Sydney

Nate and I headed to Sydney for a night to visit some of my highschool friends. We had just enough time to see two of the famous Sydney icons. See how warm winter is in Australia!!!!

Below: The Opera House

The Harbour Bridge

27 weeks

Some of my best friends from school. I've known all of these girls since I was 6 yrs old. Lill, Jo and Bianca. We stayed up talking until the wee hours of the morning. As much as I love them, I don't know if I could do it again. I'm still recovering!

The third trimester has hit me with a bang! My energy levels have dropped by half, I've startd feeling the heat that you do when you're pregnant and man have I had to work on controlling my emotions! I can now sympathise with anyone who has cried over spilt milk!

2 years

Last week, on June 2nd, Nate and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary. It's always great to have an excuse to go out for our favourite meal of the day - breakfast. After a hearty meal of meat and eggs galore we decided to climb one of my favourite mountains, Mt Kiera, despite the pelting rain.


By the time we started out the rain had slowed to a drizzle and then the sky cleared for the rest of our trip except for 1 nice shower on the way down. The weather on our many adventures always reminds Nate and me that we are like little children who are constantly getting good gifts from our Heavenly Father, who can calm or stir a storm.

Above is a statue at the start of the climb with the clearing sky behind.

What I love about Mt Kiera is that it is only about a 2 hour round trip (although now it's a bit longer for a pregnant lady) and involves climbing a "waterfall" (never more than a trickle), scrambling up steep, loose hills with hands and feet, scaling a few large boulders, getting dirty and finding the odd leech. Nate always beats me in the amount of leeches we pick up on wet walks. This time Nate won hands down 5 -0. He even had one on his belly!

We are making it a tradition to sum up our marriage for the year in one word. Last year we easily came up with "revealing". This year it took about all of Mt Kiera to come to an agreement. We decided to sum up our 2nd year with the word "adventure". Since June 02, 2008 we've been blessed to visit Puerto Rico, Europe and Australia (and to have a 2 night stay in Asia if that counts) not to mention plenty of wonderful adventures in good old Kentucky. Each place holds a new story and lesson for us. Most of all, our marriage has been full of adventure and excitement metophorically. Learning more about God and each other has been the best part. And I can tell you, be it on our futon, a camping mat or in a foreign land, there is nothing much more exciting for me than the joy of waking up next to Nate each morning

A tribute to Sarah

This is a tribute to my sister's best friend, Sarah. For Wooz's 30th birthday party Sarah arranged for Wooz's back yard to be transformed into a garden party setting. She baked her heart out and had others bring plates of food. She also organised people to put money in to purchase a huge range of Wooz's choice of plants. Then, at the party, the guests planted all of the plants and transformed Wooz's garden in an hour! It was a wonderful day and I just wanted to give Sarah a very big thanks for the mammoth effort that she, her family and her friends put in.

Sarah and Wooz

Cup cakes hand made by Sarah and her husband.

Here are some of Wooz's friends hard at work...

The great coastal walk

Nate and I just did the great coastal walk. It's a 28km bush walk (hike) just north of Wollongong. We journeyed through lush green rain forest, over isolated golden beaches, between unique Aussie scrub and along rough and windy cliff edges.

It rained and we got soaked in the 1st half hour on day 1 but God was very kind to dry us off with a nice breeze. We managed to set our tent up just before the afternoon rain which then lasted all night. In the morning the rain stopped and made way to perfect bush walking weather. Glorious!

The Aussie side of our family

Here are the Aussie relatives of the Schoens - Mum and Dad Larter...



My oldest brother and his wife, Jt and Jen...

Tim, my sister Belinda (Wooz) and their 3 sons Jason, Wesley and AJ...

Here is Uncle Nate spending some QT with his nephews...

And here are Scon, Baz and their 2 rascals again...

20 Weeks

Well, here we are in Wollongong. Each Sunday Nate and I have our "date day" and come down to the beach to enjoy a coffee and the ocean.

And here I am trying my best to look 20 weeks pregnant. Yep, we've made it halfway and praise God every day for little "Norman". We had the 19 week ultra sound last week and everything seems normal. We opted out of finding out what sex the baby is - we'll wait for a surprise. Any guesses from you? Nate thinks a boy and I think a girl. The due date is October 1st. I'm guessing that Norman/da will come 2 days early, though my sister (who has had 3 sons that came over a week late) says I have no chance...

The Australian Wild

We went camping in the Warrumbungles and this big guy tried to get into our tent. It's a goanna, and you can't really tell here but he's nearly as long as Jenni is tall!

The kangaroos were quite mild-mannered and they would just hang out around our campsite all the time.

This isn't just any bird, it is a kooo kooo kaaa kaaa kaaa kookaburra! They sound a bit like monkeys if you aren't from Australia. Several of them surrounded us while we were cooking dinner one night and stole some of our potatoes.

And these are the most dangerous of all... Milk calves. We were visiting friends on their farm, and as we were leaving one of these little guys jumped through the fence. Nate fled while Jenni coaxed him back into the paddock.