Celebrating! God is GREAT!

What a week we've had! My goodness! There has been much to celebrate.

First of all, our team scheduled an official celebration. What are we celebrating, you ask? The arrival of all members of our team to Paris, France! While we have much work ahead of us, it seemed important to make a point of celebrating this great moment and giving God the glory for what He has done!

So, we headed to a park on Monday. The plan was to take a ride as a team on this balloon (the largest helium balloon in the world, mind you) and pray over the 15th arrondisement (the part of Paris where we are planning to start a church).


Unfortunately, we bought tickets and were next in line when they informed us that they had to stop taking flights because the wind was too strong. Oh, well. We can pray on the ground just as well, right! There are other fun things to do nearby! On to the second planned event....

...fun in the fountains! (Which are free, too!) Can you imagine all of the kids' delight at this plan?


Here are a few photos of our kids enjoying the fountains...
I love this one of Ryan...

And, here's Lena pushing, no...I would call that shoving...Jim (our team leader) who is carrying two of his daughters into the fountains. Lena did a lot of shoving adults into water.


After the fountains, we had a picnic. I just love this photo of Claire and Keenan walking in the park. Keenan was kissing Claire's hand every now and then. So cute!


And, the picnic. KFC! Woo hoo! It tasted very good.
Here we all are lounging around together.

I had to include this super cute photo of Matthew, the youngest member of our team. :-) We did play some soccer with that ball, too.

And, we played baseball, too.

It was a really fun day with the team.

Then, hang onto your seats! Now, it's Todd's 4th birthday! Yeah! (This is Wednesday now.) Thankfully, Todd is excited about everything involving his Birthday...including this rather simple baseball cake.

He's also very excited about the fact that he now gets his OWN metro ticket. He was free on the Metro until Wednesday. We as parents are not so thrilled that he gets his own ticket as we pay more now. But, his excitement about it sure helps lighten our hearts.

I took Todd out on a photo shoot the morning of his birthday. (If you want to see more of the photos, go to my Facebook page.) Here's my favorite. He's getting so big!


So, are you still hanging onto your seats? 'Cause the next reason to celebrate is that we have found an apartment! Yes! God has done amazing things here! We found out Monday night that the landlord of the apartment we most wanted accepted our application and wants to rent to us! Yippeee!

We have been spending a lot of time this week getting money wired from Avant to pay the deposit and first month's rent, filling out the contract, getting it signed by the appropriate parties, buying renters insurance, and going back to take measurements of the rooms. The contract is not complete quite yet, but it will be in a matter of days. As you can imagine, we are so very excited and really praising God for what He has done.

This means that next week we can register our kids for school. Just in time -they will start school along with everybody else! It also means that I (Jill) can register for language classes. (We're working on this one...more to be said about this in upcoming communication for sure.) And, we are really praying that our shipment from the USA will arrive just around the time that we move in. We are able to move in on September 12th, so we have a couple of weeks more of temporary housing before we are finally HOME! We are all getting very excited to have a home and not be living out of suitcases anymore.

So, do you want to see some photos? I only have photos of the outside right now.

This photo is taken about a block from our building. Our apartment building is the one just right of the triangle red road sign - it's white with black bar-type railings. Can you tell that we are on a hill? A pretty good-sized hill? We are certainly going to get in shape living in this place!


This is the building a little closer up.

This is our terrace. We are on the 4th floor from the ground, and our terrace is just above the yellow and white awnings.

Here are the kids by the door to enter our building.


We are just amazed by the many ways that God has lavished his goodness on us. This place is really going to be a wonderful place to live.

Well, I'm going to end for now. If you want to pray for us, pray that...

-our shipment comes by the 12th of September, but not too early that we have to store it (which would cost lots of money). It left port in the USA on 8/17 and is estimated to arrive 8/30 in France. We'll see how this all works out!?!
-pray that registering our kids for school goes smoothly
-pray for wisdom in choosing a language school for me (Jill) - there are a number of options to choose from
-pray for temporary housing for the 2 weeks that we cannot live here (where we've been for the month of August), but are not yet allowed to move into our apartment
-pray that these weeks of waiting to move in would go quickly! It will be a lot of juggling to make school work while living in a temporary place (thankfully only 2 weeks of juggling!)
-most importantly, PRAISE GOD with us for all HE has done!

Our many thanks!