A few pictures from "The Great Snow of 2009"...

DAY 1: Emmaleigh ate snow and Hannah cried.



The "snow bunny" in our backyard. This was just before Hannah's gloves got wet and immediately froze to her hands resulting in an immediate retreat indoors.
DAY 2:

We went to Jon's (brother in law) dairy for some sledding hills. Em and Carolyn:

Hannah, who loves to try anything, would've been on the sled (aka, hamper lid) all day. Em, on the other hand, took a great deal of convincing to try the tube, or anything else.

Eventually the cold won, and we took it back to the house. We have almost as many pictures of these two days as we have from the two months previous! The vast majority have one of more of the girls in some state of crying. Neither of them really like to be cold...In other news, just before we got 4 inches of rain followed by several inches of snow, we framed the floor to the living room. Impeccable timing. The rain and runoff slid off the subfloor into one of the unfinished spots and collected between the new and old block foundations. Jon saved me with a sunk pump at a pivotal time. And its all dry this morning! Praise the Lord!

So, a few pictures of the girls:
In the box that Carolyn's birthday gift came in. The packing peanuts were all over the house for a morning before we packed it up and put it on the front porch!

While working on the living room (pictures to come) the dining room was a storage room. The girls table from their room was reappropriated to breakfast duty. Here're the girls eating some waffles and strawberries.In the driveway with Hannah's Christmas car; they love pushing each other around in it.
And finally...Em outside pointing to the stars. She came inside and asked me to, "build me some stairs, Daddy, so we can go get a star. I can't reach them. Yeah, it would be so great."

PART 1: The progression of Haircut #1...
"party in the back", the smile, confusion with the distracting toothbrush, WAILING, and finished product (aka, no mullet).



PART II:
I came home today and Carolyn told me to, 'look at the last picture.' This is it.


You are looking at the bottom of our kitchen trash can with a stack of DVDs that Hannah put there for safe keeping! One of her new favorite pastimes is shoving all sorts of random household items into the trash--remote controls, cell phones, cordless phones, toys, clothes. Unfortunately they don't make child-locks for those things. Who knows what we've lost without realizing it yet. Quite a challenge!

One done and one almost...

So, here's the first COMPLETELY finished room. The hall bath...we're pretty sure Emmaleigh and Hannah think it's their new playroom.


And, after two full day and help from Mom, Dad and Sister Hemingway, the kitchen ALMOST done...


Would've done some before and after, but we keep forgetting to take the 'before' shot!

As promised, though perhaps a bit late (!), Carolyn, Caren Dilts, and I went to Jamaica to scout out a new mission trip that we're taking there over Spring Break. Each year the freshmen ministry (Freshley) has taken a huge team over to a YWAM base in Montego Bay. This year the sign-ups were so large that we're having to take two trips. Caren and I will be leading a trip with a little under 40 freshmen with a few of our staff to a rural, mountainous, and very poor region around the small town of Mandeville. The other group will take about 60 to MoBay. We'll still be working with YWAM: local school devotions in the morning, 3 work projects during the day, an after school program for the school at the base during the afternoon, and some community-building for the team at night. We're VERY glad that we went down early, since the whole trip--atmosphere, projects, arrangements, etc.--are completely different from the trips we've taken in the past. It should be interesting. The trip itself was a lot of fun, too. Dave and Debbie Alexander were the YWAM staff that drove us around to scout out the work sites, schools, and other opportunities. It was good to be with them and I think the trip will be a real success.
This is a picture of the gate in the middle of the base and the great house on the hill. As with a lot of properties in Jamaica, this one was once a plantation. This house was really hit hard by Hurricane Ivan and lost one of the rooms on the front left as you face the house. If you keep going down the road around to the left, you'll get to the chapel, the dorms, and the primary school past that. We actually stayed about a hundred yards back behind me as I took the picture in this little house...
where we saw this sunset the first night...Here are a few more pics from the trip:

Dave and Deb Alexander, our missionary contact at YWAM Mandeville (candid!).

Another shot of the base. The gate in the middle of the picture is the same as above.

Where the boys will be showering while we're there--not exactly the lap of luxury! The whole base actually doesn't have running water (and neither does much of the countryside). The government gets much more money from electricity, so they ran the lines but not the pipes. Most of the water on the base is collected rainwater, supplemented by water delivery trucks every so often, and gravity-fed into the sinks, toilets and showers. Most people thinking of Jamaica see the white sand beaches, but reality for most of the country is that the people are seriously impoverished with little hope of economic or social recovery. Most children are born out of wedlock and will have little to no contact with their fathers. The impact of slavery and the racial tensions that resulted are still an extremely powerful force (socially and spiritually) on the island.

Anyway, we'll begin our Sunday night team meetings in just a few short weeks leading up to the trip over the break. Christmas post to come...

So the trip to Jamaica was great. I'll have some more thoughts and pics when I get my camera back--the missionaries are mailing it to me since I left it in the back seat of their car when they dropped us off (yikes)!

new in the biz

So, here we are after a long hiatus from blog posting and I can only appeal to my rookie status for the gap in posts! Pictures to come, but for now, here's some highlights from the last month.
Thanksgiving break was good...we spent a couple of days with my family in Macon, ripped the back porch off the house in preparation for laying the foundation (my guy is coming today to dig the footings!!), and had some time to rest. Which turned out to be a really good thing since the last few weeks have been absolute madness.

On top of end-of-the-semester stuff I had a research paper due two days ago for my one seminary class. You take a week with little wiggle room and add 20 hours to write a paper and it gets ridiculous really quick. Thankfully my gracious wife held down the fort despite pulling a muscle in her back just when things were getting hairy. We did Christmas shopping with the girls yesterday evening and as we looked around at all the other couples who got babysitters, we thought, "what a great idea!" The girls did great on a whole, but the tired/bored factor and packed stores made for an interesting time.

In other news, I help lead a mission trip to Jamaica for our freshmen each year. We do stuff in the schools and some simple construction projects. This year we had too many students sign up to take just one trip (105 is the trip total) so one group of leaders is taking 60ish to MoBay and the other group (myself included) is headed up into the rural mountain regions of Mandeville. That being said, since we're taking 40 or so to a place we've never been, Wesley is sending Carolyn, myself and Caren Dilts (another director) down for a couple of days next week to scout out the trip. I'll post pictures.

That should cover the basics. I'll make a solid effort at more consistent posts (Randel) so that those of you who keep up with it will be rewarded for your effort!