Christmas Eve morning

It's been a busy week so far, with lots of new things.

Sunday night we added Chester to our household for a couple of weeks. He's a cute and well tempered dog that we're watching for a family who is in the U.S. for Christmas. He's quickly made himself part of the family.

Monday we added Deanna, a high school sophomore from New Jersey. She was here last summer with her mom and a school group. We've known her family for several years now. It's interesting to see the contacts and circumstances that lead to some of the helpers that we are privileged to receive. There is no way that I would have made the sort of trip that Deanna has made, especially over the Christmas holidays. But I guess she's part of a younger generation that is much more traveled and world focused than mine was. She wants to study French at university and possibly be a translator for the U.N. someday. I admire her vision and goals. Yesterday (Tuesday) she helped me with grocery shopping in the morning, then helped with our first of three Christmas cookie baking events in the afternoon.

For the cookie event, we ended up with 4 children (all girls) besides our 3 kids. This was a good number for the first one, as it helped us review the whole process of making dough, rolling it out and cutting it into shapes, baking them, decorating them with different colored icing, and then eating or saving them to take home.

One of our desires is to get to know the children, as well as their families. 2 of the girls were classmates of our elder daughter. We already knew their families from birthday parties and other events. The other 2 were sisters, one of whom is in our son's class.

We got to talk some with the mother of the sisters. We learned that their family had their firstborn daughter die very quickly from a brain tumor at age 2 1/2, just before their 2nd daughter (our son's classmate) was born. She told us of a support group for parents who had lost children that she is part of. She also indicated a believer, although we didn't get into a theological discussion. But in thinking about this, I was reminded of the prophet Elijah, when God told him that there were 7,000 others who hadn't bowed to Baal. I wonder if there are other believers like her in our son's school. That would be a great thing and I hope that God allows us to find out.

Today will probably be a calmer day. Tomorrow we're expecting at least 5 guests for Christmas supper, with possibly more.