A City Life For Me

There’s not much new going on in the Hamilton household.  We are still living in Upstate NY (Orange County, about an hour north of the Bronx) while we wait on our house purchase to be completed.  We DID make a lot of progress on that this week, and now we are just waiting for the seller’s bank to grant an approval for the short sale.  To prepare for moving, we started packing up some of the extra stuff we have accumulated while the rest of our life is in the storage unit.  We are still plugging along in school.  I started teaching Elaine piano, though it’s been hard to be faithful in lesson and practice times.  We’re still working on that.  We also enjoyed a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.  It’s one of the museums that is “suggested donation” so it’s more economical for a big family to go.  I made a scavenger hunt booklet for the kids to keep their interest.  It worked up until the end, when the fact...

After the birthday celebration, Ben’s parents took the big kids home for the weekend and Ben and I had an “alone” weekend with Henry.  It’s been…too long.  We went away for our five year anniversary (3.5 years ago), and we had a week of orientation for the mission board.  We took the opportunity to visit the 9/11 Museum.  I have been wanting to go for a while, and this was our opportunity to go on the cheap!  We arrived at 6 p.m., and the average visit takes two hours.  I could have spent an extra two hours, but the museum needed to close.  I was very impressed with the Museum.  It is VERY well done.  Though I was not personally affected by the tragedy in 2001 as so many of my NYC friends were, I was still touched and affected as an American.  The museum not only had many artifacts and treasures to remember the Twin Towers and the people who were there that day in the tragedy of 9/11, but it did an excellent job remembering the lost li...

One of our supporting churches in Ohio is Kings Mills Baptist Church near Cincinnati.  Last year Ben and I stopped by to present our ministry after the BWM Orientation Seminar in April.  This year we got a call a few weeks ago asking us to be a part of their mission’s conference, since someone else wasn’t able to come.  We agreed, as long as we could miss the Sunday services (we already had a meeting scheduled). We enjoyed each evening service.  The music was wonderful and we enjoyed the other missionaries in the conference.  I felt refreshed, and it was so nice to have familiar people come up to speak to us at the table after the services.  We talked for quite a while after each evening service! This conference was also full of surprises for us!  Each evening Ben and I had to introduce ourselves during the service and present either a need or a want.  We feel so blessed and in need of very little…we really struggled to come up with things to sh...