Easter

We're sorry that we haven't written anything in so long. Our year has been flying by, and we've all been busy with school and life, but we do want to post more often. We have several blog posts in mind, but we'll start with one about Easter this year.

Brown eggs make for beautiful colors.

Looking for eggs in the morning!

Ainsley was a bit excited. And that hair!

Cecily loved finding eggs.

Opening Easter presents!

Making Resurrection Cookies--a fun and meaningful tradition that our friends introduced us to.

As expats living far away from our families, holidays can be difficult. We're so used to our own family traditions and ways of celebrating certain holidays, but living far away removes the comfort of those traditions and can make you feel incredibly lonely for your family. This isn't a bad thing. It's not bad to miss people who are special to you. It's normal to want to be with people who are important to you, and holidays can serve to magnify those desires. However, we don't want missing our families to keep us from enjoying the relationships that we are building here in Kenya.

We decided that we wanted to have a big Easter dinner at our house with some close friends—as we put it in the invitation, "Friends who have come to feel like family to us." We invited a Dutch family whose oldest son is in Claire's class, another Rosslyn family with older girls, and Claire's preschool teacher from last year and her new husband (who had a guest and her son staying with them, so they came too).

We gathered in our backyard around a big table with lots of great food, the kids played, and the adults visited. We were there until after dark, just talking and enjoying each other's company.

Without relationships like these, I don't know how we would function here, so far from everybody else that we know and love. But God knew that we need them, and He has been faithful to give us openings to friendships upon, and we are slowly building a Kenyan family. In the movie Finding Forrester, Sean Connery's character says, "Losing family... obliges us to find our family. Not always the family that is our blood, but the family that can became our blood." While we haven't lost our family in the same sense that he is talking about, extended physical separation from family also obliges you to adjust, and to find those people who can become like family. We are happy to have started to find ours here.