Tidwell Kids in the USA!

Our kids are in the USA!! Ever since we first moved to Zambia, we talked about how when the kids were older, we would love to send them back early to spend part of the summers with their grandparents. Our kids are EXTREMELY blessed (as are we) to have two very solid, loving, godly sets of grandparents. We are so excited that they get to spend 2 weeks with each set, plus a week at GA/RA Camp! Here is a look at our last few days together!

Caedmon & Machila on their last day of school together for awhile...they are great buddies/competitors and have been for the last 5 years!

They had a Science presentation on primary & secondary succession (don't ask me...) the day before the kids left.

Caedmon will miss his favorite climbing tree for the next 6 months!

Cambree will most definitely miss her best friend Laurie!

And our friend Joyce's newest little baby, Lillian!

And her sweet mama! :) (I had been sick with a sore throat for 4 days in this picture and felt so bad!!)

Cason worked hard to finish his Grade 1 Math books before he left!

Thursday morning at the Livingstone airport - all ready to go!

They each chose their "buddy partners" (as Cason called it!) Caedmon chose Dani because she is fun to play with on the ipad, Cambree chose Josh because he is the strongest and could carry her bag for her. ;)

And Cason chose Naomi..he adored her :)

After dropping them off at the airport, we went to our lodge to wait and see if we could see their airplane in the sky...well, I waited. Blu took a nap! :)

I waited with this look on my face!

I know you can't see it, but in the very middle of this picture you can see the tiny white airplane - we loved that we actually saw it - it flew right over our lodge!

Gelato makes all things better.. ;)

I chose sushi for that night's meal...see that little green square at the bottom of the plate? That, my friends, is not avocado..it's wasabi. Big difference.

The next morning, we did team grocery shopping before heading back to New Day!

And they made it!! Grandpa & Mama Dee were there in Dallas to pick them up! Aside from a little trouble with Cason's paperwork (South Africa has tons of requirements for kids traveling without parents), and Caedmon getting sick and throwing up 6 times on one flight, it sounds like everything went ok! So grateful to our Amarillo team and Josh & Dani for being willing to travel back with 3 extra kids and 5 extra suitcases!! :)

And here we are! Our house is quiet, and what is the most amazing thing to me is that when I put something away, it stays there!!! ;) We will miss our little critters, but we are so grateful for this time they get with their grandparents. Things around here will be a little crazy...a team arrives today for 7 days and we are doing a staff retreat. Then another team arrives after that, doing ministry in the local school and around New Day. To top it all off, our electric company has started a strict load-shedding schedule where we are without power for 5 hours each day! The times vary (today was 5am-10am, which is great!) but it certainly does affect our building/computer work/etc.! Should be an interesting 33 days left for us here at New Day!