Holiday Celebrations

Back in India

Greetings once again from India! After a very long trip, the kids and I made it back to Pune on March 12th. It took about a week to get back on schedule and things have returned to what we call normal here. Easter weekend was busy with various holiday celebrations. The Muslims celebrated Prophet Mohammed’s birthday on Friday and the Hindus celebrated Holi on Saturday. Holi is a celebration of spring in which Hindu people spray each with colored powders and water. It was a lot of fun seeing people covered from head to toe in bright colors. We played Holi with our friends Jeff, Jena, and Kai. Of course Anna loves any opportunity to cover her brother in something messy. Our Easter celebration was great fun. The Easter bunny hid eggs on our balcony and Anna helped Max during the hunt. We attended a service at St. Xavier’s Church. It was in English, but still a bit difficult to follow. Later we had friends over for dinner. Chris made a fantastic beef stew with some of our canned beef. The following Wednesday Chris left for a ten day stay in Germany. Such long trips are difficult, especially over the weekends. The kids and I spent Saturday swimming with friends, which was nice. Anna is in her last week of school before summer vacation. She gets her first report card this Friday! She will attend a week of summer camp and then we are on our own for the rest of April and May. I am searching for activities that can be done in extreme temperatures. It has been near 100° most every day since our return. Max continues to amaze us with his good disposition and intelligence. He can say quite a few words, his newest are bye-bye and uh-oh. He is also adventurous and loves to climb. There is never a dull moment here! Chris had twenty new people start in his department on March 10th, so he’s been quite busy with that. I am planning to help our friends at Servant’s Heart during the summer vacation. The kids there crave the English language, so I’m hoping to incorporate that into our activities. I have attached a few pictures that Chris took of the area around our flat. This is truly what we see around us every day. Well, we hope you enjoy hearing from us as much as we enjoy hearing from you. Please call or write when you can. Take care!

Our Trip to Phoenix

Rest and Relaxation

Greetings from Phoenix! Our trip was long, but well worth the effort. After a four hour ride to the airport, sixteen hours in the air, and five hours at London’s Heathrow Airport, we arrived in Phoenix exhausted but elated. Not surprisingly, our first stop on the way to our rental house was for hamburgers. Our first week here was a flurry of visitors, including my mom, Chris’s brother and grandpa, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins. We celebrated Chris’s grandma’s ninety-first birthday with a lotus flower candle from India. They are a bit frightening, but a lot of fun. Chris spent the second week here in John Deere meetings while the kids and I rested and spent time with Gramps and Grammy. Chris and I squeezed in a date night at the end of his conference, which was great fun. We took Anna and Max to a local fair before Chris headed back to India on the 24th. His trip was uneventful and he made it back safely. Our third week here was spent going to the dentist, the doctor, and the photographer. Sadly we are into our fourth and final week here in Phoenix, but we are making the most of every minute. Anna and Grammy went to the Arizona Museum for Youth today while Max and I did some shopping. Tomorrow we are having a belated birthday pizza-party for the kids and we are having a girls’ tea on Friday. It will be so hard to say goodbye on Monday, but Daddy is waiting in India, so that should make the long trip bearable. We do have a nine hour layover in London, so keep us in your prayers! We would like to thank everyone who came to visit us in Phoenix and send our regrets to those who could not make it. We missed you! Our upcoming plans include a trip to Germany for Chris the first week in April and hopefully a trip to see our friends, the Perry’s, in Australia in June. Our next trip home will probably be this Christmas, which seems like a terribly long time from now. I will post new information once we return to India. Until then, take care and know that we are thinking of you.