Fall in St Andrews...Adventures, Friends, Thanksgiving, and Snoods

A family adventure to Stirling Castle, the same Castle we visited 6 years ago with the First Presbyterian Church High School Choir when Janelle and I had only been married for about a year.  Check out these Before and After shots...

Before...there were two

After...then there were five of us!

Before...one silly soldier!

After...two beautiful canon operators.

Before...This table is a little large for just the two of us!

After...Now we fit the table much better!

This picture at the Castle captures a lot - Esther, our sincere, always does-her-best gal and Bella, our hilarious face-maker!

Stirling Castle...real armour.  We also learned that "Scots" is a real language (eomplete with dictionary) and that when an old man wearing a kilt tells a familiar story (like Three Little Pigs) in Scots, you can only understand about 1 out of 4 words! 

Awesome science, technology, and history museum in Edinburgh that is free!  We dressed up in medieval gowns, learned about mummies, and saw awesome steam engines at work.  We will be going back. 

Esther's third first day of school.  What a trooper she has been!  We are SO thankful to have finally found a school that feels like a great fit - safe, caring, good learning environment.  And Esther gets to take violin and ballet lessons during school, she is learning French, and her reading has taken off since she started there.  The only drawback is long days...she is tuckered out when she gets home!

Wonderful big sister!  And River being a trooper, as usual.  He gets doted on and tugged around more than any little boy I've known!

Example B.

Scottish Merry-Go-Round!

Thanksgiving Meal with some good friends at our house.  It was our first full-on Thanksgiving meal.  Everything was awesome (except I totally overcooked the Turkey.  I learned it is worth the investment to actually get a meat thermometer instead of just erring on the safe side!)

I'm ready to eat some pumpkin pie!  River is growing like a weed.  He is crawling all over the place and filling out his 12-month clothes at 7.5 months.  He is up to about 12 kilograms (25 pounds for those of you still using that silly old "English" system).

Picnic-style Thanksgiving meal.  The other families are American students at the University as well.

Playing Pin the SNOOD on the Turkey!  (The Snood is the red thing that hangs off the top of a turkey's beak...don't feel bad, I didn't know either).  We also enjoyed some Thanksgiving Picture Telephone and "Muchos Gracias" family thanks competition.  The grand prize for the family that won was a "Flying Shape" (a pink inflatable thing that could be an X, a circle, a diamond, or a triangle).  I felt like I was back in youth ministry...and loving it!

Esther and her wonderful friend Eleni!  We are so thankful for Eleni and her family (the Adams).  Her mom and Janelle have become great friends, and her dad and I are in the same program (and he is awesome).  They are a wonderful family and feel like a gift from God to us in so many ways. 

We were SO excited that my sister, Lobelia, and her husband, Mike, were able to come visit us.  They were our first visitors, and it was such a treat to spend a weekend with them. 

This is what praying looks like with young kids...you don't exactly 'close your eyes and bow your heads' anymore!

Even though we have a car now, this is still a very common place for River to be hanging out as Janelle walks Bella to Nursery or back every afternoon.

Christmas time!!  The day after Thanksgiving in the Buckner family two things happen...Christmas music is finally available for play and Christmas decorations begin to go up.  This year it was a pink tree to go in the pinkest room you could imagine (Esther and Bella's bedroom).  After we decorated the pink tree with pink and purple sparkly balls, I looked around at the bright pink curtains, the bright pink comforters, the princess dresses hanging on the wall and said, "Wow, I don't think this room could get any pinker."  Esther, without skipping a beat, pointed to the wall and said (with utter seriousness), "We could paint this white wall pink...please!!!"

Time to go get a Christmas Tree!!

Pick your own live tree (still growing) at a farm just outside of St Andrews.  We summonsed farmer John (for real) from the barn with the calves to come cut it down for us.  It was awesome!!

We found our tree!

Since I don't have a saw here to cut the trunk when I got home, I decided we needed some emergency water supply to keep up the hydration for the 10 minute drive home.  As a Macgyver wannabe, I quickly grabbed the nearest Pampers I could find, slowly poured a whole bottle of water in it, and securely strapped it on!  The Farmer had never seen that before!

Tree is up!  So fun!

Park fun.  Janelle's Patagonia down jackets that she found on sale last year have been super-clutch.  And, as if our girls weren't striking enough with their long, dark hair, the jackets gather many a comment when we are out an about.
And, in case you were wondering, we are all starting to pick up some Scottish accents in little ways, but Esther is sounding veritably Scottish at times...in a really beautiful way!

Pretty soon he will out grow the Bjorn, but I'm enjoying every minute of my time with him in it for now.

Apparently time flies when you are living in a foreign country (or maybe time flies when you have 3 kids under the age of 6!), but either way, I'm sorry it has been so long since I posted.  The pictures above tell give you a good glimpse of the past month for the Buckner family.  We are very thankful to be settling in well here.

One crazy think about living so far north (about the same latitude as Juneau, AK), is the short days.  It is wild to go out at noon and see the sun sitting just above the horizon as if sunset is in 30 minutes!  It is even crazier to look out the window at 3:15 and realize the sun has set for the day, and we still have 3 more weeks of shortening days.

My days during the week are filled with studying from 9-5.  My mornings, weekends, and evenings are time to hang with the fam.  After everyone is in bed during the week, I usually get some more studying in.  In other words, I am doing quite a bit of studying, which continues to be great.  It is life-giving and what we came here for!

Theology warning - In case you are curious about some of the things I am learning...
One very simple thing that I have been learning and is really foundational for a lot of good theology - whenever God is working somewhere, it is always all three persons of the Trinity at work.  Because we tend to think of the Trinity as 'persons' (like human persons), we tend to think they can do things separately (like the Father creates, the Son dies for us, the Spirit sanctifies), but the Bible and the early Church Fathers were clear (and the definition of the Trinity that the Church formulated over the years is clear) that wherever one person of the Godhead is working, the other two are working as well (even if one of the Persons is in the forefront).  This has big implications.  For example, if we think of the Father as the Creator alone, then we can think of creation as totally separate from the mission of Jesus.  But when we think of the Son and the Spirit as active in Creation, we can see much more clearly that from the beginning, God's purpose for creation was communion with creatures (humans in particular) that was later fully accomplished in the mission of the Incarnate Son.  Another implication is that we cannot possibly be OK with the version of atonement that talks about the God who pours his wrath out on the Son in a way that the Father turns his back on the Son and the relationship they have had from eternity is severed...NO!  The Father and Spirit were at work with Jesus in the crucifixion!  (If you are wondering about Jesus' saying, "My God, My God why have you forsaken me?" I have much to say, but in short, that is the first verse of Psalm 22, which actually is a hopeful psalm trusting in God's deliverance; as the human Jesus really experiences the pain and loss of the cross, he is cries out to God in pain and hope.)  Because the Triunity of God is actually WHO God is, there is no option for somehow breaking that...it's like suggesting you can cut off 1/3 of your body from top to bottom and still remain you. (By the way, penal substitution models of atonement still can be faithful descriptions of a legal perspective of the atonement, but they must preserve the unity of the Trinity in the process).  Gregory of Nazianzus (4th Century) said, "When I think of the One, I think of the Three; and when I think of the Three, I think of the One" - meaning we should never separate the 3 or think of God only as 1...must keep reminding ourselves that God is both!

We are not coming to the States for Christmas.  It would be really wonderful to be there, most of all to see all the wonderful people we love (like you!) , but it's not going to happen this year.  Once school gets out in mid-December, I think St Andrews is going to be a pretty quiet place .  Fortunately, I'll be done with my classes and work as well, so I can take a good break and hopefully have some great family adventures as well as a wonderful time celebrating Jesus, the one who is called "Emmanuel" (God with us), knowing he is with us even when we are not with a lot of the people we love.

Thanks for loving us and taking the time to check in!  We'd love to hear how you are doing if you'd ever like to share!

May you also know Emmanuel (God with us) this Christmas season,

Forrest

PS - In case you'd like our address...
Buckner Family
Flat 3, 24 Hepburn Gardens
St Andrews
KY16 9DE
Scotland
United Kingdom

Scotland: Walking, Color, School, Family, and Bums

So Sorry it has taken so long to post again!  Here are some pictures from our first month and a half of settling in and adventuring in St Andrews:

East Sands beach - prime time for our first Sea Glass hunting.  We found some good ones!

You can see the cathedral from the 1400s behind us

One of River's primary modes of transportation these days!

One of the fun surprises of Scotland is a few new playground apparati ;-) that we have gotten to enjoy.  Here is the awesome Huge swing!

For the first month, walking was our only way of getting around.  Notice how the girls invented a way for all three of the kids to ride in the stroller when they were tired!  We definitely put our walking time in - Janelle added it up one day in September - 6 hours of walking!!

Walking Esther to school (her 2nd school).  You can tell what school it is by the uniforms (it took a little convincing that blue was going to be an acceptable color for her)!

It's not exactly warm right now, but it also does not rain every day, so we have been really thankful for the sunshine when it comes!

More walking!

Our neighbor in the apartment is a 6 year-old whom Esther has enjoyed playing with - very fun!

This is the park that is immediately behind our house.  Dancing and singing are standard activities that could occur at any time!

River is getting super-big and strong.  He has been working on the push-up position (plank) and can now hold it for about 5 seconds.  We were trying to convince our girls to do tummy-time, but River hangs out on his tummy all the time; I think we are getting a taste of one difference between boys and girls.

Future favorite sport?  Not that I am pushing for that at all!  ;-)

Esther is taking violin lessons now, which she chose to do and committed to try for a year.  So far she has been enjoying it (except sometimes that part about practicing a few minutes each day)

Watching Esther work on writing and reading has inspired Bella who now loves working on her letters.  She works on them almost every day and can now write her name really well (with a little help on the 'A').

Janelle has done an amazing job making our Flat into a home (on a budget)!!

River's Room - the girls are doing so awesome playing with River.  Bella's favorite words to River, especially in the morning are, "Hi sweety boy! Hi sweety boy!  You are the sweetest boy in the whole world" (repeat about 8 times!)

Canvases that Janelle made for River's room with the virtues.  Pretty awesome!

We call this room the "Great Room"

Nana's painting on the other side of the Great Room.

Canvases that Janelle made for our room.  Janelle and Esther have been learning to sew on Esther's new pink sewing machine, so Janelle made a bunch of pillowcases with colorful fabric that she bought.  We love our color!

Our "new" car!  After a month of walking everywhere, we decided that it was time for a car.  In the UK, you are rewarded for having a smaller car, so we are cooperating with the system in our little Toyota Corolla (which is still bigger than a lot of the cars here).  We are really thankful for our car (and the chance to get good at driving on the left). 

Things are going well here.  We really are having fun as a family.  One of the great gifts has been the community of people that we are already getting to know.  Many of the students in the Divinity School are in a similar place of life to us, and the wives do a really good job of connecting.  We have started to make some new good friends, which we are so thankful for.

We have also found a church, the Free Church of Scotland, that we are excited about.  Our new church experiences have definitely made us appreciate even more what we had in Boulder and Pasadena, but we are thankful for this little community to call home, and although they don't have the programs for children that we are used to, there are loving adults who are there and are starting to get to know Esther and Bella (it may have sped up that process that they decided to dance in the aisles last Sunday, which I gathered is a very new thing for this church!).  I also got to lead music a couple weeks ago at the service, which was really a gift to me.

My school started in mid-September.  I am working on a one year Masters now that I hope will roll over into a PhD when it is done.  My classes are good and pretty intense.  We have tons of reading and almost all primary sources (stuff like Irenaeus and Augustine and Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas), mostly from the first 4 centuries of the church. Here's how I described it to a friend recently:
School has been life-giving still, but in a new way.  Last year felt more like being fed delicious smoothies all day - tastes delicious, not much chewing, but good sustenance.  This year has so far felt like eating steak and potatoes - takes some cutting and chewing; you have to cut off some fat; but a good bite tastes really good and you know it is going to keep you full and strong longer.  Hopefully the analogy makes sense - here we read almost only primary sources so far, and I am being exposed to theological concepts and points of view that I had no idea existed.  For example, my Trinity teacher has a very different (but still committed, evangelical Christian) take on the Trinity than I came in with!  Although that has been challenging, I have found that I am really glad to see other perspectives and question some of the things that I had assumed everyone thought were true. And, there are other teachers here who have a theological approach much more akin to mine, and when I get to learn from them, it is amazing!!  I have recently loved reading Irenaeus and Athanasius and seeing their understanding of the good news  of Jesus and the Incarnation (Jesus becoming man) that was MUCH bigger than just the problem of sin needing to be forgiven but was a grabbing onto a humanity that  was broken on the inside and alienated from God, sanctifying every step of human life (birth, childhood,...death, resurrection) and pulling that life up into a communion with God that is way beyond what Adam and Eve had in the garden but is exactly what God had in mind from the beginning. 

Janelle and the girls and River are doing well.  The girls are on break from school right now, and when break is over, Esther will be starting at her 3rd school.  It is a long story, but the bottom line is that we feel this school is really going to be best for her, and we are really excited she gets to go there for the next 3-4 years. 

We have been compiling our list of "Scottish" words that we have learned so far... here are a couple with context -
"bum" - bottom; at the park a mum said, "Don't sit on the grass or you'll get a wet bum!"
"tidy" - clean; at school the girls have "tidy-time" every day"
"brilliant" - awesome


Love to you from the Buckner family.  May you know the glory and presence of the Father in the Son through the Spirit this day and week.

FB