Madyline is a teenager.


For real.



Happy Birthday to Madyline. Indicative of the schedule we've held the past few weeks, she chose to spend her entire birthday at home, relaxing in front of a fire with friends. Usually, our birthday adventure with Mady is ice skating or sledding - January seems to dump Arctic snow in the mitten state, but on Tuesday, God must be preparing her for South Africa though, because it was 60 degrees all day! A great day made even better since we bought her a skateboard for her birthday! You've got to check out this board. There are only two wheels, and they are on casters, so they swivel every which way. The thing is danger. And Mady loves it. So much "cooler" than a regular old skateboard. Mom loves the heavy duty pads and helmet we also bought her.




Jen brought Mady some "snow" in a bottle since she didn't get any on her last birthday (for a while) in Michigan. And Erin brought our old puppy, Zoe, over to play. The Beasleys and the Hoffmans and the duMonds came to visit. It was a pretty perfect day.



We are packing up this week, I had hoped it would be done last week, but it looks like this week was more reasonable for whatever reason. Trying to balance all the details that need worked out (visas, insurance, fixing the car so we can sell it, figuring out what we are doing with the house since it hasn't sold yet), packing up the entire house into suitcases & storage, and making sure we spend time with the people that we love and say valuable goodbyes... any one of them could be a full time job - trying to divide our time between the three (and being good parents to our kids) is difficult.

We've decided not to contract a shipping container which makes life harder... but I'm glad for the direction. Up until yesterday we were still wavering and it was terrible to try and make decisions when we didnt' really know what we were doing. We are sad about what we will have to leave behind now with only suitcases to bring with us... but I feel a freedom about not spending thousands of dollars to ship our junk across the ocean. Now, that money will still be spent to build a home in South Africa (we'll have to buy all our beds and blankets and dishes and pots and pans and .. well...everything) but we'll do our best to buy locally and put that money into the economy instead of putting it in to the hands of the american shipping company. We are still trying to figure out how to pack the desktop computer as a piece of luggage since replacing that either with a laptop or as a desktop in South Africa will be too expensive to make this container trade off worth it. But Bill(y) has ideas.

I actually need to get back to packing... and figuring out how to fit three skateboards and helmets into a suitcase and still have room left over for four winter coats. Maybe I'll let my sister figure that one out when she comes over this afternoon.