Jamaica Day 2

                        So in our exploring we discovered snails everywhere in the trees....not small snails

   These guys were huge!! Every discovery I made ,made me miss our girls so much. I wanted to share all these amazing  finds with them!!

Every morning would find us girls sitting on our front porch doing our devotions, checking our e-mails or just sitting and enjoying the quiet.

 We also enjoyed the frequent visitors to our rooms!!!  Some enjoyed the lizards more than others~

  The whole country was filled with goats. So you can imagine my delight as everywhere we went I saw my favorite 4 legged creatures.The groundskeeper of the Bible school  had a little herd of them that he would stake every morning around our dorm.

  We went to a Children's Home (orphanage) and got to meet and spend time with so many darling kids.

  They also had 2 sweet little dogs that were their pets.

               We had so  much fun hanging out with them and sharing Christ's love with them.

 We were joined and led by ABWE missionaries Dave and Cathy Smith and we were so glad that they were there with us. David grew up in Jamaica as his dad and Grandfather were pastor/missionaries there.

                   

   Gary Long brought his puppets with him and the kids LOVED them!!

  Ashley had such a fun time showing her skills playing basketball with one of the girls.

  This was so cute. We were all listening enraptured to one of the girls giving an object lesson and then one of the little girls behind Ryan decided to see what his hair felt like...

His face instantly broke out in the biggest grin that he couldn't wipe off.















We were all pretty quiet leaving the home. All I could think about were my 4 little ones back home who have so much ,how much I've been given with my family that still surround me even though we are all grown up. I wish I could have added each of those little and not so little ones into our family too. The Baptist church in Jamaica has started a program to adopt kids every year into Christian homes so some of them may get families yet.

Jamaica Part 1

I'm not going to apologize about how long it has been since my last post....It seems like I'm always doing that...having said that however, I do want to be more frequent with my Skaling family updates!! So this latest series of posts just happened this past week. We have all been well since November and the girls are growing like crazy!! This past week Ryan and I as well as 2 other leaders led a team  of young people from our church to Jamaica for a missions trip. We had such an amazing time and this is our trip in picture form!!
    So here we are at the Halifax airport awaiting our flight at 6 in the morning.

                                     

 Seeing Cuba from the plane!! When we arrived in Jamaica it was soo hot! We all started filling our water bottles at the airport fountain.
Our bus and driver were waiting!!On the bus and way too excited to be there!!Huge bugs!

We arrived at Fairview Bible Baptist College where we would be staying for our 10 day missions trip, and got settled in.

 We were in the mountains of Jamaica and it was beautiful!!

I couldn't get over the bountiful possibilities of fruit and produce all around us!!  A banana grove behind the guys dorm.

 We did some exploring that afternoon and had so much fun seeing so many things for the first time in our lives!

 A view from a little ways up the hill of the girls' dorm where we stayed. Most of the homes/ building in Jamaica look half finished like this as they build as they have money and don't take out loans.

Ryan was thrilled to find a fruitful Guava tree in the middle of  the campus . ( he fell in love with the fruit when we went to Cuba 3 years ago)

 He shared his excitement and the fruit he got from the tree to all of our team who wanted a bite.

And ate alot himself!!

                        The palm trees were massive and beautiful.

                                      We had tons of fun that first afternoon exploring our surroundings!!

  I loved seeing most of my houseplants as bushes and trees growing huge in their natural habitat.

            Here we are settled in and getting ready for ministry.

 We were spoiled to have wifi available to us!! We loved being able to keep in touch with our families back home.

                     Practicing our music together. It was the first time as a group, as half of the kids were collage kids that had come right from school . We had skyped weekly with them for 6 weeks leading up to  our trip , but this was the first time getting all together in person.

                                                              Sunday morning came and my knight in shining armor had fun knocking fruit from the trees for me!! The Jamaicans had a huge stick resting against the tree for just that purpose!!

                     A silly self portrait of us in our Sunday best!!