Chick chick chick chick chicken!

Some family photos taken by our friend Emma when we visited her and her husband Ben near Oxford this week. Simon is fascinated with animals, and after making friends with these chickens he was very excited to be able to stroke a cat the same day when we visited another friend, Ros, in Oxford.

And we very much enjoyed our 24 hours in Oxfordshire spending time with friends we hadn't seen for a while! There's nothing like catching up face-to-face!

Wintery awakening

(Thanks, Marc, for braving the cold to go out and take these photos!)

Ahhh...

… I am now in holiday mode! I noticed almost as soon as we got to my parents’ – suddenly I felt lethargic and unmotivated to do all the things I had thought it would be useful to do during our holidays. The hours slipped past like honey on a knife … slowly but easily.

However, no one seems to have explained to Simon about Holiday Mode, and he is as full of beans as ever. The weather – high winds with snow showers – hasn’t exactly made for ideal playing-outside conditions, so he’s been running up and down Grandmum and Grandad’s living room to shouts of “No! Not the DVD player!” “No! Don’t eat the flowers!” “Leave the books alone!”

We did manage to play outside for a while yesterday though, and Simon didn’t even seem to mind being blown off his feet a few times. Apparently that was what had happened to this daffodil too!

against all odds

I have been reflecting recently on trust in God and what that means. Yesterday I read Isaiah 36, which tells the story of a desperate situation that King Hezekiah found himself in. Sennacherib, the King of Assyria, had captured over forty towns in Judah, and now his men were standing outside the walls of Jerusalem, mocking Hezekiah’s faith in his God. In human terms Hezekiah had reason to despair. Sennacherib had the might and the patience to besiege Jerusalem and there were no obvious grounds for hope. I had to wonder whether I would have managed to trust God in that situation.

This reminded me of a question we had to discuss in our tutor group recently. We had to imagine that we were smuggling Bibles in the roof of a camper van. Stopped at a border post, the guard inspects the vehicle, and just as he is about to step out he knocks the roof of the van and asks what is up there. We had to decide how we would answer – or to be precise, how we hope we would answer, since it’s difficult to know how we would really react in such a tense situation! After a lot of reflection, I decided that I hoped I’d tell the truth. I couldn’t feel comfortable with lying, even in God’s service, and I think it would be a way of showing I totally trusted Him to deal with the situation. After all, I have heard stories of amazing things happening when people smuggle Bibles – border guards not seeing things that are right in front of their eyes, or being interested in the Gospel and so taking a Bible and letting the vehicle through.

However, when we had to imagine that someone in our party had a gun against their head when the question was asked, I did find it more difficult to answer. It doesn’t change my argument, everything I thought is still true … but would I trust God when the stakes were higher? I think it’s impossible to know before you actually find yourself in such a situation, and if I was ever to face such a challenge, I pray that God would give me the grace and the faith to act as He wanted me to.

Both the Bible and the Assyrian annals record that Sennacherib retreated and didn’t attack Jerusalem … and God says to Hezekiah, through Isaiah, that it is because (without knowing it) the Assyrian king is just an instrument in His hands. Which raises other questions that I’m not going to go into now, but does also show us how God, in His sovereignty, always sees a bigger picture than us!

we've finally persuaded Simon...

... not to throw his food on the floor when he doesn't want it

communicative competence?

“Ghee! Ghee!” Simon shouted enthusiastically as I reached for the packet of Cheddar at tea this evening.

I keep thinking that I should keep a record of the things Simon is learning to say. There are some that he’s been saying for a while, namely “Mum”, “Papa”, “boo”, “tick tock”, “no”, “hello” … though not all with their conventional meanings! Then there are others that have been coming into circulation recently…

As I have already mentioned, he started repeating “no!” after us, but he now has a French-sounding “no” (or “non”) and an English-sounding one which is accompanied by his finger on his nose, and actually means “nose”!

I’ve also realised how often I encourage him by saying, “Yeh?”, as it has become one of his favourite words … and I like it better than “no!”.

He will now point to something he wants and say “dat!”. If he just wants to show something, for a while he was saying something that sounded like “look”, but it now seems to have been replaced by “dere”.

He’s been saying “nana” for “banana” for a while, but when I tried to teach him apple he liked the word so much that he wanders round saying constantly, “aaaa-bull …. aaaa-bull … aaaa-bull”. With a lot of encouragement we managed to get him to try out one of my sisters’ names – “aaaa-li”.

And he’s started to sign “thank-you”, which I’m happy about even if I’m quite sure he doesn’t know what it really means! (We haven’t done much baby-signing, but I thought “thank-you” would be a good one to know!)

He is also good at other non-verbal communication. At lunchtime he was melting hearts by smiling and blowing kisses at Seda, Loes and Suzanne.