de Haas family adventures

School in a new country can be scary and exciting all at once! Charlee and Declan have absolutely aced their first week at Bethel Christian School. We started the year with what they call family worship! I feel that every Christian school should start the year like this. Yes, we had to be there super early (a 7:30am start!) but it was so worth it. Just an hour of worship; families are free to join in, welcome each other to the new year and then pray over each other! Charlee turned to me at one point and said “This is so different to school at home!” She was right! T hat certainly wasn’t where the differences ended. In fact it was only the beginning! It’s quite different at the school at the moment as the air quality here has been so bad. To give you an idea in Sydney the air quality reading right now is between 30 - 60. Here in Redding it is struggling to get under 100. Under 100 is safe for everyone (even sensitive groups like babies, asthmatics and the e...

Hello from Redding, California, USA! We pray you are all well and full of hope! I will start by apologising that it has taken so long to pen this post, it won't be a long one as I am typing it out on a phone keyboard and we all know that can be challenging!   As I'm sure you have seen on the news, a few days before we were due to leave Australia a huge wildfire (bushfire) broke out just outside of Redding. It made it into the town a day or so later and a thousand plus homes were lost and a few lost their lives too! In God's grace they contained the fire around Redding and now it is still burning but mostly in the national park. The unit we were due to move into was in an compulsory evacuation area and so our landlords asked if we could put off our arrival a few days but as anyone who has gone overseas knows it was just too hard. So we came but stayed 2 nights in San Francisco to allow a little extra time!  On arrival in Redding it was obvious there was a fire burn...