Turning a Page

Packing packing and more packing! On Saturday Heather, Elise and I are headed out to Boise for our final training with MAF. This time we are there for two months. At the end of our time there, we will have a baby! Elise is getting pretty excited about the arrival of Baby Brother. His due date is April 27th. She is beginning to talk more and more about him. It will be a fun day when we get to introduce her to him! So packing is a little bit more of a chore this time thinking about what to pack for two months, and for baby brother's arrival.

What's the training this time, you might ask? This is the major pre field training called technical standardization. That means they are bringing me up to speed on the way MAF operates overseas, both in flight and maintenance. We will begin with ground school. Then we will move into working and practicing in the maintenance shop. Lastly we will do the flight training, culminating in a week of practicing on back country airstrips in the mountains of Idaho. I am very excited to get back into "aviation mode"!


Here's a batch of recent pictures, including the latest "belly shot," the obligatory cute pics of Elise and her antics, and a few shots of my time out in Spokane a few weeks back training at the Spokane Turbine Center.




Elise was showing off her new moves the other night.



She was in the party mood because we were celebrating the birthday of Mads, our foreign exchange student from Denmark.



We would like to share a quick "timeline" for friends and family who would like to know. It's getting simpler from here on out. We will be out in Idaho training with MAF and staying until the birth of Baby Brother, then hopefully in the first or second week of May returning here to Missouri until we head to language school in Indonesia. If our support is at 100 percent and our visas have gone through, we hope to depart in July!

While I was away....

What were Heather and Elise up to while I was in Spokane the last two weeks?

A fan of my own blog...90%!

Today I found myself appreciating our blog in a whole new way. Today was my first full day away from Heather and Elise, and I miss them like crazy! I found myself visiting this blog to see pictures and to watch videos of Elise, appreciating those videos and pictures like never before.

I am going to be here in Spokane Washington the next two weeks learning how to operate and maintain the turbine engine mounted on MAF's Cessna Caravans and Quest Kodiaks. What type of engine, you aviation enthusiasts might ask? The Pratt and Whitney PT6. Here's two of them from the classroom today.

Exciting eh? I actually think it is. These are amazing little machines and they give a Kodiak aircraft 750 horsepower. MAF in Indonesia plans to have all Kodiaks and Caravans (pt6 airplanes) within three to five years, so this training will be very handy. So there is a special training facility here called Spokane Turbine Center, which was created a few years ago to provide training in turbine aircraft (specifically the Kodiak) for people like me who are headed to missions to use the training. The Kodiak aircraft has been a dream of the mission aviation world for the last decade, and it is really neat to be out here and see it in full swing. Today I walked out to the hangar and saw three Kodiaks. Here's two of them.

The yellow one belongs to Spokane Turbine Center, and they do flight trainiing with it.

Then there was this really cool one on "amphibs" or floats that also have wheels that pop out in case you want to land on concrete. I was amazed at how tall this one was.

What's the big deal about this airplane? Check out my post from a couple years ago if you'd like to read more.

During one of our conversations today Heather told me the news that we've reached 90 percent of our monthly support! Our one-time support is already past 100 percent. How exciting! It feels like we're really on the home stretch and....like with the Kodiak....it's neat to see the "dream come to reality." It is awesome to see the Lord provide every step along the way and now things are coming together for the next step!

Little learning machine

Yesterday out of nowhere Elise is all of a sudden going through the WHOLE abc song. I haven't heard her say but the first few letters before. Where does she get this stuff!

These next pictures are from the last few weeks...

And these next ones are of Elise's birthday on December11....