Wake Up, Go to Work, Eat, Go to Sleep, Repeat... NOPE!

Our days have been following a pattern, which after summer's slow down, I love right now.  I think we were created for structure! 

Our's looks something like this: Wake up, start home school by 8, wrap up around 11,  clean up, make lunch, do office work and/or home project, prep for home visits which start at 5, visit a house or two, return home, make supper, eat around 7:30, bathe children, edit photos, go to bed!

A few days a week we'll make the odd trip out for errands, but we're more than happy to stay in the village if we can so as not to get behind.  We're gearing up for a busy fall in a couple of weeks, so we're trying to get our ducks in a row to enjoy and make the most of everything on our plate!

Because every update is more interesting with pictures, here's some photos from the last few days to fill in the blanks...

Ellie and Elio on our neighbor's motorin during one of our home visits.  Don't worry, it's parked.

In thanks for their service and help to us this first year, we celebrated our 'one year in Albania' with the Planters staff over lunch this weekend.  It was a treat and rare thing for us to all be together at the same time!

It has rained every day this month except yesterday.  It makes it kind of challenging when I'm trying to take outdoor photos every day!  This is really unusual weather.

We bring the kids with us to every home visit.  They are consuming an inordinate amount of candy and getting their share of cheek pinches, hugs, and kisses, but we wouldn't have it any other way.

As expected, we are learning a lot through meeting our neighbors and collecting their prayer requests.  Would you pray with us as we assimilate our observations and translate that into practical ways to serve them? We have a new idea for ministry here, but need prayer to see it through. Would you also pray with us that we would have boldness in sharing why we have come?

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I should know by now that to post about life being mundane and falling into routine is probably writing prematurely.  No sooner had I reached what I thought would be the end of this post and the electricity went out for 3.5 hours.  It went off promptly at 8:30 and resumed at noon.  We have lost power nearly every day this month in the mornings, but never that long.  This does not bode well for the winter! (people must not be paying their bills!)

Then, an hour after the power comes on and we've eaten lunch, Nathan and I decide to embark on a project to install some shelving in our one real storage space in preparation for company coming next week.  It's lined with thick tile so the work was hard, in spite of having a really good drill.  We got the brackets in place for the first shelf and were starting to drill holes for the upper shelf brackets when Nathan started yelling.

Here's a very short video I shot while he ran outside to try to turn off the water.



Nathan had inadvertently hit the line from the hot water tank to the shower.  As soon as I turned off the video, I was mopping as fast as I could to keep the water from seeping into the adjacent rooms (no floor drain in this bathroom).

Meanwhile, Ellie was outside and had decided to exercise her grasshopper (whom she had caged in one of her many bug boxes).  Naturally, it hopped away but for whatever other reason, it triggered a full blown meltdown.  So Nathan's scrambling up the tower on the side of our building to turn of the roof-top tank and Ellie's howling in the yard, in an indistinguishable language to our neighbors and Nathan and I are yelling at each other through open windows about the status of the water situation.

No sooner had we gotten the water situation under control and a brigade of boys show up at the center to borrow our stools.  Puzzled, I wondered who had died (because wasn't wedding season over)?  To our disbelief, one of the girls in our village was announcing her engagement and that she would be marrying the next day and moving to Kosovo!  She's 18 and has never left her family for even one night!  Announcements like those are like a punch in the stomach to me.  A reminder that we are working on borrowed time.  For as slow as life moves in the village, situations can change this dramatically.  It makes relationship building with young women here challenging for my heart because just like that, they can be gone.  This particular young woman was one I had been drawn to, in spite of the fact she wasn't a regular, we respect her hardworking family and their sweet spirits.

Thankfully, in this situation, because her family was borrowing our stools, we learned about the impending nuptials and were able to go visit her after women's group.  I was able to pray for her last night and later this morning will be returning to her home to take her family's photo before she leaves.  As we ate a late supper (well past the kids' bedtimes), the familiar strains of traditional music and accompanying drum beats filtered in our open windows.

Another day in the village coming to a close.