Author: Beth

At our last house in Roswell, I was so proud of myself that I ordered a recycling garbage can for our  duplex. I had a little talk with the kids about recycling and we were pretty pumped to be taking care of God’s creation. I even had some grocery bags in the back of my car -that I always seemed to  forget to take in the store somehow- but I had them. I also had drying racks that I used for a few items that we didn’t like to go in the dryer.  I was on my way to being greener. Or so I thought.

Welcome to Europe where life is just green by nature. Here are 5 ways that we have adapted.

One: You take your shoes off at the door because of all the dirt that gets tracked inside. More dirt = more cleaning. Schuhe Auf.

Two: Most of the homes here are very efficient in their window placement allowing you to take advantage of all the daylight that you can. Lights really don’t get used until very late at night.

Three: We find ourselves walking a lot more. People here walk a lot or take bikes because gas is just too expensive to drive everywhere. We had a couple over on Saturday and they walked to our house. It took them 30 minutes to get here and they have a newborn. When we offered to give them a ride home they reminded us that they enjoyed walking. Rockstars!

Four: If it’s a sunny day that means it’s laundry day. Instead of a clothes dryer we have 3 drying racks. I’ve learned some tricks to getting laundry to dry faster and to keeping darks from fading in the sun.

Five: And now my favorite-the trash. It has been quite an adjustment figuring out how to take care of all of the trash here. Ellison held her popsicle stick and looked at me puzzled. “Which one does this go in mom?”  Inside of our house we now have 5, yes 5 separate containers to contain our waste. There is container for plastic and aluminum, one for paper, one for glass and aluminum cans, one for biological food waste and one for everything else. Seriously I should video myself cleaning up after a meal. It’s a delicate dance of recycling for sure. Once the containers in the house fill up, we take them outside to the appropriate cans.

Although this is all new for us it feels good to be taking a big step at taking care of our world.

 

So the talk from Atlanta is all about the heat. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I miss that heat. The sweltering wanna jump in a pool kinda heat. I’m a Southern girl at heart and I grew up less than an hour away from the beach. So, the sun and being near water are two of my favorite things.

Many people have been curious about what the weather is like for us. You know, its kinda crazy and I still feel like I’m waiting on Summer to really arrive. I have a feeling that when Fall gets into high gear I’m going to feel like I’ve missed something.

When Memorial Day comes to Atlanta it’s pretty much a guarantee that you can put away sweaters and jeans until late fall. Not so much the case here in good ole’ Augsburg. For example, today when I took Ellison to school it was in the 50’s. Yep the 50’s in July. Jude wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants and did not break a sweat. I had the heat on driving in. What!!!??!!  The “Summer” weather here has been more like a Spring in Atlanta. Some days it’s like 60 and then a few days in a row it will be like 85 or so. It’s been well over a week since we’ve been able to start a day in shorts and sandals and feel comfortable.

One thing that I’m learning is to layer and to just wait and see what the weather will bring. The huge plus to this milder summer,  is that since homes are not air conditioned, it is much more bearable.

The variable temperatures make one thing sure- when the sun is hot and shining, you drop everything and get outside.

Here’s to hoping for a sunny hot day tomorrow or someday soon. Please…

I love birthdays. I love Ian. Today is Ian’s birthday and that is a double bonus!  Sadly he is recovering from an awful gut wrenching stomach situation from yesterday so our celebrations were a bit last minute. Like at 2:00 this afternoon I had to run out and get his birthday gift- really last minute.  This morning I even mis-measured the amount of cream cheese I needed for the cake so I had to run out and get some more. Dang.

But, one of the many things that I love about Ian is that he is so laid back and he truly did not care about the delays and that things did not work out just perfectly. It’s just what I need to bring balance to my world.

As a little tribute to Ian, here are some of my favorite pictures from this past year to celebrate.

 

Every other Tuesday Ellison has school for an hour and a half. Instead of driving all the way back home, I’ve been using that time to get grocery shopping done. It’s nice to be in sort of a rhythm with where to go for what and to be figuring out what works for our family.

When we lived in the States, Aldi was one of my favorite grocery stores. I loved being able to get in and out quickly and if they didn’t have it, I either made due or visited a bigger store and selected only what I needed there. Aldi is actually a German chain and the style of shopping (5 ailes, cashiers sitting down, paying for grocery bags and inserting a coin for grocery carts) is very common here. So I made it a point to buy a big Aldi bag while I was still in the US because I knew I’d put it to good use here. It’s kinda cool walking in with my English Aldi bag.

A major difference to the Aldi in the US and the Aldi here is that they have a big section for lots of other things. It changes from week to week and it kinda goes by themes. So this week was…America week apparently. I was doing my normal grocery shopping and was stopped by the display of American items. I grinned from ear to ear to see jelly beans, marshmallows and fried onions.

Random 3 items I know, but hopefully they’ll help us connect to the celebrating that we’ll miss at home.

Since we moved here, Asher yells “train” at the top of his voice every time we see a train. Well when you live in a city in Europe that is actually quite often. We knew that we had to get that boy on a train! Some friends invited us to join them for a pottery market in a neighboring town and it just so happened that they said we should go by train. I wish we had taken video of our ride so that you could really experience all of his excitement but it was awesome.

 

Today we are back online!!!! Our internet provider came and we feel reconnected with the world again. We are just about done moving in and it has been quite the month. Here are some pictures from the move.

On one of the first days that we came to work at the house it was a holiday here. We knew there would be a processional that would go by but we did not know that there was a service that took place right in front of our house. You can’t see it clearly here but there was a stage set up right outside of our front door.

This is a wall that was torn down by Ian and another friend. 

The kids are getting in on helping get paint off of the floors. (This lasted for like 2 minutes.)

This is how our crates from America showed up. Oh happy day.

HOME!! It feels so good to be settled in. We are really thankful for new friends here who helped us figure out which lightbulbs to buy, where you go for hangers, and how to figure out bedding and various other questions that came up along the move. It’s been a busy month but we are really grateful for a space to call home.

 

Man it’s been a long time since we last posted. Crazy how fast time goes by. When we last updated, we had gotten the keys to our place. After we arrived, we realized that there was actually more work to do than we’d thought. Over the past few weeks, we have been cleaning, painting, tearing down a wall, going to Ikea, returning things to Ikea, painting some more, cleaning again, making lists, checking things off, going to Ikea, returning things to Ikea…are you getting a picture of all of this :-). But…we are home now! HOME Last Saturday was our first night in our new place and we were all grinning from ear to ear to just be…ahhhh. There’s been lots of hard work for sure, but it’s been worth every bit of it to unpack all of our suitcases and take shirts out of actual closets (actually Kliedershranks as they are called here not really closets at all more like huge wardrobes). We are incredibly thankful for so many simple things like putting our kids in beds each night and handling temper tantrums in private.

So…Sorry that we’ve kept you out of the loop on all the ins and outs, but we will share some of our top surprises from the move.

1. If you’ve watched House Hunter’s international, you know that renters here bring their entire kitchens. Cabinets and all. What we didn’t know is that lighting is also something that moves with the renters. On the second night that Ian came to paint, his plans where thwarted with the surprise of no lights.

2. Mattresses here are sold by actual measurement. So, there is no “twin” size mattress, for example. There’s 80×200, 90×200 and 100×200. We ended up having to return one mattress and buy some foam to stuff another to make it all work.

3. Ian can tear down a wall! The owner of this house had put up a wall 10 years ago to accommodate the last renters. This left the house with no family room and he gave us permission to tear it down. Ian and a friend spent 4 hours one day working on it and a few days later he moved all of the debris outside in the rain.

4. Painting a room means walls and ceilings. That’s a lot of paint and a lot of neck work.

5. One actually can grow tired of going to Ikea. Especially when every trip home requires building on your husband’s part. Bonus though, our kids love the play area there! They actually look forward to going.

It’s been an awesome 3 weeks setting up and adjusting to living on our own again. Tomorrow our shipment from the  States arrives and we are looking forward to unpacking things from home. Thanks for following along, and thanks for grace in the gaps.

 

We officially have keys to our HOME!!! Tomorrow we begin the cleaning and painting and we hope to move in by the end of the week. I may not be able to sleep tonight because I’m so excited. Little by little, we’ve been accumulating furniture at good prices from people that we’ve met here and we’ll have to make a big run to IKEA at some point this week to fill in the gaps.

The timing of this move is great as Ellison is at home on a 2 week break from school and we have our fingers crossed that maybe our shipment from home will clear customs and hit the road this week as well. Thursday is a public holiday so we’re not holding our breath- but we’re hoping.

This new place is yet another story of God at work on our behalf here. It turns out that we are actually going to be living in a house that was divided in two (we are on the right side). The owner of the house goes to the church that we will be interning with and heard of our need after we got rejected from our first attempt at getting an apartment here.  He has been building a new house for the tenants who were there, and they moved out this past weekend. We are really thankful that we will have a garden (yard) in the back and we also have incredible flexibility with the lease terms (one of the hardest things about getting a place here was that we are not sure how long we will be here).

Needless to say we are grinning from ear to ear. We have basically memorized the ikea magazine and have been studying home decor blogs for cheap and neat ideas at how to create a new space for us. It’s one of my favorite things to do and has been one of the hardest parts of this wait. We are looking forward to the next few weeks of making a haven for our family and a welcoming space for hosting new people that we meet here.

Have you done anything neat in your home lately? Got any fun blogs you check or ideas to share? Do tell…

 

For the past 6 months or so, our kids have been wondering whose birthday we’d celebrate first in our new country. And the winner was…

Our little guy turned 2 two a few weeks ago. We kicked the day off with his favorite breakfast- cookie cereal, then we headed to church. After church we picked up Happy Meals on the way home and he was one happy boy.

Later on in the afternoon the boys took a nap and the ladies in the family made a birthday cake (thanks to the Duncan Hines mix in our luggage) and birthday dinner. Ellison got all into celebrating his big day which was really sweet.

He loves blowing out candles and he also loves anything sweet so his cake was a hit.

So much so that he ended up getting into it when no one was looking.

The one thing we were all sad about was not being able to really celebrate his day with anyone else. Normally we would have had a big family birthday with all of the Atlanta cousins so that was a bit of a downer. To our surprise, some of our new friends stopped by knowing it was his birthday with a a little gift for him. They came at just the right time to enjoy some cake and sing the birthday song.

We are really thankful for Asher. He is a little guy who brings smiles to our faces when we need it. He is the most cuddly of our three and I eat that up! I’m not sure if it’s because he’s our 3rd, but we are truly enjoying watching him grow and it’s so fun to see our oldest two really excited about experiencing new things through his eyes.

Happy Birthday Little Guy!

At the end of our time with the Nelson’s, my friend Kirsten and I laughed about our conversation that we’d had at Chick-fil-a in the early fall of last year. That day, Kirsten asked me if I’d thought about where we were going to live next because at that point, we’d begun purging all of our stuff and had reached our funding goal to apply for visas. Shortly into that conversation, she invited our family to live in their basement until we left for Austria. We were both really excited about the idea but thought we should maybe pray about it and run it by our husbands first. Thankfully all parties agreed and shortly after that conversation we moved in fully expecting to leave in 6 or 8 weeks at the longest.  Well…Six months later, we sat and laughed at the reality of the length of time we actually ended up together.

Today, we are in another situation where we are living with a sweet lady from one of the local churches here. She opened her home to us while she was on vacation and unfortunately our permanent space was not ready when she came home. The weekend before she came home we were preparing to make yet another move and we were not looking forward to moving 10 gigantic bags to another temporary space. Over the phone she offered to live in a space above her home and let us remain in her house because she thought it would be more comfortable for us. Amazing right??!! We told her we were prepared to move to a hotel and she insisted that we stay.   To make a long story short, we’ve ended up sharing the same living space with her- at her request. She did not want our family to have to go to a hotel and she said she was happy to have us until our home was ready. She is recently widowed and is enjoying the noise and life back in her home. The first few days, we were very nervous about how this would all look. I mean, we are literally sharing the same bathroom and kitchen and to further complicate things she speaks no English. My mind was racing with questions about the logistics of everything but she has gifted our family amazingly with nothing but kindness and grace. We’ve shared many meals together and Ian and I often laugh thinking about how funny it must look to her the way that we do things or the foods that we eat.

Both of these stops have been necessary for our family. With the Nelson’s we learned so many practical things about true community, raising children, marriage, friendship and the logistics of running a home well. Here with Frau T, we have learned about how to manage a home here in Germany. For example, what do you do with mushy left over cereal in a country that recycles everything (more on that later) or how do you handle doing laundry and drying clothes when washing machine cycles take well over an hour and you are hard pressed to find a dryer in anyone’s home.

But, the real lessons we’ve learned are deeper and richer than housing logistics.  In both situations we’ve been faced with difficulties as well, and I’m sure our hosts would agree, but we’ve learned that left to our own devices we would always choose the easier route. Knowing in advance what a circumstance may look like or how long it will last would deter us from that decision. In these cases, we would have missed out on all that God wanted to teach us. We would have missed the chances to really live out true community to really be authentic and to be vulnerable.

God is continually teaching us to be thankful for His provision for our family because we’ve seen that what He has in mind for us comes in packages that we don’t expect. When we open ourselves up to that idea alone, the benefits have always been greater than we could have imagined.

This post is mainly a reminder as we will inevitably face difficult situations with schools, in churches and just in normal life here. God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. This past year has come with twists and turns that we would have never expected, but the gifts that have been given to us, both tangible and intangible have come as a result of being placed in often uncomfortable situations that require dependency on Him.