February Holidays

On February 13th, Betsy celebrated another birthday. Danny surprised her with a party. Many friends from school came over for pizza, movies, fellowship, and games. It was a lot of fun.

On Valentine's Day, Daddy and Aaron went for a walk through the neighborhood to give Betsy a chance to rest. Aaron enjoys playing with all the exercise equipment that is scattered throughout the community:
He also enjoys the more natural playground equipment.

Living in a very dense housing district, we are amazed by the number of playground areas that are scattered around. Almost anywhere we go out walking Aaron is pointing to the "ide" (slide). He loves to slide!


He also enjoys walking in the grass.
Aaron's new car has been having some alignment problems, he decided to try to do some repairs!

Happy New Year!

This past Thursday the country of Singapore basically shut down in celebration of Chinese New Year. This time of year is a crazy time here. Many of the people that work here only get one or two days off in the whole year: Chinese New Year's Day and the day after. Most small shops shut down for at least two days if not three or four days. Chinese New Year is a major family holiday in many of the ways that Christmas is to Americans. They spend the first day with family, then the next two weeks with different family and friends visiting. We just enjoyed a four day weekend!

Just before the New Year we celebrated Aaron's second birthday. It was a fun time.





One of the teachers at the school gave Aaron a bag full of hand-me-down books. He was thrilled as he loves to look at books.








Here is Aaron's new favorite, Junior's Colors.












Aaron's fingers are getting quite nimble at tearing paper.
































Aaron is also very neat. He took time to line up all his new cars before opening his next present.
Daddy and Aaron have had lots of fun with this one, a remote control car! All weekend Aaron was saying 'Drive car again?' The batteries died quickly, time to get rechargeables!

Aaron at Play and Rest

We had a bit of a scare last week. On Friday evening our external hard drive suddenly stopped working. We used this drive to store our photos, videos, and documents. Unfortunately (and unintelligently) we had not created a backup of any of the files on the drive, so we were a little upset at the thought of having lost all of our data. But we were hopeful that it was simply a minor hardware problem and not the hard drive itself. Praise God it was only the enclosure and the drive is working splendidly again! Now, to make that backup!

Tomorrow we celebrate Aaron's two year birthday. He has grown a LOT, it is amazing to see the changes each day as he adds more words to his vocabulary ("All done Cat Comes Back" as he hands me his Dr. Seuss book or "Purple car go up stairs" as he drives his car up the stairs).

Here are a few pictures of him at play:

He loves to "go under" things.


A few weeks ago we discovered this great little playground near our home, Aaron loves the slide!


As you can see, he also loves his purple car and carries it with him everywhere!



The car slides.




Then Aaron slides!










At the end of the day, Aaron is usually very tired and sleeps well. In the morning though he will wake up and get out his books. On this morning he got his books, read them, lined them up, and went back to sleep before we got to him.




Have a great week! Remember our little two-year old in your prayers.

Videos

Just a quick note, we've been working hard and have a few video clips for your enjoyment:


September 2007:
Aaron in ball pit dial-up
Aaron in ball pit high-speed
Just more of Aaron throwing balls.

January 2008:
Aaron in lego fort dial-up
Aaron in lego fort high-speed
This video has a lot of Aaron talking as he is playing. His vocabulary and sentence structure is pretty good for a 23 month old!

December 2007:
Indonesian Wedding dial-up
Indonesian Wedding high-speed
This is the wedding we mentioned in an earlier post.

Our Final Adventure of Christmas Break

Christmas break is nearing a completion. While many of you have been back in school for at least a week and others have been back to work for almost two weeks, I am preparing to head back to school on Monday. This week we have had the opportunity to go on a couple more adventures. On Wednesday we went into Little India to get an Indian suit for Danny and Aaron. Then today we went to the Singapore Science Center. It was a lot of fun learning more about the world God created, and watching Aaron learn about it too! Enjoy the pictures:

The pagoda at the Chinese gardens. We had a bit of a walk from the bus stop to the science center. Betsy was enjoying the clouds so she took a couple of pictures.










Some of the housing in the same area.













Constant construction in this country. Not sure exactly what they are doing here, but we found the banner to be ironic. Maybe they are digging up sidewalks to put in trees?










The Science Center was incredible. Before we even entered the building we came to this little park with many different experiments. Here you can see Danny at one sound dish. We were able to talk to each other in our normal voices and be heard by using the parabolic principles of the dishes.







There were many sections devoted to young kids with hands on things they can do. Aaron enjoyed this little triangular mirror room; we had to crawl under the mirrors to get in, but then we were surrounded with ourselves!









Here was a small little room built for toddlers! In the wall were all kinds of little creatures, mice, gerbils, and a leopard gecko that had been confiscated from someone who was keeping it illegally.







Aaron also loved the little houses. He likes going in and out of doors and opening and closing windows. This was a great chance for Mommy and Daddy to rest!










Aaron's favorite part was pushing buttons. There were buttons all over the place that he could push to make amazing things happen. This one was showing how different materials (steel, nylon, rubber, iron, etc.) react to being pounded by a sharp hammer. Aaron liked the BANG!
"Do Again?" "LOUD!"







There was a whole section of optical illusions, including this one. Aaron just liked the fake banana!











Even waiting to head home Aaron was playing with his car. It is amazing how much energy a little boy can have!











After a long day of play, little boys need sleep!













Thanks for all your prayers and support throughout this past year. Pray for us as the second semester begins and life goes back to "normal".

A Festive Christmas Season

WOW, this month has gone quickly. We want to apologize to you all for the long delay between posts, but we have been having a wonderful time with family and with friends. This post should give you a glimpse of the many adventures we have enjoyed! Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to you all!!

Danny works with the children's Sunday school program at our church. Due to the extra time off from teaching this holiday season, he volunteered to do an overview of the Old Testament with the Sunday school. He has been learning so much about God's hand in the history of Israel and the world because he is developing his teaching materials on his own. Our prayer is that the children discover the reality of God's power, not only in history but also in their own lives!

Betsy just finished a great Bible Study focusing on Psalm 46. During this study she was challenged to get her focus off of herself and back on the God she tries to serve. Now, she is doing her own study on all the different Hebrew and Greek names for God used in the Bible. This will be a long study, but has already been quite rewarding! Please pray that God will break through her pride and be glorified in her life!

It is our greatest desire to bring our Lord the glory He so richly deserves. Thanks be to the God and Father of all creation for His amazing love!!

Without further ado, here are some pictures from our many activities from this month:

A surprise birthday party for our pastor's wife.


Fellowship with our church family.



Celebrating Christmas with the ESL program at IBC




Decorating our new tree! Yes, it is fake...try finding a live tree that will last more than 2 days...(ha ha ha!!)

Playing with Papa


Such a big boy in his new bed!




Enjoying the ICS Christmas program (Danny ran one of the spot lights)

Reading books. Aaron has many of the letters in this book memorized:
D: Daddy
A: Aloha
M: Mommy
I: Ipu
R: Rain
B: Baby
It is amazing how fast his vocabulary is growing! He speaks in sentences:
Aaron Apple All Gone
Going Up Stairs
Ni-Night Mommy/Daddy
I Love Daddy/Mommy
Excuse Me
Please
Thank you
Big Bus
Nummy goldfish
Rock truck go under


Opening presents, first with Gigi and Papa before they left.


Eating!!!


Playing with presents


"Going Up Stairs"


Celebrating the Advent


Reading some more:
Aaron has many of his animal sounds figured out:
Cat: "Mou"
Dog: "Woof Woof"
Cow: "Moo"
Duck: "Kack Kack"
Pig: "Oink"
Horse: "Moo"
Bird: "Kack Kack"
OK, so he still needs to work on a couple of those!



Building Walls


Driving Cars


Watching this amazing wedding processional! On the 23rd, soon after returning from church we started to hear excessive engine noises from our parking lot. We looked down and discovered that a huge group of motorcyclists were entering our lot. They sat around and randomly revved their engines for several minutes. We also saw a car decked out with wedding bows idling at the end of the lot. "Ah," we said, "must be a wedding!" However, that was only the beginning. Some time later, we heard drums and xylophone-type clangs. They were getting louder and closer. Another peek out the window showed the parade pictured above. The first figures are men dressed from head to foot in monkey costumes (can we just say....so hot lah!). They were followed by several dancers and the groom and his father. They moved through the parking lot and disappeared. "Quiet at last," we thought. Oh no, about 2 hours later, here they came again, this time with the bride. We could hear the celebration for several more hours. We are not sure what the nationality was of the wedding party, but we think they may have been Indonesian or Indian. Just another one of those, "not ever has happened where we grew up!!"


Christmas unwrapping #2: The three of us opened most of our presents on Christmas Eve. Aaron understood what he was doing a bit better this time.


Solving the Rubik's Cube!
Aaron has seen Daddy playing with his rubik's cube since Aaron was born. Now he has one of his own and loves to twist it. Give him a couple years and he'll be solving it too!

So, that is our month in review! Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas Season and wishing you a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!