Visiting our Cousins in Croatia! It had been two years since we saw Stevo and Sarah, Nina, Daci, and Marco and we were excited to take our vacation time allotted from our mission organizations and spend it together.

Breakfast time!  Dan and Jeremiah often helped with the cooking for all 11 of us.

The beauty of this vacation with the Vuletic's was that we didn't wear oursleves out with traveling everywhere.  Instead we intentionally rested and tried to take excursions as we felt like it.  This indirectly provided more time for us as parents to disciple our kids together.  All of our kids are into the Marvel superhero movies, so we decided to watch one of the movies such as Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, etc. each night and then discuss the positives, negatives, character qualities, morals, values, etc. the day after and integrate scripture proving that God is the author of truth and everything right and virtuous.  We discovered that this exercise in critical thinking was not only relevant but faith building and a special time of discussion we will never forget.

Can't forget our smore tradition!  Jeremiah just can't ever seem to get enough...

Daci creating a marshmellow masterpiece!

Grilling and tasting!  I think Jeremiah would rather just do the tasting.

4th of July

Finally sold the van!



Remembering Independence Day...

Emma with her friend Abby at the 4th of July picnic

 

Levi and his best friend Isaac hanging out on the roof of our defender.

 

Rugby

           JV rugby contesting a lineout

A scrum between RVA and Mongu.

A ruck is formed once the ball carrier has been tackled.

Rugby this year has been a fun and very challenging sport for me.  When I first came to RVA I didn't think that it would be very hard to train for the sport; I assumed that it was going to be like American football in that it would be intense but not too hard.  I was comepletely wrong.  Rugby is a continous game with no breaks until halftime.  It requires a huge amount of stamina, speed, and field awareness, that before the season started, I did not have.  However, once the season started, my coach made the entire team do morning runs.  Morning runs are good for fitness, but extremely annoying because you have to wake up at 5:30 am and run sprints for 45 minutes.  Racing to get a shower and make it to classes on time was hard but this exercise did make us one of the fittest teams in our league.  In the end, all the conditioning paid off and we finished 3rd in our division.

Celebrating Claudia's Birthday

This is Claudia, an adorable little girl who lives very close to Tenwek.  She is the daughter of Solomon Rop who is the physical therapist at Tenwek.  In June they invited us to her birthday celebration to introduce them to some of the ways we celebrate birthdays in America.

Levi and Caleb, who is Solomon's son.  Caleb and Levi are almost the exact same age by just a week.

Having a cake on a birthday, putting candles on it, singing Happy Birthday, blowing out candles is all new for them.  Claudia was thrilled!  She loved the rainbow chip cake!

Claudia and me (Emma).  She turned four today!

Claire's 11th Birthday!

May 25, 2012

I had an AWESOME birthday! This is me eating rasberry

buckle and drinking peach tea.(I was going to open some of my presents later)

I invited all my girl friends over for a tea party. Anna brought her american girl doll in a tea party outfit and Bella brought her stuffed animal puppy.

Emma and my mom made the tea party so special! They took the whole morning to set this up.

We had scones, sandwiches, pudding, glitter balls, and carrot sticks. Yum!

At night I celebrated my birthday with my family. I was sad that Jeremiah couldn't be there. Oh well!

Black Rock

Black Rock is the long anticipated tournament of the Rift Valley Academy Rugby season.  Both JV and Varsity teams from RVA participate.  Jeremiah was bumped up to varsity for this tournament (exiting!)  Searching for him once we arrived, we hardly recognize him in his coat of mud.

Rugby is totally different from American football and we are still learning how the game is played.  It is my new favorite sport because of its fast and furious pace and intensity.  The terms used are unique - such as scrum, pitch, try, prop, lineouts, etc.  Jeremiah plays in the position of prop which is in the scrum (pictured above).  You can only see his leg because he is right in the front pushing hard to get the ball. 

These are the boys from Tenwek who are on varsity.  Tradition holds that every player has to shave their head for Black Rock.  They all looked hilarious!

Jeremiah is #4 and what he is doing is called a lineout.  Each team tries to get the ball this way when it is thrown in from out of bounds.

Even though Jeremiah was mostly with his team, we were able to get a few moments to be together!  We miss him and are glad that he is able to have opportunities like Rugby at RVA.

God Provides!

 God provided a 2003 Defender with a newly rebuilt engine for us!  We are loving having continous 4 wheel drive and a tough truck!

Levi and Claire like their special seats in the back!

Dropping Jeremiah off at his dorm at RVA.  It was sad to say good-bye.



April Birthdays

Levi's birthday was more of a 3 day celebration.  On his actual birth date, April 11th, we were traveling to the WGM Kenya Field Retreat and I knew it would be difficult celebrating it there.  Levi chose pizza for his birthday dinner.  We had a great time together!

Levi's dream came true.  He wanted the Maverick nerf gun and was so excited when he opened this present.

Levi decorated his own cake with candycanes and pop rocks.  He is helping me with this blog post and wants everyone to know he got a lego set too, and already had the jedi starfighter built by the time we had cake.

This present is probably his favorite...he reads it constantly!

Jeremiah's birthday was on April 2nd and he turned 15.  We were so glad he was on break and home so we could celebrate together.

Levi spent a lot of time wrapping this present for Jeremiah.  He gave him 15 toilet paper rolls as a joke and was so proud of his present for him.

Dan and my birthday were also in April, but we forgot to take pictures...typical.  We celebrated with 4 other missionaries with birthdays around the same time. 



Easter at Tenwek

Easter Sunrise Service in one of the missionary's yard.  Each year we decorate the cross with flowers on Easter morning.  It is so beautiful as the sun rays begin to shine on the cross!

Claire takes a sign language class with her friends and signed a song with them for the Easter Sunrise Service.

Jessica Wilging, Dan's niece, came to visit the week of Easter.  God used her in so many amazing ways with all the MK's, local Kenyan kids, Peds patients, with us, and with our church. We were so blessed!  This picture is of her presenting the Easter story to MK's and Kenyan kids before the annual Easter egg hunt on Saturday.  Following are pictures. -

Kids listen to the retelling of the Resurrection story.

All had fun hunting for eggs!

Jessica also taught an impromtu class on poetry and drawing cartoon characters. 

Claire and Jess hanging clothes out to dry.

Jeremiah's Home!

Jeremiah to the rescue!  Rodents make me feel panicky - they disgust me!  We have had a mouse in our kitchen for some time now.  Jeremiah delights in killing pesty animals and caught it in the non-traditional way by smashing it with his foot!

 

Jeremiah hanging with his MK buddies at Tenwek who all attend RVA together.

I wanted to include a picture of the three upper compound dogs.  Chuma is the German Shepherd, Ema is the boxer, and Rugby, the newest addition, is a Golden/lab mix.  Playing and wrestling is their favorite thing to do together!

Trip to the Mara

Dan and I spent a weekend out in the Masaii Mara for our anniversary.  We stayed at a quaint beautiful lodge which served just up to 14 people.  I was apprehensive at first, because we had never been to Ngerenda before, but it turned out to be the best anniversary getaway ever.  We even were able to visit a Masaii village.  The warrior with me in this pic was our tour guide, and in the background is a one of the many identical houses that make up this village.

In every Masaii village the single young men are trained to be warriors who protect and hunt for the village's food.  They're also extreme jumpers!

We were able to see the inside of a Masaai house which is built exclusively by the women.  Existing in each house were only two beds with cow leather for a mattress, a mud cook stove/fire pit, and a room to pen up the kid goats for the night.

 

Dan and I are on a walking safari, dangerous, but we had an armed guard with us, so we felt safe.  We are standing next to a hippo trail.  When we are on safari, all night long we hear the bellows of hippos.  We have learned that all the hippos exit the river at night to forage for food, following the same trail, while the mothers ready to birth, or who have too young of calves, stay back, and that's who we are hearing.