Half way round the world we are, and yet the arrival of a small six pound boy has made much more than a ripple in our river this week. We feel the joy with the arrival of grandchild the fifth almost as much as that reflected in the eyes of his older sister Acadia, so well captured in the image MB posted of Acadia. So interconnected we are! This must no doubt lead to a poem somewhere, though I'm not quite sure where. But here we are exactly 12 time zones away sleeping soundly when the clock struck 11:47 on Thursday July 9th and this Finn-egan entered the history books officially, and it couldn't have been more meaningful and real than if we were hanging from the delivery room light fixtures. We have little doubt too that our being here brought an extra measure of divine assistance to ensure the outcome and process worked as smoothly as possible for both mother, babe and father. We've lost track in counting such blessings already!
The other big event of this week was the official launch of Happy Family Class!
note from MB: No, the cards were not in English. This was just a first mock-up.
This is none other than the "Strengthening Family" and "Strengthening Marriage" classes content so nicely put together by LDS Family Services and taught elsewhere by either professional counselors, or able stake-based volunteers. While we were just beginning to approach the challenges of our children, such a class was a great help in developing a sensible and effective approach to our parenting. Though perhaps most importantly, it facilitated discussion between us that also unified our approach and prevented many problems. Mary Bliss quickly recognized the need for such help when one of the members of the congregation, living with his wife and two year old daughter under the same roof as his parents, as is common here, broached the topic of contrasting styles of teaching and instructing their daughter being applied during the day (by grandma) or the evenings (by him or his wife.) The class got a reasonable turnout for a first event of this type in a congregation with relatively few families, and our invitation to community members also brought in a few new people as well.
The class has me scrambling to develop the vocabulary to deal with a host of new situations that I don't usually talk about, though that is good for my language development-- urgency, need, and application all together. It also opened the opportunity for our friend Sister Huong to assist with two way translation for Mary Bliss' major contributions to the class. Truth be told, her stories were much more effective in translation than my 4th grade description of parenting styles and family governance. So sometimes I just wrote on the white board while she entertained the class with another "tale from the WInterport woods" or even further back, a legendary story from her growing up in Woodside.
We are enthusiastically eager for this class to continue and suspect it will be a great way to bless the lives of generations to come, particularly as so many of the participants are young, even a few who are still single.
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