Happy New Year [and our new contact information]

Hello everyone!! Happy New Year to one and all!! Needless to say, Rob and I are very excited about what 2009 will bring for us as we move on to Red Deer. I have so much to write about and yet I have so little time and no way to add pictures, so I will be writing a lot once we are settled out in Red Deer. :-)

Our new contact information is as follows:

Our home info:

716 Lancaster Drive

Red Deer, AB

T4R 2V6

CANADA

We have chosen not to have land lines at this time so:

Andrea cell: 403-877-2033

Rob cell: 403-877-2202

Our e-mail will be staying tannahills@charter.net until Jan. 30th in order to give us time to get our new Canadian service up and running so I will post that address once I have it.

For any of you that may want to get a hold of Rob at the church, the info is:

CrossRoads Church

38105 Range Road 275

Red Deer, AB

T4S 2N4

The phone number at the church is: 403-347-6425

We don't have an official e-mail address for Rob at the church yet, so check the web site and watch for them to get that up and running. The web site is:

www.crossroadschurch.ca

I talked with my new boss in the ER today and she wants me to do some orientation days on January 8th and 9th since these orientation days won't be available again until April! So, it looks like I will be off and running right away!! I'm hoping to negotiate some extra time off the following week as Rob is scheduled to start work on January 12th and I think that we will need a few days to settle in with school and daycare without both Rob and I at work as well.

Well, that's all of the information that I have for now. We are very excited to get out to Red Deer and start this new chapter of our life. Please pray that the 3 day drive out West goes smoothly and safely. I will blog as soon as we get everything set up out there and I will update you on how all the travelling went.

Take care and I will write again in 2009.

An Update

I just wanted to write a little update. We had a wonderful time in Red Deer. The people are very warm and friendly and we were treated like a king and queen. Rob has officially been offered the job as Young Adults Pastor at CrossRoads Church in Red Deer. We have already officially accepted and we have a tenative start date of January 5th 2009. HOORAY!!! That is still tentative due to some issues we are still working through on housing, so once we know when we can get into a home, we will know when we can officially start.

I had a great interview with the manager of the ER at the Red Deer Hospital but I will still be talking with the manager of the Neuromedical Unit just to be sure that she doesn't have something I would be more interested in doing.

So overall, everything is going great. Seth is having a bit of an adjustment and has asked to "go home" a few times but so far so good.

We are wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Once we are settled, I will post all of our new contact info.

Thanks for all of your love and prayers.

Merry Christmas

Well, the POD is in the driveway being loaded and the final things are being packed up [including the computer in the next few minutes], so I am writing our final blog from Fond du Lac. I will try to post some pics from Red Deer and from our family time in Ontario.

I love this picture of Spencer that Rob took this week. I was so excited to share it here on the blog. As I said earlier, Christmas is my favorite time of year. Time with family and friends celebrating the birth of Jesus is for me the highlight of my year. Rob's mom just told us that she has bought tickets for Rob and I to join them at Handel's Messiah. That is also one of my favorite things to do, so on Dec. 20th Rob and I will be listening to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra play and the Mendelson Choir sing out scripture about the birth of Jesus and how He will save all mankind. For me, it is a little snapshot of what heaven will be like with the angels singing about the greatness of God.

We wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Packing Assistant

Well, as you all know, we are a flurry of packing here. The baby has decided that the best way for her to help is to sit in each box before you get the chance to get anything into it. If you set up two boxes [which I tried so she could play in one while I loaded the other] she goes from one to the other. So, whichever one you focus your attention on gets a big Spencer Grace sitting in it. :-) I really had forgotten what it is like to have a toddler. She is so much fun. She is really getting a sense of humor and she has us all laughing with her and at her a lot of the time.

Let it snow...let it snow...let it snow

I have to say that I really like winter. I especially like winter in December. Snow makes me feel like Christmas is right around the corner and Christmas is my absolute favorite time of year! It has been snowing a lot over the last few days in Wisconsin. In fact, as I sit here blogging this morning, it is again steadily snowing. I wanted to share some of these pictures that I snuck out one morning to take. For me, there are few things as beautiful as the world around me with fresh snow on it.

On the Road Again...

I'm sorry that it has taken so long for me to post something here. Our life in the last few weeks has been a flurry of activity. Rob has been talking with a wonderful church in Canada for a very long time. We have been sending and receiving e-mails, having phone interviews and web cam inteviews etc. They have wanted Rob to go for his final interview since June...that's right...I said June. Due to delay after delay with our US visa renewal process this year, he has not been able to go for that interview. Let me be clear, Rob can go to Canada at any time, however, his being able to return to us here in Wisconsin was what we have been unsure of. While it would be manageble to have Rob take a few days away to do his interview...having him unable to come back while I work close to full time on the night shift, manage 4 kids, pack a house and set up a move was just more than I could even think about doing on my own. So we have been sitting here completing form after form for INS thinking that at any time we would be approved and go forward. That has not happened. We just received another request for additional forms from INS just two weeks ago.

We have decided [after a lot of prayer and discussion] to end our petition for our visa renewal, and return to Canada so that Rob can do his final interview at CrossRoads Church. When Rob and I sat down about 10 months ago as our last potential ministry opportunity was going up in smoke, I had Rob list out for me what his dream job would be. Well, I have to say, that CrossRoads offers Rob each thing on that list!! They have been so patient waiting for us to work out our issues with INS, but it has gotten to the point that we have absolutely no idea when we would be able to go for this interview [we have been working on this renewal for almost an entire year!] Two years without work is a very long time for anyone, but it has been especially long for Rob and when you have your dream job sitting there in front of you, it gets to the point that you have to trust God and do what He is directing you to do even if it seems foolish and illogical.

So, we are heading back to Canada so that Rob can do this final interview and we are trusting God that we will be moving to Alberta for Rob to join the pastoral team at CrossRoads Church in Red Deer, Alberta in 2009. We will be leaving Wisconsin on Thursday December 11th and going to stay with our loving, kind and very long-suffering parents. [A special thanks to both sets of our parents for being willing to have our chaos descend upon them! :-) ] From Toronto, we will be flying to Red Deer on the 13th for Rob's interview and a few interviews for me at the hospital in Red Deer. By the end of that week, we are hoping to officially know if that is where God has finally opened the door for us to serve.

Please keep us in your prayers as we go down this road. Doing something in faith like this when you have 4 children is very scary indeed. But, God has been with us for the last 2 years. He has always met our needs and we know that He loves us and has a plan for us. I hope that we can see many of you here in Wisconsin before the move, but if that is not possible due to time constraints, please know that we love you and it has been our pleasure to share the last 6 years with you here in Fond du Lac. We will never forget you!! For our Canadian friends and family, we are looking forward to a wonderful Christmas with our fabulous family and are hoping to see many of you in Ontario before we are hopefully making the long move to Alberta for Rob to start his job.

I love this picture of the baby that I took the other night. We have been so busy sorting, organizing and packing that we have all been very tired. We have gotten rid of a lot of the bigger things that we aren't moving and we moved our lawn furniture into the living room to have somewhere to sit until the move. The kids think that we should have made that change long ago. :-) This picture completely sums up how I have felt over the last two weeks....

Halloween

I have to say that Halloween is my very least favorite of the seasonal holidays. I have issues with it and for many years we didn't celebrate it at all. Then we sent the kids to Harvest parties at whatever church we were serving at. The last two years, we have allowed the kids to trick or treat in our neighborhood with Rob. Fond du Lac does not celebrate Halloween with great enthusiasm. They only allow trick or treating on the Sunday before Halloween between the hours of 3:00 -5:30 pm. This is due to a child abduction with a very terrible outcome on Halloween night about 20 years ago. On that happy note, here is our brief selection of Halloween pictures from the last week. I'm sorry they're late. It's a combination of not really liking Halloween and being very, very, very busy here.

Here they are...the Wizard, the Fireman and the Queen.

I really liked this choice for a Jack O' Lantern. Jonah drew the bat and the ghost on paper and then Rob transferred the design onto the pumpkin. I think it came out really nice.

Here's the glowing Jack O' Lantern that was on the front step. Seth wanted a straight forward simple design. :-)