Trip to Madrid

We are so grateful to have loving grandparents who look after Jess and Sam, Scott's parents had Jess and Sam for a few days allowing us to grab an easy jet bargain and fly to Madrid and practice our Peruvian spanish, people could understand us most of the time!
How exciting to see spring blossoms and sit in an outdoor cafe after the cold snow in Scotland the week before! We enjoyed the spanish food, architecture, museums and art galleries and had a lovely break. Now we are gearing up to go back to Cusco saying our final goodbyes, clearing our stuff out of Anjanette's parents garage and organising our packing . Feb 28th is the BMS World Mission day of prayer, please pray for the work BMS is involved in all over the world and please remember us in prayer as we start our long journey back to Cusco then too! We will arrive in Cusco on March 1st , then Jess and Sam have their first day of the new school year on March the 2nd !

Scottish snow in February

We have spent the last few days in a hotel in Pitlochry,Perthshire. It was lovely to spend a few days away as a family and the scenery was spectacular since it snowed while we were there! Sometimes we feel that as missionaries our children miss out on normal activities and life experiences that most children in the UK have (and we know that their lives are also enriched by other experiences that UK children would never be exposed to!) One such experience is learning to swim,the swimming facilities in Cusco are not very good so we hoped that during our few days away that Samuel's swimming skills would improve if we spent some time in the hotel pool . Samuel loved the water and for the first time ever he became much more confident managing to take a few strokes unaided which we are delighted about and will be working on in the next few weeks.

photos of our Scotland trip

dressing up in Victorian outfits with Nanny



dressing up with the bagpipes!




photographed with our new friend the Piper



Jess, Sam and their Great Granny



Visiting the Discovery ship in Dundee

Jessica writes about the aquarium

Scotland:
In Scotland we went to Nanny and Grandad's house. The next day we went to an aquarium, we saw a shark her name was Tiana. Tiana was the biggest fish in the aquarium.I met a bearded dragon called Fin,he had lots of spikes but they were very soft. Me and Sam held him but he ran from Sam's hand , he was yellow.

Bonnie Scotland

Here we are north of the border, it is good to be back in Scotland.
We are having precious family time staying with Scott's parents and this weekend we enjoyed our last link church visit. Our only link church in Scotland is Cupar Baptist church and what a treat they had in store for us! This weekend we were invited to their Scottish evening, we feasted on haggis, stovies, scottish trifle and tablet. We listened to scottish music and poetry and we also had an opportunity to share about our work in Cusco. Cupar have been fantastic at keeping in touch with us and supporting us and it was wonderful to spend time together again.It will be impossible to forget Cupar since they presented Jess and sam with a battery operated bag pipes toy!!
We have enjoyed our link visits immensely, we have spent 12 weekends visiting 20 different churches and now that we have completed our busy tour of our the UK churches we look forward to some much needed rest and relaxation.

Searching questions

Generally our link visits consist of speaking engagements at our supporting churches, however a few have involved schools work when we are visiting a church that has close links with schools.
This week as we visited Vale Community Church in Bedfordshire we also visited 2 primary schools that the church works with.
In each school we took 1 class room session and 1 assembly, we did a geography/spanish language class and the children had spent some time in advance thinking of questions for us. Jess and Sam made new friends and played in the playground at playtime, Anjanette felt a little in awe of the fact that for the first time in her life she entered "The staff room!" For the first time in many years we all enjoyed school dinners!
Jess and Sam thoroughly enjoyed the time in schools, as it was interesting for the british children to discover about life in Peru it was interesting for Jess and Sam to experience life in a british school. We had some wonderful questions from the children, one was very concerned that since we lived at such high altitude closer to space then didn't we need space suits like spacemen? But the favourite and most honest searching question of the day was "Why are you here?"

Sam's new glasses

Sam is looking very handsome in his new specs, he needed quite a strong prescription (long sighted) and we are delighted that now he will be able to see much better!
There is so much excitement that Jessica even handwrote her own entry for the blog for the occasion!