Reality and Money

Marae! A little taste of home in Chicago City!

Been thinking a lot lately about ideas for the blog, just haven't put 'pen' to 'paper'. No excuses really, ok maybe this week when a nasty throat bug hit me! All is ok, little white (panadol) and red (ibuprofen) pills came to the rescue! So I thought I would write you all a post on the realities of living with a seminary student. You see you might think judging from my 'lovely' blog posts that all we do here is fun, fun and more fun. Well we do a lot of that but also behind the scenes there is a LOT of hard work. Seminary is NOT for the faint hearted! Please read the post as is, fact/reality, not a whinging/complaining post. 

Let me just tell you about a few of the 'realities' that we face. 

Albert's study hours!
Now to give you a bit of a background here. For those of you who know Albert in real life, you will know that he is extremely focused to the point of it being a weakness. Albert & I and our deputies/session/family knew that this would be an issue coming into seminary which was a HUGE help. See this is where is lovely wife comes in, to help him with the study/family balance. So we made a decision for Albert to have some structured time with the girls. On Monday mornings generally he does language arts (English) with all the girls while I do some errands/shopping. On Thursday afternoon he is taking the devotions and PE at our local home school group. It's worked out brilliantly, his grades haven't even suffered! PHEW!

He still keeps long study hours. He get's up at 4.30am studies to about 6.45, showers, eats, drives to seminary to start at 8am. He gets home again at about 5pm and goes to bed at about 8.30-9pm. During the last couple of weeks of the semester, he only sleeps and eats, just about with studying again after dinner from 7pm to about 9.30-10pm, getting up again at 4.30am! I can cope with exceptions and I know that some of the other students are keeping even crazier hours during those last weeks. The only way Albert has been able to keep normalish hours is because he tries to 'space' out his work over the semester. 

During the last few weeks of the semester just about everything falls onto me, homeschooling, parenting, washing, cooking (7 meals a week), shopping etc. I do it by God's grace and plenty of prayers (THANK YOU!!)

So the 'fun' that you see on this blog here, are the times/opportunities we take when we can. 

By God's grace the girls are thriving and our marriage keeps getting stronger. We try to have regularly date nights. Lately we have been going out with lovely donations people have given us. One lovely couple gave us movie tickets with babysitting for Christmas, what a lovely idea, we enjoyed our night very much!

Money
I know this is just about a taboo subject but I thought I would write a bit about the realities of being a student and 'eating/drinking' someone else's money. We so much appreciate our donors from New Zealand and the fact that we don't have to worry about where our next dollar is coming from is humbling. We can't even begin to 'pay' you back, we'll do our best to pay some of it 'forward'! 

Ok the reality is that living of someone's money can also be a 'burden' that I think twice about each $1 I spend. Thoughts go through my head about what people will think if they see us eating icecream and (bought) pizza again or drinking that beer occasionally or 'catch' us eating at that fastfood restaurant again! Or going/visiting yet another museum or the amount of money I spend on our homeschool curriculum. Now I realize that I'm accountable to our Deacon/session and God ultimately. For the record, our deacon has access to our 'open' book financials, we have nothing to hide but still my 'sin' creeps in. What will people think? 

So a couple of facts regarding me and money. 
I dislike thrift stores, I'm sure I have a phobia (see this is another excellent reason why I can't be a Pastor's wife, I don't like thrift/secondhand store shopping! said very tongue in cheek!!!). You see the reason I don't like them, is that you need to know what a bargain is to start with, because if you don't, then you will get ripped off even at the thrift store. Clothing thrift/secondhand store shopping oh dear, help me! I strongly dislike clothes shopping at the best of time and then for me to do that in a shop where I need to know, what I want, what goes together, reasonably modest and it has to be in my size, HELP!

Note about this though, I see the value in thrift/secondhand store shopping and realise that if you know your prices you could do very well. I have done well getting most of the girls winter gear from there, some appliances, books. Thankfully I have not have had to do any shopping for the girls as most of their clothes I either bought from home or have had donated. I bought a whole lot of clothes for me before we left so again, there is no need to shop here either (although I got some money from my lovely Mom for some new things!). Albert has been the only one that we've had to buy 'work clothes' for suits etc. 

Money and Fun/Extra's Facts.

• Most of the luxury foods, chocolate, pizza, soft drinks, travel foods etc I have got either cheap or free from coupons/sales. I enjoy sharing those with our guests. 
• Fun outings - most of those are petrol/parking fees only 
• Toiletries - very cheap or free, just got Hannah 6 L'Oreal shampoo's and conditioners for $0.64 including tax! Free toothbrush, anyone?
• I use money to make money or to get freebies. For example, I ordered a years supply of contact lenses and got a $50 rebate back by mail. I 'invested' $50 cash into a hardware store and keep 'rolling' my $50 rebates for 'free' things regularly. One of the last freebies from that store was smoked sausages (bought 16 packages for free after the rebate!)
• Rent (our biggest expense every month) - After owning a house for most of our married life, paying rent can 'hurt' me sometimes. So we decided to use our house for HIS service and so we have all sorts of gatherings at our house regularly. It is perfectly suited to have our fellow students over for a potluck meal once a month. Plenty of room to play both in summer (fenced backyard with playground) and a heated/lined basement in winter! 
• People here are SUPER generous, this is not to underestimated. We have been blessed with many gifts and opportunities. So when you read about the fun things that we are doing, most likely we have been given some money for this purpose or we are doing it for free. 
• Compared to private Christian education, our homeschooling curriculum is a drop in the bucket. For someone (me) who loves school, the complete/extremely descriptive homeschool curriculum is priceless!! 
• We actually eat a lot of 'meatless' meals substituting beans instead which we actually love, although meat is always nice :). 

One final fact for you all: It is just simply soo much cheaper to live in the USA!

Reflections!

Meeting Clifford in 'real' life, a highlight for Kate!

WOW, summer is over and it's the first day of 'school' for Albert! It's gone fast. I thought that before I  show you all that we have gotten upto over summer in picture form I would give you my personal reflections on the internship and what I have learned. 

I was privileged to meet so many lovely, lovely people and was able to get to know them a bit better mostly over dinners. I loved the diversity of the church which is something I haven't experienced before, from new Christians to mature Christians, various backgrounds (some very interesting ones), various forms of suffering (a large number of widows) and a newborn baby who survived major heart surgery! We enjoyed countless offers of hospitality in various settings. (I was glad for my electronic calendar on my ipad mini as otherwise I wouldn't be able to keep up with all the offers of hospitality!). 

We enjoyed lots of swimming both at a church members pool and at the YMCA. The girls got really good at swimming, Kate and Zara especially did really well, we are almost at the stage now where all the girls are swimming. On some of the hot, hot days, the outdoor pool felt like a warm bath but being wet did help. 

The weather was VERY hot (90-110F) and humid (often 80-100%). I was surprised on how quickly we did acclimatize. On the very hot days we went to the library, YMCA or hung out in the basement playing the wii and ate lots and lots and lots of icepops. Now being back in Illinois having 73F days seem cold! How funny is that! 

I did manage to complete my year of homeschooling, it was a real struggle for me in the end but we made it. I had hoped in my optimism to start on the new school year and get a few weeks done over summer but with it being that hot and the lounge was not air conditioned, I decided to leave it. I can't do it all! Also the girls went to Vacation Bible School for two weeks over summer, one at another church (the Free Reformed) and one at Pompton Plains Reformed Bible Church. They really enjoyed both those weeks and it was nice for me to have someone else teach them. 

A couple of words of encouragement for you ladies in regard to hospitality. We would have been invited to at least 20 homes over the summer with some lunch and breakfast invites as well. 

• Despite what your may tell yourself, it truly does NOT matter what you serve. We have enjoyed some lovely restaurant type cooking from ladies who were gifted in that area. We also have had some very simple plain meals and some even bought dinner. The idea here is not what is served but the company of the 'saints'! We appreciated the willingness of those people to have us over. A special note for those you are single, YES we were invited by some widows and not just one! 
• A couple of people invited their extended family over as well as us.I really loved the concept as we were there for a short time and so it was nice to be able to meet several people at once. 
• The church family invited us knowing that we were unable to return the honor of having them over for dinner. There were simply too many invites and soo little time. May this be your (my) attitude too, to invite the 'angels' into our house because God commands hospitality instead of with the wrong motives!  

Girls - The girls did VERY well and thrived during the summer. They got very fit from all the walking we did especially in NY (we were too Dutch to pay for the subway), lots of swimming (at least 3-4 times a week) and scootering.

You know when you as a family travel a lot when:

• The girls prefer to sleep in one room together! (Yes even though we had three bedrooms, we only used two!)
• Automatically take a book or something to do in the car without me saying where we are going or how long for.
• Ask you: where are we going for dinner tonight?
• Automatically say their name and age when they meet someone new (this is very cute if I say so myself!)
• Hug people they have never met and thank them once they leave
• Are able to play instantly all sorts of games etc with 'new friends'.
• Your chillybin (cooler for US people) becomes your best friend (apart from the GPS of course!!)
• Happily look at some more airplanes at the third air and space museum that summer (oh dear did I just write that?)
• Happily eat sandwiches on the road for dinner, again!
• They travel for 12 hours straight in the car with not much entertainment and only stop to refuel the car. (On a sad note, I had downloaded quite a few audio books to my ipad mini but sadly overnight the ipad 'cooked' and so I was unable to use it. On a good note, once we got back, we went to the Apple store and they replaced it, no questions asked!)

As a summary, I thoroughly enjoyed the summer and it truly was a working holiday for us. Albert did work a fair amount, but was able to have one day off a week which the church insisted on. I was able to attend ladies bible studies  have some play dates and had a few dates with Albert too! We are also VERY blessed by the church for supporting us financially over the summer. Thanks to the generosity of a few people in the church we were also able to do some 'extra' things over summer, like visiting Wasington DC.