Hallelujah He is Here - Chataway

[DutchOma]

Well here you are then I don't post often, but just to save Nickel a job...

The Purpose Driven Life is quite a good one newlark, will try find the linky in a mo. There's a J John one on the ten commandments which is good too.

Hi milly - sorry you have no water still :( DH is going to southern sudan, but not sure that has any more than northern!!

lost - brrr - did you manage to get hold of some fan heaters etc?

A Lineage of Grace is possibly too "Christian fiction", but it does have questions at the end of each chapter. I don't read much, but I found the stories gave me a new perspective on familiar and less familiar stories from the Bible. The linky is to Amazon, and you can read a few pages to see if you like it.

mhd - funny you should ask, one of our two fan heaters broke this evening! Oil engineer returning tomorrow - hopefully he can get the Rayburn working properly this time, or there'll be another weekend to get through!

Mmm... a nice risotto and a at lunchtime before picking up the kids for the long, lonely first weekend without daddy (for this trip, at least)...

It'll be fine.

Hi everyone, just checking in as I've been lurking and praying recently, but not posting. Praying for heat, water and energy for folk who need it.

The heating is working again! And hopefully it will stay working this time. Hooray!

That's wonderful Wellies Does that mean you can have a BATH?

I discovered I had an immersion heater about a week after the problems started(!), so a bath has not been such a problem (except for the freezing room to get out of it into!).

But this morning, the dcs slept later because of the warmer house - yippee!

Hope you are all having equally good starts to your weekends...

afternoon all!

well done on the heat :)

JC2 is still not very engaged with choir - might have worked out that it'sJC1's fault. ooh, that sounds mean! what i mean is that JC1 demands attention (by being rather loud and enthusiastic and generally attention-seeking), and JC2 ends up falling into the background rather.
he was better on sunday, and it was cos JC1 wasn't there.
on friday, DH pointed out that he had been fine until JC1 had chosen a hymn and sung a verse.
JC2 isn't on that stage yet, and DH hadn't got a special task for jc2, so he felt left out.
now i've got to work on getting the fairness into the lesson plan. (which of course will prob make JC1 more demanding...)

Aaaagh nickel - good luck with that, sounds like a challenge! Let us know how it all goes!!

Had a fantastic day at the women's day. No good wife comments in sight Went down with Blue and another friend and met up with more friends there. Was awesome worship and some great teaching on confession and healing and various other stuff, need to process it all now. Loved it :)

Where is everyone?

I am lonely and bored!

Come on girls, we need a discussion!

hmmmmm, it's been days, hasn't it!

we've got our parish profile almost completely done now and it looks ace.
i can't show you yet though.

but you can look at our improved website, which i've been updating this week.

Anyone got any plans for the summer? We still don't know if we'll be moving house internationally in August - and won't know until, ooh, probably late July. But "we" seem to be planning a trip to Uzbekistan and another "stan", although I forget which one. Anyone doing something more normal that I can envy? :o

Ooh nickel the website looks good. Like the idea of 'wine and wisdom!'

lost, at the moment we are going to Dorset in June, camping with friends, and in the summer we are as usual going to New Wine at Newark - can't wait. We usually have a fortnight away in the summer but not sure if funds will allow - we will stay for a few days at my brothers house near Brighton and go to an event at the Olympics so we'll have a little break then. Wow at the 'stan' travels! What will you be doing there?

lost sounds familiar! We did a month on Kazahkstan when we were at college but I think that's the least stan-like of the stans .

We've got 3 holiday clubs in June/early July then driving back to the UK although not so much yay for the journey. After that, who knows! Definitely still needing prayer on that one...

MHD what event have you got tickets for?

We're camping in Tenby with friends from church in June, and in Newark at NW with more friends from church in August - we'll have to meet up again MHD!

Will have some time by the sea in Norfolk staying with my parents at some point over the summer, as well as daytrips to the Olympics and Paralympics. Don't think we'll be able to afford anything else as we should hopefully be moving soon. NO date set yet, and only moving 10 mins walk up the road, but our outgoings will be significantly more than they are now!

Respect to you campers... mind you, the only time we've camped as a family was in the desert in Africa, with a borrowed tent, sheets and duvets from home and not much else! Of course, the only water you have is what you take with you... it was probably a bit more extreme than the British experience! :o

Sand is incredibly uncomfortable as a mattress for more than about a minute... Our companions were a bit or possibly about our unpreparedness, but where do you get hold of a blow-up mattress out there? There weren't many campers among the local population!

ha, we have an enormous tent and as many home comforts as possible when camping, including decent beds, table and chairs, and electrics (when camping in a proper camp site not a show ground with 1000s of other Christians all queuing for the variable temperature showers!)

As camping is our main holiday I want to be comfortable! Has to be said all our gear cost us the equivalent of one week's cottage hire, and here on in the holidays are must cheaper than a cottage. We do usually buy some new kit each year - pesky children growing and not fitting into child size sleeping bag any more last summer for example.

sand is ok for a doze in the sun, but not for a proper night's sleep, very hard I would imagine! Don't likethe idea of carrying water either - that is even worse than the NW porta-showers.

You'd be hard pressed to beat the view the next morning, though (I climbed a sand dune before sunrise with my 1yo on my hip!) - it was glooorious!

Fortunately, our friends carried the water - one drum for drinking and one for washing. If it was up to us, we'd probably have taken a couple of flasks and then wondered what to wash up the tea things with/in...

I like the sound of all that (esp if it's in Dorset, lovely county), but I married the wrong man for relaxing holidays. He's learning slowly, I suppose. The last one would've been relaxing were it not for (1) the fact he had to work all the time and (2) the car crash. Actually, it's quite nice to be having a break from holidays at the mo. :o Or to look at it another way, this little patch of English/Welsh border country I find myself in is sooo lovely, it feels like one long holiday some days.

that book group sounds nice

Oh gosh yes we don't do rough camping either, like Panda we're all kitted out as most of our holidays are camping. We have a trailer tent which is wonderful as I am off the ground sleeping which lessens chance of getting ill. Everyone calls our tent 'the hotel' because the other year we had 30+ people in it for a bbq in the rain at New Wine, including numerous children in different compartments, what fun. Love it though and I'm a bit of a camping porn addict, my ideal day out would be at the camping and caravanning show at the NEC but dh not quite so convinced

Panda oooh yes the showers at NW leave something to be desired, dd and her friends love going in them so they can screech when it suddenly turns cold I've got ehu at NW

Now I'm starting to think that we should go to NW. Hmmm. When is it? Not that we have any camping gear or anything like that though

here's some info milly

We go to the North and East one, 28th July - 3rd August.

Would highly recommend :)

oh and here's a short video about it

:)

Thanks MHD! But looking at the dates I think we'll still be doing a mammoth drive across Europe then