Greetings Friends and Family and Followers!

Well, we are obviously getting much busier as it was kindly brought to my attention that it's been a month since our last posting! Thanks you to that anonymous person.....you know who you are!

Yes, we are filling our days now and finding that we even almost have  weekly routine.

We just this past week made our second trip to immigrations and yes got granted another 30 days with little to no hassle from the officer. Praise the Lord! We cover that trip in a lot of prayer as we never really know what to expect.

Chad is doing a lot of slow ground work for a number of projects. We are seeking to apply for a small business/farming work permit. If we can get this it will save us from needing to get our passports stamped every month and the children (we've stopped calling them kids as "kids" are most often referred to here as the goat kind) and I can register as dependents under Chad's business permit. He is also diligently researching seed, shipping seed, importing seed and growing seed in Belize. We have found most of what we need for seed and have all the steps outlined to get it imported we just need to send in the final paperwork, pony up some cash, and confirm the order. We are patiently awaiting this next step to move to the next step in our business venture. Some time ago I would have said, "All in good time" but I'm truly believing it's more, "All in God time".

 

May I introduce you to our alarm clock! Not sure but it might be a Red Lored Parrot...either way it puts roosters to shame! This was taken from our second floor deck in the morning. Beautiful bird but so loud, especially when there is a flock of them fighting at 6:00 am. Opa, you would appreciate them!

 

 And if the parrots sleep in you can count on the woodpecker who is almost as loud....remember we most have hardwood here. That beak is amazingly strong.

 What have we been doing. Well, we are praying for chickens so we need a house for them to live in. Thankfully although we are renting here the owner were more than willing to let us have chickens and there was already a fenced pen that needed only minor adjustments to make a perfect chicken pen. Chad and the kids designed a fine coop with 6 layer boxes. We ran out of staples for the gun today so  it will be finished and ready for chickens on Monday. This give me a great opportunity to share with how our life has changed. In the past we would have finished the box and the next gone out to get some chickens to fill it. You know we are just witnessing so much of God's hand in our life and the lives of those around us that we are learning to pray for even the little things. For some reason we adults think we should petition for only the "big life changers".  There is a family that is becoming very dear to us and I tell you they live a life of prayer and they receive everything....everything the need and more by God's mighty hand. We joined with their 11 year old daughter to pray for a horse and the next day they get not one but 8 horses! Did I mention they have no house, no vehicle and their are 8 family members. They have what some may call "mysterious' money show up in their bank account. The list goes on but all to say that we are learning to wait on the Lord and ask for all things before we run ahead and do it on our own merit. But yes Lord, we are ready for some eggs!

 Because these little chicks are not laying well!

 We have started a small life group and meet every Wednesday for a DVD study and we are currently learning from one my new favourite speakers, Robert Morris: Dream to Destiny. Highly, highly recommend this or The Power of Your Words. Life changing lessons in my opinion.

Paige and  Keaton have been singing in a children's choir at church. There are about 20 kids and they will sing at church for Thanksgiving and apparently they enter a competitions with other local schools. The choir won last year so this may be the tell tale if they take after Chad or myself musically!

School is going well and we are still very flexible with our routine. I am not a woman of routine...some things may never change. I do however appreciate this flexibility as already we've been able to drop what we are doing when a need is brought to our attention. This has also been a focus of our family's growth. We are learning and pray every day that we yield to whatever God has for us for this day. We have a plan but we are praying about always having a servants heart and putting aside what our schedule might say to do the "will of the Father" and serve those in need. It's probably one of the most rewarding things that we are able to teach and participate in as a family.

Today we took on some property maintenance tasks. It's a beautiful property we live on but it does require like any property some TLC. So, rakes and shovels, buckets and .....water bottles in hand we filled a day with landscaping. We are learning to how to work around the heat because working with the heat is just not possible. So, it's best to work outside from early morning to 10ish and then hind from the sun until about 3ish.

The past weeks have been very spiritually challenging for us as we attended a 3 day prophetic word conference put on by our church. It was our first experience with anything that deep as far as the Holy Spirit goes. Powerful, challenging, amazing, exhausting, hope filled and in the end we stand even more in awe of what a mighty God we serve. Wish I could tell you more but we'll have to save those story's for face time.

Moving from what is consuming our time to what is consumer our thoughts we are SOOOOOO excited that my parents are coming on December 13 for two weeks! There literally is not a day that goes by that we don't talk about it! We can't wait to see them and even more so I can't wait to have a new perspective for those at home of what our life if like here. You only have our perspective and I think it will interesting to see what a fresh set of eyes sees it like. Did I mention we are so excited!

 

Time for some Belize horticulture. This tree brings new meaning and likely origin of the phrase "the big cahuna"! This is a Cahun palm. Those pods of cahun nuts must weight about 150-200lbs! The tree is huge and so are branches of nuts. I believe you can eat them but similar to chestnuts I think they are a lot work to extract the nut. We have used local cahun oil from this tree for cooking though. This tree is at the centre of our driveway so I'm for one of those branches to fall off so I can really weigh it.

 

 We celebrated our first Belize birthday on Oct 1st.  Happy 33rd Daddy. What better way to celebrate than a dinner of lobster tails, curried cauliflower and roasted parsley potatoes. Mmmmm. Oh, yeah and chad got some wine from the village grocery store.

 Birthday breakfast set up by the children on the second floor deck.

 We have a great opportunity for volunteer and outreach work that are super excited about. In addition to this mission facility we live on the owners that are currently in Canada also had run an after school pgm in our village at another small community building right in the village. Since they have been gone the center has been closed which sad because it has about 8 computers and in the past was opened up after school to enable those children (most of the children in our village) who don't have access to get to a library or have computers at home to come use the resources there. Along with the pastor and another family from church that lives in the neighbouring village we've had on our hearts to reach out to the village people. So this is a great opportunity for us. We will hopefully each take one afternoon a week to open the center and be available to help village kids (not the goats) with their home work and research. If you are praying for us this is an area you can pray for us in. We are praying that we can get it open this week or next and that we would be able to be used to help meet the needs of the village school children. We are excited to build relationships with them. Pray that we are sensitive to God's moving and what ever way he wants us to serve there.

Signing off until next time. Hopefully I'll post sooner than a month from now!

We are all doing well and living very vibrantly here in Belize!

Love you all.

Stephanie