Thailand Here We... Are!

Well, we are here!  All the preparing, all the prayers, all the traveling, and we finally made it!  It's still a little hard to believe.  I know, we have been here for over a week now, you would think it has all sunk in, and well, it hasn't.  I'm not so sure it will until we are able to live our daily lives again, until we find a house to call home, until we have a more regular schedule.  Right now we are transitioning.  And tomorrow we will begin a month of training.  Training with the organization we have come here with.  Learning about the culture, meeting people within the organization, learning how to live daily life here, etc.  They do this with all the new people coming to SE Asia, we are excited to be a part of the team. To be a part of bringing the gospel to this side of the world.
For now we are staying at a retreat center as we get over jet lag and begin to start getting the basics done of establishing yourselves in a new location.  We are thankful that we have had some great progress in our search for a car and have found one! We are just waiting for it to arrive (its coming from Bangkok) and checked out, but we should have it soon!  We have also been to quite a few stores learning where to shop and what kinds of things we are (and are not) able to get here.
Our kids are doing well.  The first week of jet lag with a 2 year old and a 4 year old are, well, rough, to say the least.  There was a lot of waking in the middle of the night, a lot of crying, and a lot of eating breakfast at 4 am, but thankfully, I think they are finally almost over it.  We have actually gotten both of them to sleep through the night, well, once so far, but it was glorious and hope to have more sleeping through the night in the near future.  Our goal was to get everyone over jet lag before we starting CLI (Cultural Learning Institute), and I think we will reach that goal.  Or at least be close enough.
Our finances are well, what they are.  We are still lacking about $700 a month, which is a stretch to say the least.  We are really trying to trust God with our finances and that God would place us on the right people's hearts at the right times as we continue to do His work here.  It's all God's money anyway.  We truly believe that He will provide each month, though our human eyes have a hard time seeing.  I know He is faithful.  There is something about trusting God for your EVERY need, and not being dependent on yourself that well, brings faith to a whole new level, and, it's hard.  It's hard to not just depend on that paycheck we got very regularly when Rob was working for a contractor.  It's hard to have no clue how much money you will have to live off of each month.  Not really sure how to budget for a budget that fluctuates so much.  I guess we will figure that out.  There are seasoned missionaries that continue to affirm to us of God's provision over and over again.  Their faith is so obvious, I can only pray to have faith like that one day.  I guess that's the journey I'm on now.  There's no way I can have that kind of faith without the journey.]
Well, here are a few pics of our travels thus far...

 Good bye New Orleans!  Here we are checking in all our luggage at the New Orleans airport!

 The kids loved riding on the airplanes (all 4 of them it took us to get here!)

 We had an overnight layover in Seatlle and when we arrived we got our luggage back and one of the duffle bags had ripped and had a very large hole!  So, we duct taped it up and shipped it off to Thailand!

 Our kids with pretty much all our earthly possessions in just 10 bags! Phew..

 Our layover in Korea! One more plane to Thailand!

 And this pretty much sums up our jet lag experience. This is us the evening of our first day here.  we were a little tired to say the least!

 After staying with family for a few days, we came to a retreat center for people in ministry and have been staying here while we get over jet lag!

 Rob's first time driving here!  He's a natural!

 Here we are at a mall here.  It is normal for someone to parallel park behind you but they are suppose to leave it in neutral so you can just move the car out of the way to back up, well the people who parked behind us must have forgot.  So they had to jack the car up and push it out of the way!  It was a 45 min ordeal!

They love tigers here!