Life so far . . .

Wow, we can't believe it is November. Did you know that since we are in the southern hemisphere all of our seasons are opposite from yours?  It's fall by you, going into winter.  Here it is spring going into summer.  It's so weird to have a warm Christmas!  Instead of hot cocoa we will be having chocolate milk. And instead of snow angels, I don't know, maybe we'll just thinking of something else. Hee hee.  Let's catch you up since we last wrote:

AJ had her birthday just 4 days after we moved in. She is now 7.

Our super fun Landy is so much fun! We can sit on the top of it or peak out the top like Savannah is in this picture.  When we go to game reserves we can see all kinds of animals, it is SO fun!

Here is what Savannah saw through the top of the roof :)

We couldn't find orange pumpkins but we found these bluish greenish ones! Halloween is like a bad word here, so none of the Christians celebrate it.  But we found a shopping mall an hour away that had trick or treating at the stores.  For treats, they handed out hard candy, not nearly as fun as all the delicious chocolates we used to get in the states but we were glad we got to dress up and have fun!

This is our backyard. We love our fun fort! After not having a backyard last year we LOVE that God gave us a super huge ginormous backyard!

This is hut is in our backyard.  Mom and Dad want to fix it up for a little guest room.  We like to play in there for now.

Here is our school room. This is Chloe's preschool corner.

Another view of the school room :)

In Asia, there were no libraries so we had to order lots of books. We love having so many books because we love to read.  Soon we are going to visit the library here in Pretoria.

This is Savannah and Chloe's room.

This is AJ's room.

This is called a Lapa, it's in our backyard too.  We will get a table and chairs to put under it and have fun barbeques.

Here we are at the government building in Pretoria.

These are our friends!  Their Dad and Mom work for Cru too. They are South African. They always go around with no shoes like most South African kids.  Sometimes we like to do that too! We really like these friends!

We even went to the circus with them. It was so fun!

We started AWANA a couple weeks ago.  Tanner is our American friend, his parents work with our Mom and Dad. We are glad he is here!

This is Miss Kacy and Given. They stayed with us for a few days. We loved Given, he is so cute!

This is our Terra Cotta Warrior from Asia. We like to decorate him for the holidays :)  This is what he looked like for Thanksgiving.

Yesterday we started to decorate for Christmas. Here Chloe and AJ are helping Dad put up our new tree.

In Africa there are lots of languages. There are 11 languages in South Africa and most people know 3 to even 10 of these languages!  We are learning Afrikaans and Zulu.  This video shows Savannah and AJ counting to 10 in both languages.  Chloe was too shy.  But she walks around the house and says, "yisishagalombili" (the number 8 in Zulu) and all kinds of funny things!

Moving to Africa hasn't been easy, but now we really like it.  Mom and Dad even found a church that we really like.  On Friday nights they have a thing called J.A.M. it stands for Jesus And Me.  It's so fun! We play games and act out Bible stories and have cookies and juice.  They are ending their school year in a couple weeks so it won't meet for awhile after next week.  Next week is a water party!  Oh! Want to hear some funny sayings?  When we got to J.A.M last week, they were playing "touches".  Daddy told us that was the same as "tag". And instead of saying your "it" they say your "on". The funniest thing so far is that they call swimsuits "costumes". So we are supposed to bring our costumes to the water party next week.

Well, that's all for now. Remember we love you and we are so glad you are our friends!

Love,

Savannah

AJ

Chloe