Vickery Threads is growing with more and more women who want to join us. What a blessing. We are now in the process of becoming a non-profit (something I have no idea how to do, but God has blessed us with an awesome lawyer named Hanna who is volunteering her time to set it up). We are also in the process of trying to get more volunteers and yesterday the new womens minister at Northwest Bible Church came over to see and brainstorm ways to get more ladies involved. We have the sweetest ladies and kids that come sew with us. We even got to sew with a group of 11 year olds for fun last week!
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We are growing. We have 4 machines now! This is Dawt Ying, Sa Ron, San Dahtwe, and Evinna working on bags together. This was a sweet sweet day. We had 5 women/ 9 kids join us for morning sewing and then 6 women/5 kids join us for afternoon sewing.
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| Htwe Nyo with her first zippered tote. She is a sweet mama of two kids, Lisa and Carason. |
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| Evinna shows her new tote. She has one little boy who is sweet as can be. |
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| This is Sa Ron. She is an amazing lady who is a mother of 5. Her oldest is in middle school and her youngest is baby Julia (in the picture - she is not quite 1). Sa Ron and her children are such a joy to be around. |
Andy is enjoying playing soccer with the kids and adults at Vickery. We have neighbors from Honduras that he is getting to be good friends with. They watch soccer together in the evenings. Yesterday they taught him that if you rear end a standard transmission vehicle that won’t start and push it really fast through the parking lot it will start (I sat in our car with the girls trying to explain why daddy was drivng one of our neighbor’s cars into the other one and pushing it around). They also let him play on the Honduran team for friendly soccer matches against the team from Mexico at the local park. He is playing guitar for worship at Celebration (the tuesday night VBS in Vickery) and co-leading the youth bible study on Friday nights. Our girls are starting to enjoy kicking the soccer ball with the neighbors in the evenings (when it cools down from 105 to 101 - come on October!)
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Andy leading worship
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Our girls get more fun everyday. In the last few months, it has been fun to watch them play together more and more. The three of them are becoming great friends. They love to sit around together and say silly words like eyeball and then all laugh hysterically over and over. Ruth is a great big sister. She is patient with her little sisters (most of the time) and is a great help when all the refugee kids come over. She has a big imagination and loves to put on plays and make up songs (and the great thing about having little sisters is that when you make up a song, they will sing it with you). Lucy is exuberant about life. She bounces when she walks and it is fun to watch her excitement. She is also passionate about being upset and has the best lower lip sad face of the 3. Betty is still tiny (but she is getting closer to being on the growth curve). She loves to check things out in detail and she works really hard to do things by herself. She is also starting to love to sing and it is fun to walk in and hear her tiny singing loud!
So, summer has been fun and we are looking forward to one more month of summer in Vickery before all the refugee kids head back to school. We are excited that the Newby’s will be home this weekend, happy Shelley is back from Bolivia, and looking forward to Valerie’s return from Afghanistan. It will be fun to have the whole crew in Vickery again.
