It's All Grace

a journey with the Thomason family

Sunday School Isn’t Just For Kids

One of my favorite sayings is “Never stop learning.” I actually have a print of it next to my desk that Bethany got me. It’s one of those life philosophies that I adhere to and kind of drives me to read, study, and continue to grow in all areas of my life. I realized this morning while sitting in Titus and Avery’s school school class that each and every Sunday here we’re learning. I know we have things like “Sunday School,” but for a foreigner like me it’s more like “Sunday University.” At least, that’s what today felt like and the funny part is we never even made it in to the sanctuary. Here’s four lessons we learned today:

1) Being in the right classroom is a good place to start learning – We got to church this morning and found our way to the kids classrooms. Avery was downstairs and Titus’ was upstairs. Bethany stayed with Avery because she was a little sad and I took Titus to his class. When we got there the kids were sitting at the table during what seemed to be a teaching time (photo above). I put a chair at the end for Titus and the teach asked in Czech what his name was (which I understood!) and also if we spoke Czech (which I also understood!). I did my best to keep Titus focused and listening but after about 10 minutes Titus says to me, “Daddy, this isn’t my class.” Uh oh. I waited a little longer. “Daddy, where’s Beni and Caleb?” Titus asked because they are normally in his class too. Oh no. We better go.

2) Employ family to help in the learning process – Titus and I kindly left the class and went back downstairs to Avery and Bethany. I told Bethany that wasn’t the right class and we decided to switch so I could stay with Avery and she could go with Titus to try and find the right one. As I sat with Avery, they kids were painting little leaves (shown above). As I sat just observing I was picking up Czech phrases like “pro maminku” (“for mommy”) as the kids were finishing their artwork. I figured out was “mám rád” (which I’ve heard a lot) means “I like.” Listening to the teachers speak SIMPLE Czech was so helpful for me to just try and pick up what they are saying. Then I got a text from Bethany: “I found it. Beni’s here.” She means she found the right class and Titus’ friend was there. Whew. That’s like 2 lessons: a) language lesson b) church building geography lesson. Sweet! This must be a 4-credit class. Oh, and those little leaves the kids were painting were put on a piece of paper that read: “The Lord creates colorful leaves.” Yes, He does.

3) You’re never too old for the tiny chairs. – When it comes to learning, you sit in whatever chair is available and in both Titus and Avery’s rooms this morning we were hanging out in tiny chairs. You’ll even see the teacher in the photo above in the small chair. Learning is more important than comfort, I guess. Also, and this is really a bonus, you can be pretty funny from the tiny chairs. Today I had the kids cracking up by making silly faces. Here’s a photo I got of them laughing at me (side note: I also dig the kid in the background feeding another kid a cracker).

4) Have fun after class.- This evening I had plans to take photos for our good friends Zach and Kara. At the castle yesterday I was thinking I’ve gotta go back and do photos there so Zach and Kara were my models today. We had a lot of fun and I was excited that Bethany could come too and see it all for the first time. The weather was incredible today and perfect for enjoying some family time and photos of friends. Here’s a couple photos (captions below each):

Zach and Kara having fun watching Titus try to make them laugh. It worked!

This is Bethany and Avery overlooking our city from the Poland side. It was a little windy, but what a great view today.

Avery’s legs because she’s still so little and cute.

Titus in his natural state…”hanging” out.

A quick shot of the streets of Poland, just inside the border.

That’s all, folks!

October 19, 2014
An Unexpected Walk in Poland

This morning Bethany had plans to be at a baby shower for our friends John and Erin. Their son, Shade, was born about three months ago and some of the missionary women around here decided to through Erin a little shower and bless her. Bethany made a couple breakfast quiche dishes and off she went around 10:30am. I didn’t have any serious plans with the kids until I got a text from Casey who’s house the shower was at, “Hey, what are you doing today? I have to leave my house for 3 hours…do you want to go to the park?” Casey has two boys who are friends with our kids (all of them shown above) so I said, “Sure, let’s meet at 11.”

The park was a bit soggy from rain last night but the kids were having fun. Casey and I were just talking and hanging until he said, “Hey, have you been over to the castle?” “Nope,” I replied, “How far is it?” Casey said we could practically throw a rock to it and said we would really like it. As soon as I told the kids we were going to a castle Avery got really excited and said, “A castle?! Princesses live in castles!” With that kind of excitement we had to go so off we went.

We’ve said before we live on a border town of Czech and Poland–literally on the border. When we left the park we crossed the river and went right into Poland where the castle is. I guess it’s like a castle ruins of sorts with lots of cool structures in a beautiful park-like environment. It was built in the 13th century! It’s all free to walk around in and explore, and apparently you can go to the top of one of the castle towers but it costs so we didn’t do it today. Everything was majestic because of all the leaves on the ground and the kids were having fun dropping leaves in to this huge, I mean huge, dungeon like whole thing. I don’t how to describe it and I don’t have a photo, but when I read the plaque they said it was for prisoners. Let me just tell you…you would not want to be a prisoner in that thing.

Here’s a few photos of the leaves and the one remaining castle tower (of the original 4):

After the castle we decided to walk further into the town square. Our town is a lot like Kansas City in the states, a city that spans two states. In our case it’s two countries. On the Polish side it really feels like Europe. Small streets, little sidewalks, cobblestone, and just a little more charm. Don’t get me wrong, the Czech side is great, but it feels a lot different on the other side of the river. Casey knew of a little place to get food that was kid-friendly so we grabbed lunch right on the town square. Everyone was pretty hungry from all the fun. Here are the kids chomping away.

This is a shot of the town square (below). The kids enjoyed chasing the pigeons around and making noises at them. I’m never sure how we look to the nationals, but I guarantee our kids are the loudest ones around.

Even though we had a great time, there was a lot of walking so by the time we started to head home the kid’s energy was starting to fade. Below is a photo of us heading back towards our house on the Polish side. Shortly after this photo we were walking down some stairs and Avery stepped in doggy doo-doo…and it wasn’t a small amount. I was helping her get it off but she was wearing her Crocs which just spread the mess inside her shoe. A nice Polish lady saw my trying to scrape it all off and offered me her little bag of tissues–it as really kind of her. After a few minutes I got it figured out but Avery was not happy about her foot having doo-doo on it and was sad about it most of the walk home. I was proud of her though because despite all the walking she didn’t really want me to hold her and did it all on her own. When we got home I gave her a bath just to make sure we got her all clean!

Start to finish we were gone for about two and a half hours. We got home around the same time Bethany was getting back from the baby shower. Our kids took a nice long nap this afternoon, but I’m glad we got them outside and the weather was nice enough to walk around. I’m super thankful for Casey showing us around Poland and I’m excited to take Bethany over there at some point. I really don’t have any excuse when we can just walk there!

October 18, 2014
It’s All in a Day’s Work

One of the great pleasures of being part of Josiah Venture is serving with a team that not only loves Jesus a whole, but are a pleasure to work with and are great at what they do. Two of those teammates, John and Daniel, are who I spent the day with today. I spend a lot of days with these guys, but today was just different. Instead of meeting at the Josiah Venture office, we decided to hang out at another house where Daniel is house sitting (Mel and Amy’s house) and we had a lot of fun just being together and being creative. We had a fire going in the house, fresh coffee, and Daniel brought in some fresh croissants for us to munch on.

Our plan today was to really work through some final design work for next year’s camps. The camp design is something that will be seen and used by literally thousands of people, especially young people on flyers, t-shirts, and banners. Camps are such a big part of what Josiah Venture does and every year many young people hear the gospel for the first time and begin to follow Christ. Local churches in 14 countries will use the material that we create to go and invite students to camp where they learn music, English, sports, and always hear the Good News. It’s a joy for our team to create materials that will bless our staff and be used as a tool to eventually bring young people to a place where they hear the gospel.

Back on the home front Titus attended his second day of preschool. It was fun dropping him off again and feeling more comfortable. Like Wednesday, we had no issues and Titus didn’t cry or get upset when we left. However, Bethany was just a few minutes late picking him up today and he was pretty sad. He told me, “Mommy didn’t come so I cried and cried.” I just laughed. She wasn’t THAT late, pal. He also told me the class went for a walk, but outside of that I don’t know what else happened. I’m glad he’s doing good and hopefully starting to adjust. We’ll continue to have him go three days a week for now and reevaluate it at some point.

I did the grocery shopping tonight by myself. Shopping is still a hilarious experience because there’s so much I don’t know. I end up calling Bethany on the phone five or six times asking, “Wait, what does half and half look like? What kind of package does it come in?” “I have no idea where to find cottage cheese.” “How do I know if the grapes are seedless?” Tonight was an ever bigger challenge because when I got to the check out counter the water I was buying broke open on the conveyer belt. The lady said something to me in Czech that I didn’t understand but wasn’t about to continue checking out my groceries so I ran those bottles back and grabbed another set of water and we continued. Then when we were all done there was some issue with the computer and my bank card so the line began to back up and people were not looking at my very happy. In the end we did get it to work, but it took a good five minutes of a lot of card swiping and re-swiping, a lot of Czech I didn’t understand, and multiple employees. My only concern is that I was now charged for the same amount twenty times over. Only time will tell, but until then…goodnight.

October 17, 2014
Email, Pizza, Date

I got an email from our landlord the other day. The subject was “Wash exterior window sills” and the email read,

Hello Mrs. Bethany on Thursday morning ie. Oct. 16. 2014 at home?
You will need to wash again sills and you have a lot of work with children, so I ordered the lady who would at 9.30 pm. Washed it in the apartment.
Greetings to all .Thank you.
Musilová

What a great email. Not only is she very nice in how she words everything, but she paid for a lady to come and wash the window sills for us. I’ve shared before about the window sills, but they are big and there are a lot of them. With everyone not feeling great it’s been hard to get them cleaned. We were so thankful for the kindness of our landlady to do that for us. The only tricky part was the 9:30pm part. I assumed it was AM, and I was actually right, but she came today around 11. No biggie. We were home and she did an awesome job.

For lunch today we decided to get pizza to-go from a local place here in town. To give Bethany a little break, I took the kids with me. It’s a walkable distance, but with Titus and Avery it pretty much doubles the length of time I’m going to be gone. It was raining lightly when we left so I brought umbrellas which quickly turned in to “bumper umbrellas” as the kids kept running in to each other and laughing. The pizza guy speaks great English so I ordered and I told him we would be back in a few minutes and off we went to the bookstore.

I needed to look for some new Czech language books as we are pursuing a new teacher and she goes through different material. I was able to find the books after going through the store two times over. The only problem was they only had 1 set of the books in stock (there are 3 books in the series). When I got the checkout it proved very difficult to communicate that I needed another set. After a few minutes of trying to speak and trying to use my phone to translate I kind of got the gist: I think they needed to order more and would arrive in the future, maybe next week? Another lady in the store overheard me and the clerk trying to communicate and walked up and said, “Do you need help?” in perfect English. Score! I told her I think I know what’s going on but she was able to tell me that they are ordering the books and they will come tomorrow. Ah! “Tomorrow…” — that’s the word I confused as “next week.” Now they know why I need the books.

Tonight we got a babysitter and had a date night. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten away together just Bethany and I, so it was a blessing. We had originally planned to go to dinner with friends but I felt like we just needed some time to ourselves tonight. A girl from our church watch our kids and she was great. Bethany and I went to the mall in Ostrava and had–wait for it–Burger King for dinner. Don’t judge us. It actually sounded really good, is cheap, and just the small taste of America, fast food or otherwise, is a blessing. After dinner we just walked around and relaxed and ended up leaving earlier than we expected. It was a fun night together and I’m thankful for the focused time with my wife.

That’s all for today. Onward.

October 16, 2014
Titus’ First Day of Preschool

My son went to preschool for the first time today. Even though missions work had been on our minds before Titus was born, I honestly wasn’t thinking that one day he would start school in Czech. But that was the Lord’s plan and that’s what happened today. I brought my camera along today and will do my best to tell the story with photos and captions.

The morning started early, before the sun was up, so we could get everyone ready to walk down the street to where the school is. Our friend Misa met us at our house at 7:15am and was our help in translating everything this morning, and a huge help she was! Titus was really excited as we started to leave and he and Avery started running down our street.

When we got inside we had to figure out in which cubby to put Titus’ stuff. His classroom is upstairs and he actually had two cubbies, one upstairs and one downstairs. The one downstairs is for his outside shoes and his one upstairs is for his change of clothes, backpack, and coat. One thing we’re still not clear on is the change of clothes. As the kids were coming to their cubbies their parents would immediately change their clothes. Titus’ teacher said the same thing to us and suggested he change his shirt for playing outside. We haven’t had time to ask someone about this, but it seemed kind of strange to change his clothes right away.

Inside there’s a big, little bathroom. It’s big because of the number of stalls and sinks, but everything is little in size. Above is a photo of Avery checking it all out. She loved it…maybe a little too much, but more on that in a bit.

When we got into the classroom, Titus ran right to some toys he thought he would like. I got the above photo of him just enjoying himself. I know it feels a little lonely him sitting all by himself, but we were some of the first people there which kind of helped get us settled and find our way around. Even as kids showed up, Titus was discovering all the new things to play with. Here’s another one of him with a European style race car.

I’m sure he has seen me ironing before, so I laughed when he found the iron by the girls and started to play with them. Shortly after I got this photo he said to me, “Dad, do you want to iron too?” I just laughed at him.

Avery was getting in on the action too. Here’s a few shots of her playing:

While the kids were playing and I was taking photos, the teacher, Bethany, and Misa worked through all the details. Here they are (below) looking over some paperwork, actually, a lot of paperwork. It’s amazing how much longer the process takes when you’re having to translate everything. The one funny thing that still confuses me is we have to go to the post office to pay for Titus’ lunches. You pay by the month, but I’m not sure why we go to the post office? While in the classroom I had to pay for a trip they are taking to the cinema (at least, I think that’s where they were going) but I just paid cash right there. It’s just funny to me.

The whole trip took about 45 minutes from the time we left our house until finally leaving the preschool. Amazingly, we didn’t cry. I think it was just crazy enough with figuring things out and Titus had such a good attitude that it made it all a smooth process. We got so many notes from people praying for us and I think God answered those prayers with a great morning. I know I said “we” didn’t cry, but Avery had the hardest time of all of us. She was sad that we couldn’t stay with Titus and I think she was enjoying herself. Here she is on the stairs when she sat down in tears not wanting to leave.

Titus went today from 8-12pm and Bethany picked him up. He ate lunch (chicken soup and toast according to Titus) and played outside a lot. He told us tonight that, “I bonked my head on the wall and I was crying for you.” Bethany asked him if they comforted him and he said, “No, they just waited, waited, waited.” We laughed! When Bethany picked him up she tried to ask the teacher how he did by pointing to him, smiling, and giving the thumbs up. The teacher answered back in her best English saying, “You don’t have to worry, he did fine.” I wonder if she read our blog last night?

At the end of the day, we are excited about what God has for Titus and for our family in this new phase of life. Only the Lord knows what the future holds, but we’ll take his Word and the broken English from Titus’ teacher: “You don’t have to worry.”

October 15, 2014