The Best Christmas Present EVER

So we did receive the best Christmas present on Friday last week. It was the rest of our stuff!!!! :) It felt like Christmas since we hadn't seen these things since the end of Sept. I can finally start decorating the house and scrapbook! Spencer didn't know what to do with so many toys. He's only had 5 things since Sept. so he was very overwhelmed. We can read books, play games, print things out on our computer, and watch other movies!! We weren't sure if we would get our stuff on Friday or not, and that was the last day to get it before Christmas. One of the guys that works to get our things from customs worked very hard to get all of our things, and we are so grateful for him. He saved Christmas! :) It's a Christmas Miracle! :)

So we were able to get all of our Christmas stuff out and put up our tree that night. It felt so much more like Christmas with all of our things. Spencer kept saying that the tree was so beautiful and he wanted to look at it forever. So sweet.

And while we were putting up our ornaments we opened our curtains on the big front windows/doors we have, and outside we saw our guards standing in the front lawn looking at the Christmas tree. They seemed to like what we had done to the tree. You have so many mixed feelings here this time of year, because you are so happy to have your Christmas, and presents. Then you think of the people here that probably will be getting one or two things this Christmas, but are so grateful to get those things. We made sure that our guards (we have 5 that rotate) had a good Christmas dinner. We got them for their Christmas gifts food, they were very happy. :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

We hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas today! It's only 2:30am on the east coast right now and we are all done with our Christmas! :) It was great! Who knew Christmas in Congo would still make us all happy. I guess getting presents will do that anyway. We have so many things to be thankful for and the presents we got are just icing on the cake! Hope you all got what you wanted, and that Santa visited your house. Spencer was so excited to see that Santa ate the cookies and milk he left out for him. He told me this morning when talking about Santa "I didn't even hear him come." I told him that Santa is really quiet when he leaves the presents. It's so fun watching him opening presents and getting so excited about all of this. We took pictures so we'll try and get them up here this week (no digital camera, or I would have the pictures up today, just a regular camera with film).

Merry Christmas to you all!!!

Christmas Holidays, Tanks, Rumors of War. 'Tis the season!

Got your attention eh?

So the Christmas Holidays are coming fast, and we are excited to have them come. Even though we don't have any of our decorations yet, so it doesn't feel so Christmasy in our house yet, but we are hoping that the rest of our belongings will be delivered to our house this week. We know that it is all here in the country, just not at our house. But what a Christmas gift it will be to get all of our stuff here! It's weird to think we could end up having Christmas twice! That's alright....we are in some unusual circumstances. But Happy Holidays to everyone! :)

Tanks....well I don't remember if I put this up here or not, so sorry if I have. But I was informing some family this weekend about how we have a military tank right down our street. Yes a real, big, Congan military tank. So I was telling them that when we go on our walks around the loop by the river, Spencer will always say "I want to go by the tank, let's go see the tank." Now, is it normal for a 3 yr. old to know what a real tank is, and see it all the time? It will have to be I guess. :) It's there, by the way, because at the other end of the street is one of the Presidents houses? maybe office? I don't know, but it is there for protection. There are soldiers all over here too. They look mean, but sometimes they smile at us. :)

And that brings us to the rumors of war. I don't know what the news is saying about Congo back home, but there is a rumor that a war could break out in the eastern part of Congo. We are fine, and are on the western part of Congo. My analogy is that if the fighting is in Ches. Virginia, then we are in like Nebraska or Kansas. It is kinda scary to know that there is some brutal things going on right in the same country, but we are safe. So no worries! :)

Oh and our camera should be here VERY soon! So...pictures on the next blog? We hope!

Post Birthday...

So I had a great birthday WEEKEND! That's right three days of fun! :) Friday night Tyler got some of our friends together and we played games and talked and ate. It was great!!! Always fun to have friends around. Then Sat. was a lazy day, my favorites! So we didn't do too much, except play with Spencer and look at all of my birthday gifts staring at me in the face. Sunday though was good, Spencer did sleep in a little but was not good during church. But I got to open up my birthday gifts and I loved them! I got gifts, e-mails, e-cards, and I called people on the phone. :) It was wonderful. Tyler worked so hard this whole weekend to make it great, especially since we are in the Congo (and actually while I'm writing this there is a baby gecko on the wall watching me), and it was fantastic!

Now it's on to wondering if we will be getting the rest of our stuff soon. It's in the country we know that, but we may not get it for 2 to 3 weeks. We are just hoping before Christmas. Even if it was the day before, we would have all of our Christmas stuff up. We miss all of our family and friends, but are excited to start our own traditions of Christmas, and have our first just-us-3-family Christmas.

Oh and we should be getting our new camera soon! I hope. :) If you don't know, our other digital camera was stolen, so that's why there are no pictures on here. But as soon as I get the new one, we will be downloading like crazy! I already have a list of all the things I want to take pictures of around our house. So keep checking back here.

One of Tyler's Car Stories

I've decided to take advantage of Becca's blog and post a few of my own stories from Africa, I won't put them all on right now as it may be over whelming, but here is one of them.     I don't profess to be an excellent driver, in fact I am quite the novice. When it comes to driving a stick shift, I am very inexperienced only having learned just recently without much time to practice. So as luck would have it, the car I have here is a Nissan Xterra, nice rugid car, but a stick shift. So I get the chance to learn how to drive on these crazy streets and learn how to drive stick at the same time. Well on the second day we were here I was driving some visitors of the embassy back to their hotels after they came to our house for dinner. It was about 900 PM so it was dark (there are not too many street lights here). We had a map and thought we could easily get them back to the hotel. (Becca and Spencer stayed at the house). Well at the first traffic circle we came too, I went the wrong way. Needless to say we got lost and ended up driving around town for an hour, some areas we drove through I am told are known to be dangerous places. Remember that I don't know how to drive stick, so that only added to the problem of being lost. There were hundreds of people on the street, lots of traffic. At one point we were crawling along when we noticed a congolese running next to the car, he had his hand on our side mirror and was yanking on it, trying to steal the mirror to sell later. So I just hit the gas a little more and he let go. We were told not to get out of the car at night so we couldn't really ask for directions. Eventually we stopped at a gas station and I ran over to ask a worker where we could find main road that would take us to the city center. He was more than happy to help, mainly because he knew we would probably give him money. We eventually ended up back by our house and realized where we had made the wrong turn. None of us knew how we ended up doing a circle, but we did. So that was my first experience of driving in Kinshasa. We made it home safe and with our mirrors still intact. MBOTAY Tyler

Monkeys...as pets??

So I've changed the background for Christmas, since none of our Christmas stuff is here yet, I at least can decorate my blog. :) And I'm hoping to figure out how to put music on here too.

Today was an average day, we did a little shopping then we went out to lunch with some people. Then as we are almost to our house we pass by some vendors, and we see them holding leashes up high with something dangling at the end of it. I thought it was a rat that they are selling for food or something? Then when we got closer, we saw it was not a rat, but a monkey! Two monkeys!!! They had one really big monkey and one kinda small monkey. They were selling the monkeys as pets! Crazy! I thought I had seen it all here, but obviously there is still more to see. MONKEYS!!! :)