Long walk.

We went for a hike to Paris today. We left about 10:30 this morning and hiked the coulée verte. It took us just under three hours to go twelve miles to Paris. We took the train back. We had a good walk with a lot of good conversation. Along the way I saw this photo op. of a large mansion, photo attached. We will not get to go as planned to Normandy tomorrow, because the rental car was unavailable, instead we are going to go see the Arc de triomphe. I am looking forward to it because I have not made it to the top yet. God bless, JASON

The parents have arrived.

Mom and Dad arrived yesterday. We had a good time yesterday showing them around town. We had Christmas for our family. At least it seemed like it with all the stuff that they had brought. They made it all day long and only dozed off for a small nap. They slept twelve hours last night. This morning we went into Paris and looked a the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Cœur, and Notre Dame. It was a good time, it has gotton cold but it did not rain on us. Looking forward to tomorrow when Dad and I are going to go on a hike into Paris. Be sure to check out my Dad's blog, link on the right of the page, to see his point of view on things. God bless, JASON

I don't know.

We asked Micah what he did at school. He happily replied, "I don't know." We have had a time getting information from him. I think how often God could asked us what we are doing and we would reply the same. I just heard Caleb talking about some friends of ours that were students here at the language school, he asked when they were coming back. Angie said that they are not coming back, they are moving to Congo. Caleb said, "Oh man, that's a long planet." I also forgot to mention that Andrew locked himself in the bathroom Friday. We tried to talking him to turning the key but could not. We tried everything else we could, taking off the doorknob, and all that we could think off. I finally had to kick the door in. Andrew was scared and upset but he is all right. The door fared worse and will be replaced today.

We are getting ready for my parents to arrive. I have the scheduled all planned out, what we are eating and what we are doing. I think that the weather will cooperate with our plans. I will meet them at the airport and we will show them around Massy. Wednesday we will see some sites in Paris. Thursday, Dad and I will hike "la coulée verte", hiking trail to Paris. Friday we are renting a car and going to Normandy. Saturday Angie and my mom and going to the mall. Sunday after bible study we are going to the Louvre (free the first Sunday of the month). Monday is open to whatever Mom and Dad want to do, Possible more sites in Paris or Versailles. Mostly I am looking forward to sitting and talking. I will hopefully find time to post pictures and updates as we go. Be sure to check out Dad's blog (link is to the right) to see his perspectives. Pictured is my Mom and Dad at my sisters wedding shower. God bless, JASON

Extra Hour

We woke up this Sunday morning and started getting ready only to find out the time had changed and we have an extra hour. So I think, I will use this extra time to send out a little update. We are loving the time off from school so far. Getting more and more excited about me parents coming in Tuesday. We let the kids stay up Friday and watch a movie. They had some friends over Saturday. Friday they had class pictures as school. Ironically, when I picked up Micah he had a colorful bump on his head. I asked him what happened and he said he hit it when he was going potty. That led to more questions but I could't get anything else out of him. Later someone else asked and we found out a little more, he said he didn't know how it happened but it was when he was going potty. The third person who asked finally got the full story. He was leaving the classroom to go to the restroom and looked back to say something to the teacher and ran into the door. I do not know if it was before or after pictures were taken. I am going to start metioning little quotes that Micah says during the week. The one for this week happened while we were playing at the language school and Micah came up to me holding a stick and says, "With this stick, I can change the world."  God bless and enjoy some time with God today, JASON

English

As I have mentioned before, other than French we are also learning "English" (British english). There are quite a few differences, For instance, If I said, "I left the nappy and the dummy in the pushchair next to the cot." translated into English (American), "I left the diaper and the pacifier in the stroller next to the baby bed." That is quite a difference. I need to go write an email to a French pastor in the south of France. I have found that it is a lot easier to write in French if you go directly into French, meaning you use the vocabulary and sentence structure that you know. The other way is to think what you would say in English and then try to translate it to French. I always run into things that can't be translated. We are considering going to the south of France after language school to start our church plant. There is a lot of work to do if that is the case. I have been feeling God's leading there, we would need to take another trip there to survey the area more. Pray for us, that God would make his will clear and guide us to where we can best serve him. Pictured is Lilia with a flower she picked at the Language school garden. God bless, JASON

Caleb and Andrew

Micah was getting fussy tonight when we told him to get a bath and Caleb reached out to him patted him on the shoulder and said, "Awe don't cry Micah you're my good buddy." I gave Caleb a high five and told him I liked that encouragement he gave! Then he got to draw out of the "pickle a privilege" jar!And over the weekend we have seen a significant increase in the # of words coming from Andrew. And today also in French he was the same. I am glad- he has been way to quiet (well quiet in words but not in sounds and noises) since this school year began. It is like the old Andrew is back.

This is a picture of Andrew when he climbed onto the windowsill and got himself stuck while waiting at the bottom of the stairs for me to be ready to leave for school.
ANGIE

Vacation drawing closer.

Another week behind us, which means that we have only one more week before we get a break. That means seeing my parents. We have had a good week. As I already mentioned, a good visit with our guests Wednesday. Thursday we had fun doing our "job interviews" for the class. I think we both did well. Friday night we had all our classmates over at our house for a party of sorts. It was a lot of fun, everyone brought food and we talked for a couple of hours. There was a lot of laughter. We managed to keep most of the conversations in french since our teacher was present.
I am making plans to get our Colorado drivers license so we can swap for a french one. Its a long story, I will explain more later.
Tomorrow (Sunday) I am going to stay here with the kids and let Angie go to the church in Paris for the services as I did last week. We may decide to go as a family, but maybe not. We have been trying to keep some routine in the kids life. I have had a good day today. Did a lot of paper work. Angie gave the boys hair cuts, it will be my turn shortly. Thanks for reading and God bless, JASON

Bienvenue!

We had a good day today. We straightened things us this morning. We had guests come over this afternoon. A pastor in Paris and his wife visited with us for a couple of hours. We had a really good conversation with them. He had a lot of good advice, answered a lot of our questions, and confirmed a lot that we thought to be true. We plan to visit in their services in a couple of weeks. We have a large project to do in school tomorrow. We have to do a mock job interview for 15 minutes.

Micah evidently is a little slow to catch on to some things. A couple of days ago he said to me, "Do you know Shane is in a different class." This having been the case for six weeks. After we were closer to school and he saw the people waiting to get in, he said, "Everyone is speaking a different language." Yep. I guess that is a very important step to learning French is realising that there are people around you speaking it. Attached picture is Micah enjoying an Ice cream cone in Paris. God bless, JASON

Dimanche (Sunday)

We are having a great day today. I visited with a Baptist church is Paris today. The father of one of our Language school teachers is the pastor. The services went well. They had the Lord's supper (my first time to see it here). They, like the church here is Massy, have a moment of prayer and praise, when anyone can say a prayer or short testimony or song. The sermons was good, I understood it. It was from the life of Shadrach, Meshach and Adednego. The three main points were 1. comfortable life 2. Problems 3. Never alone. After the service I had a good conversation with a young man from the south of France who is going to college here. I got back to the house about 3:45 and saw Lilia scrubbing the toilet and Caleb vacumming. Angie must have had a good lesson with them. I just finished some homework and helped Caleb get his finished. Angie is taking a nap and I am tempted to have one myself. Looking forward to the hearing the services at Walnut Street tonight via Skype, last weeks was a two parter and so we are anxiously waiting for part two. God bless, JASON

Subjonctif

We have had a good week at school. We have learned two new verb tenses this week, plus-que-parfait and subjonctif. Plus-que-parfait is not much of a problem, it is easily conjugated and translates directly into English. Subjonctif is a little different. It has a more difficult conjugation and it doesn't really translate. Il faut que j'écrive = It is necessary that I write. Many students I have spoken to have had a lot of problems with it and we may too by the time we finish learning all the uses for it.
Last weekend I let Lilia walk to the store around the corner by herself and pick up a few things for us. She has been begging me to do it again. Of course I followed her to make sure she made it okay. Thankfully we live in a safe neighborhood. There are almost always people around and many of them neighbors.
Micah is staying late after school on Thursday and Friday to work with his teacher and a couple of other students learning French. We are really thankfully because even though he understands a lot of French he has been hesitant to speak much.
I am really looking forward to school break coming up and my parents coming to visit. I am excited about hiking into Paris with my dad. Massy is the start of "la coulee verte", a hiking and bike trail that goes into Paris. Thanks for the thoughts and prayers. God bless, JASON

Une petite pause

I'm taking a little break from homework at this moment. I do not know for sure how much homework I have been working on but it has been a lot. I had to write my tèmoignage (testimony) for school tomorrow on top of my usual homework. We had bible study at the house this morning, the family was not all recovered yet. My kids have been doing a lot of interesting things, they are starting to resemble missionary kids more and more.

I was walking home from school with Caleb and he was showing me another kid in his french language class (CLIN). I asked if he spoke English. Caleb says, "No, he speaks British".

Yesterday, Lilia told Andrew that he was twenty-one (a number on his baseball shirt). He replies, "No way." While we are all laughing, she tells him that she is talking about his baseball shirt. He points at the ball on his shirt and says, "handball".

Lilia was also talking this week at lunch one day about two boys that were wrestling. Caleb asked if he had a red shirt on. Lilia said yes. Caleb then says, "Well, I suggest he is in my class."

Last Sunday, Lilia fussed about going to church. Afterwards she told me that in Sunday School the teacher had mentioned that fussing about church was a sin. She said she started asking God forgiveness right then.

Micah, who is our perfectionist and always has to have everything in its place, got out of the shower and somehow I forgot to comb his hair. It was sticking up bad after he had got his "gown" (pajamas) on and so Angie took him to the mirror to show him why we where laughing. As soon as he saw himself he said, "Whoa, give me a comb!"

Attached is a picture of (left to right) Micah, Andrew, Caleb and Lilia. God bless, JASON

First winter colds,

We are having a little sickness passing around the house. Angie is congested and not feeling good. Andrew has had a little fever on and off for the last couple of days. Micah has had a bad sounding cough. I hope they are all better by monday. I have been able to get several other things done other than medicating. We did our absentee voting finished, sent out some thank-you cards, did some drivers license research, of course went shopping three or four times. We have homework due monday over the book Tintin - Le Lotus Bleu. I have not been able to find it here locally yet. Concerning the driver's license, it costs a couple of thousand euros minimum and several weeks to get you driver's license, if you pass everything the first time. It is a difficult test from what I hear. There are five states that have agreements with France, meaning France accepts there driver's license directly. You show them your drivers license from one of those states and they will give you a french drivers license. So far, it may be faster and cheaper to fly to the US and get a drivers license in that state and then return and get the French one. Definitely something to consider. Attached is a picture of the kids in a pool at Greece. They really liked this one, Andrew as well because it was just the right depth of water for him to walk in. God bless, JASON

Interesting Facts about France

*France has the 7th or 8th largest economy in the World (depending on how you measure)
*Minimum wage is €8.27.
*Electric Power production is 78.1% produced by nuclear power generation, 11.1%by hydroelectric power generation, 9.5% produced by fossil feul power generation.
*France is the second largest agricultural exporter after the US
*France has 1/3 of all the agricultural land in the European Union
*France is the most visited country with 82 million visitors a year (only those staying over 24 hrs).
*France is the third largest weapons manufacturer in the world.
*70% of new cars sold in 2004 had diesel engines.
*According to a January 2007 poll by the Catholic World News: 51% identified as being Catholics, 31% identified as being agnostics or atheists. (Another poll gives atheists proportion equal to 27%), 10% identified as being from other religions or being without opinion, 4% identified as Muslim, 3% identified as Protestant, 1% identified as Jewish.
*For more facts. http://abainfrance.blogspot.com/2008/11/interesting-facts-about-france-ii.html