End of an era...

...beginning of an another.  No longer do I have all my babies with me at home all the time.

Ready to go!

Today, my baby girl started nursery! Can you believe?

She was so excited and has been for a good long while so was very pleased to be told it was FINALLY the day to go.  Today was a "settling in" day which meant that she would be able to get a bit of extra attention from her keyworker (who had visited us in our home yesterday) and meant that I had to stay in the building in case of any problems or inconsolable tears.

There were no problems though, I am told she had a great time playing with everything and with the other boys and girls.

Although. Naomi did get very upset at one point, she was not happy at all and even Mummy couldn't console her.  What was the problem? It was time to come home! Eventually we managed to placate her by letting her borrow a book from the nursery, she can return it tomorrow when she goes back and Mummy will be coming home this time!

I hope this is the beginning of many happy years of education for her!

Cornton Baptist Church

Having been in Stirling a few months now, we thought we'd share a little about the church that we've settled in to: Cornton Baptist Church. We spent a little while praying and searching for churches before the move, and it was proving a little difficult as not one place seemed to be quite right. Just a couple of days before the move Jay heard from someone that CBC existed: after a quick look at their website we found that they believe about the right things, are doing a lot of good things, and the church building was very close to our new house (with the implication that it was a church serving our local community - something we were keen to be part of if possible).

We went along on the first Sunday that we were in Stirling and have stuck there ever since. Jay has recently joined the church as an official member (Sandy hasn't yet - a condition of membership is a believer's baptism which he's not had), we're both getting involved in small groups and serving teams, Miriam's been dedicated and with the appearance of some pictures from the church Christmas party we thought it to be a good time to share a little about our thoughts on the church and why we feel God wants us to be there just now.

We'll try to avoid too many comparisons with our previous church Open Heaven as God puts us in the right place at the right time, and all churches have their pluses and minuses. However, there is a quite visible difference form OH, and that is that CBC has a really broad mixture of people and demographics. It's quite balanced between all age groups, with children the same ages as Naomi and Miriam, students, people our age, middle aged and retired. Also worth saying is that the people are really friendly: we were made very welcome from the first week, with simple things like people remembering our names and making offers of practical help like babysitting.

It's a fairly small church - maybe 70 or 80 people on a Sunday - which is good because it's much easier to get to know people well, and it's easier to find a place that we can serve. It's also growing, which is a reflection of the good job that's being done of reaching out to local people.


The teaching is really solid - Bible focused and accessible with a clear gospel message every week. We also think the church's priorities are in the right place - that is, for Kingdom growth - early on we were told that it didn't matter which church we joined as long as it was where God wanted us. As in Loughborough, there is also a good relationship between the different churches in the area.

The church are also open to trying new stuff - we gather that the church has changed quite a bit in the past few years. One example is that Jay has offered to start a toddler group for the community and the response was pretty much - "how do we make this happen?" The church also has a good focus on social justice and wider mission, supporting a number of charities and agencies that do these things.

We're sure that God has put us here for at least the next wee while, and we're quite happy with that. It would be great if those of you who pray can give thanks that we've been led to a good church and that God leads us to the best places for us to serve now that we're here.

Finally, some pictures from the Christmas party...

I see party food...

Smile please.

Yes, actual ceilidh dancing. Awesome!

Party games with prizes!

Videos

I have a couple of videos I thought you might like to see.  One is of Naomi, she had been telling me all about stars and planets but fairly soon after I started filming it became about Christmas (and before you hear the end, she does normally answer Jesus to that question, I'm sure she just answered this way because it was going to be on record!).  The other video just shows various things Miriam is up to, in typical baby fashion it was much cooler before I turned the camera on!

Zurich

Last Friday I was in Zurich - one of our partner airports is Flughafen Zürich, and a visit was arranged so we (there were three on the trip) could see first hand how the airport actually works. It was a very useful trip from a work point of view - I have a much better understanding of the problems that we're working on, we have a couple of new problems that might be interesting to solve, and we have seen the people there in person so it'll be much easier to share data and ask questions remotely from now on.

The trip there was quite "interesting". In short, all these things happened:

• flight out was overbooked and we got bumped on to a later flight, so several hours to kill at Edinburgh airport
• just missed bus to hotel so needed to get taxi there
• one of our group was almost unable to check in at hotel as they wanted our booking reference number, they didn't have a printed copy, and that's the one day when the university email system wasn't working well enough to retrieve it
• taxi didn't appear when ordered at airport - cue most animated conversation in German I've ever seen between hotel manager and taxi company, followed by scariest taxi ride ever (and I've been in an Italian taxi)
• lengthy question session by UK Border people for one of our group
• burst tyre five minutes from my house in Stirling

Still, we got there and back in one piece, and I did very briefly manage a quick trek into the centre of Zurich while waiting for the return flight. Here is some Swiss scenery:

Lake Zurich

PS: I'm told that Naomi answered "Zurich" to the question "where's your daddy today?" :-)

PPS: I'm quite entertained that this can be classed as a "day trip"!

Christmas excitement

Here are a few of our preparations for Christmas, it's proving lots of fun this year as Naomi is understanding better what is going on.  She is very excited and can engage with some of our traditions and fun.

One thing she was very excited about was getting a Christmas tree.

Here we are having chosen the tree (as a side note, Sandy had the day off work and it turns out that Monday morning is an incredible time to buy a Christmas tree, the queue was non-existent!)

Here is Naomi making some decorations for the tree.  She wanted to make it sparkly but the decorations were in the attic and I wasn't in a position to get it down on my own so I said she could make some things for it

Here is the tree with the decorations Naomi made

Here is the tree with a few more decorations including a star that Naomi made with Daddy yesterday.

We will be up in the North East for a fair wee while over Christmas and New Year so looking forward to catching up with you soon...

She's a walker!

Miriam has had the longest nearly walking phase I've ever known, she looked pretty close about 6 weeks ago but she has now mastered the basics and is now trying to perfect the art.

So here goes, enjoy!

Docs

In the bath last night Naomi was having a lot of fun with her hippos. They were having a lot of adventures but at one point the pink one wasn't feeling well.

So, here we have the blue one being a doctor,  the link one in the doctors bed,  and the whale being, well,  a whale.  What else?

I like this stage of development :-)