This and That (from the cell phone cam)

Where or where has this week gone??? Here's a brief recap for my own sanity...

Let's see... Monday afternoon and evening after home school we hosted Angela P and her sister.  They were in Albania to bring Angela's daughter home to the States.  Her daughter had been living in Reni's former orphanage so we connected online about a year and a half ago and it was a joy to finally meet in person!  Sadly, no photos of them but here is a selfie photo of my two favorite boys getting a coffee while our car was washed before we picked up our guests (there was no way I was letting Angela ride in our car after our road trip last week)...

It's missions conference weekend at our home church in Kentucky and they asked for a brief video.  Here's Nathan's sophisicated "tri-pod" (a mixing bowl, serving tray and four plastic drinking cups).  If any of you are lucky enough to see this video, watch for the shot of Reni picking his nose (albeit out of focus) over Nathan's shoulder.  The quietest activity we could find for them to do while we recorded was coloring on the dining table in the background.

FALL finally arrived in Albania!  The rain came on Tuesday and Wednesday the temps started falling fast.  We swapped wood stoves between our village residence and our old apartment in Tirana, which has a the capacity for larger pieces of wood.

By the way, soot is not a fun thing to clean up.  Thanks to our friends Ani and Demir who helped us!

Again, no photos, but we were visiting a neighbor's home and you can imagine our surprise when they told us that our family was mentioned on a national TV talk show (kind of like the Albanian equivalent of Howard St*rn, from what we can gather).  He was interviewing a pastor (who is a frequent guest on the show, representing a different point of view than his own) about Albania's way of handling children with disabilities and this pastor shared our family's story (though not by name)!  From the description of our children, our friends were sure it was us, and Shpresa confirmed the pastor is a friend of Genti's who knows our testimony... Interesting, eh?

Our kids brought back some souvinirs from last week's conference.  Namely, head colds (no fevers, thank goodness!)  Here's Ellie showing that she is fever free with her forehead temperature sticker!

We lost our internet for 2 days... enough said.  Also, hence the haste of this post because I'm living in fear that it will go out again soon!

We had a staff meeting with our Planters Staff on Thursday.  We hold those in Tirana and it's always a great time when we can get together to strategize and hear about what's going on in each other's area of ministry.  The staff have a couple of good ideas we can't wait to implement.  And because we were back in our old neighborhood, our boy got a hair cut at our favorite barber shop, which you can see below... I always call him "my little Albanian" after haircuts because there is one haircut style here for boys, which which of course makes him look just like all the other little boys his age.

Wednesday afternoon between rain showers I was able to photograph Linda's scarf creations on our friend, Ester.  Ester was a beautiful model and I was excited to see what Linda made!  We are preparing for two big craft shows in Tirana in November and December our our knitters have given us a lot to sell!  You can also see some of the inventory posted so far on our site:  http://villageknitsalbania.blogspot.com/

Saturday I will shoot one more batch of scarves, this time from Roshe's collection.

Finally, Ellie was really proud of catching this fellow who had the misfortune of hopping up on our steps during an evening rain.  We discovered it after Wednesdays Bible study programs...it was released the next morning but she's been thinking about it ever since!