Botswana Wedding

Brent had the wonderful privilege of attending a Botswana Wedding. It was a very long day, He left the house at 7:30am and returned at 6:30pm that night. It was a wonderful day and one of those days that make you so happy to be living in such a wonderful place. The true beauty of Africa is not the wonderful landscapes, exotic locations, or amazing animals, but it is simply the people. This wedding was a true testimony to this. Here are some pictures of this wonderful day.

This is the bride and her father walking down the aisle.

This is inside the church where they were married. The Bride and Groom are located at the back. They sat for most of the wedding, only standing for the vows. The wedding was almost 2 hours, mostly comprising of Praise and Worship to the LORD.

  This is my friend Moses Motsweng and his wife saying their vows.

Weddings always makes the grandparents happy. Here they are dressed up in Tradional Batswana dress, dancing after the vows, singing Praises to the LORD for a half in hour.

This tent was set up in the wife’s home village, it was beautifully decorated with hanging fabric. The entire village came to the wedding.

After greeting the elders, the wedding party made their way into the tent for a meal.

Dinner was wonderful, fresh salads, greens, and beef made up the menu.

After dinner the wedding party had a costume change. They all changed into blue and did a dance together at the very end.

This is the true beauty of Africa. To see an entire village show up for a wedding of two very strong believers is a wonderful thing. We truly are blessed to be serving the Lord here!

Toyota Desert Race 1000

This past weekend I was able to attend a rally held in our backyards. It was a blast of super fast cars, trucks, bikes, and 4 wheelers. I was able to attend with a MK and we had so much fun, here are some pictures of a great day. This was the first time the BMW X3 came to the race, it was a real crowd pleaser.

This is Micah, he is a 16 year old Missionary Kid (MK). Fellow missionaries are called Uncles and Aunts and it’s great to be the cool Uncle every so often. It was great to hang out with this young man.

This is a buggy going around a turn, we came home completely  covered in dust but having a great day.

Buggy getting some air. The Kalahari Desert is such a beautiful place. We live right on the edge of the desert, we were able to get to this location within 30 minutes from the house. 

Big Sister T-shirts

This past week we have had the privilege of having 2 sweet sisters (Meredith and Peyton) stay with us while their parents were away. Taylor has had a blast hanging out with them all week. We decided to paint some big sister t-shirts and had a great time playing in the paint and making some fun creations in preparation for baby boys arrival.

Taylor painting her very own t-shirt of a princess.Taylor and Peyton doing a handprint t-shirt. Little girl enjoyed very much having her hand painted. Meredith painting a “Best Big Sis” t-shirt

Rosy

We had this huge grasshopper show up at our house about 3 weeks ago and has taken our home as her own. She truly is the biggest grasshopper I have ever seen. As a dear friend of mine was over getting ready to help prune some rose bushes for me, we found her living in one of the rose bushes and that is where she loves to hang out so we’ve decided to call her “Rosy”. Here’s some shots of the grasshopper with Taylor and Caden each taking a turn holding her.

 

Chick-Fil-A Chicken Nuggets

So what does a pregnant woman when she has a huge craving for chick-fil-a chicken nuggets (did I mention this preggo woman lives in Africa)? Unfortunately we can’t just drive to pick some up as there are zero chick-fil-a’s here. Just to give you a feeling for what is available, the closest McDonald’s is in South Africa and is about 3 hours away.

So off I went to the internet to find a recipe. We had these last night and I have to say it was not exactly the same (I think due to the lack of peanut oil), but it was pretty close. Here is the recipe I used if you want to try it out.

• 3 cups peanut oil
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup flour
• 2 1/2 tsp powdered sugar
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1 Tbs salt
• 2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts cut into chunks

Mix together the egg and milk. Place the chunks of chicken breast in this mixture and let it sit for at least an hour. Mix together flour, sugar, pepper and salt. Once the sitting is done, dredge in the flour. Place the peanut oil in a deep fat fryer and bring up to a high heat of about 375 degrees. Gently drip into the oil and let cook until golden brown.  Enjoy!!

Delivery Update

We are down to about 3 1/2 weeks before our baby boy will make his grand appearance into the world. We’ve had a lot of questions about our delivery, so hopefully this will help to fill everyone in. We were hoping to deliver the baby here in Botswana, but things have not worked out for that to happen. We have some great doctors here in Botswana that are a husband/wife team from Germany and we have all faith in them delivering the baby, but some things have come up last minute with the hospital that we were supposed to be delivering at so they recommended we go to South Africa to deliver the baby. 

We will be leaving Botswana on September 30 to drive 5 hours to Johannesburg, South Africa. We will meet with the doctor on October 1 and set a c-section date for around October 13 but this all depends on their surgery schedule. After delivery we will have to wait hopefully just about a week for the babies passport and birth certificate before we can come home to Botswana. So at best we are hoping for about 3 weeks away from our home.

We are so excited to welcome our son into the world and Taylor is more than ready to be a big sister. She kisses and hugs my belly all the time and loves to feel him kick. Hopefully a name will be decided on soon :)

Baby Shower #2

On Sunday, September 12, some of my sweet missionary friends here in Gaborone threw me a baby shower. It had a jungle theme which is what the babies room is decorated in…I know a little cliché since we live in Africa. It was so much fun and we had such yummy food. Being so far from home, these ladies and their families have become our family and we just love each of them so much.

Tent Revival Wrap Up

On Saturday,September 4th, was the wrap up to the tent revival that we had posted about earlier. The tent revival was just supposed to be August 23-27, but because so many people were showing up and getting saved they extended it from August 30-September 4 (praise the Lord). Taylor and Amanda were able to go out with Brent on this Saturday to be with the folks there since it was going to be held in the morning/early afternoon. It was a great time of worshipping and they also set up future discipleships with some of these new believers. They then did a big braii (grilling out) for all those who attended. What a great time of fellowship with people who love the Lord!

One of the little girls that attended let Taylor see her binoculars. As you can see, the children all love to sit around Taylor and pull their chairs as close to her as they can...I think she loves it just as much as they do.

Mommy’s little helper

Today was laundry day and Taylor always likes to help mommy whether she is hanging laundry, cooking, or watering the flowers. Here’s some pictures of part of our day today.

As I hang the laundry, Taylor takes the clothes pins and hangs them all over the bottoms of the clothes. I wonder when she will figure out that doesn’t really help…I sure will not ever tell her! And yes, she was wearing a princess outfit that she picked out for the day.

We also have been doing school regularly now that Brent and I have finished language school. She truly loves to learn and right now I can threaten her that we won’t do school if she is misbehaving, I just wonder at what age she will change wanting to do school so much.

  Right now we are learning how to recognize and write her ABCs. I will dot a line for her and then she connects the dots to make the letters. We then find things that start with that letter and attempt to draw them (don’t laugh at some of our drawings as I’ve never claimed to be an artist but my little girl can tell what they are, ha ha) She also is learning more and more bible verses. I find it helpful to make up motions to help her remember. I’ve also drawn pictures on the bottom of the page so she will know which verse it is until she can learn to read.