october 31

Hear ye hear ye... Princess Lucy and her great protector Dinosaur Clark have arrived for the annual Davis Harvest Party! Let the party begin... cupcakes and pizza eaten and fun had by all!

jack-o-lanterns

Lucy, Clark and Phil had jack-o-lantern carving fun. They are getting ready for our annual Harvest Party. Lucy and Clark came up with the design, or shall we say Lucy came up with the design and Clark said "YES!", and Phil was the craftsman.

Saturday Mornings

Most saturday mornings you will find the Davis clan at Bohemian Bagel (aka Bo.Bagel). It is an all day breakfast eating, bottomless coffee and coke light, play-place and favorite saturday morning friend meeting ritual. This morning was typical, lots of playing and lots of friends!

indulge

here are a few more favs from vienna

Example of Vienna Culture

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Red and Sunny

Red and Sunny - they're not just adjectives, they're our good friends who spent the night after Bible study on Tuesday. Late night TV watching turned into a slumber party, which turned into muffins and coffee the next morning. The kids loved having them here to join our morning chaos.

Mozart, Klimt, See-Saw?

Yes, Vienna is a beautiful city full of culture, museums, and concert halls. But who needs that when there's a park with swings and slides and teeter-totters??? Culture is way over-rated anyway. And it certainly doesn't make you laugh this hard.

What IS schnitzel?

Last weekend we took a 3-day trip to nearby Vienna (4 hours by car). Our visas were finally ready after almost 6 months of waiting. We now have our visas, which were properly registered today at the Czech Foreign Police. Yay!

Vienna was great fun for the whole family - we stayed in a nice little hotel with a separate room for the kids, not far from a very fun amusement park. There is a relatively famous ferris wheel there that is HUUUUGE, and we all rode it - there were some great views of the city and the amusement park itself. Some of us (Shanna) were more scared than others.

We walked around A LOT and ate A LOT of ice cream. Phil drank A LOT of Starbucks coffee and Clark pointed out A LOT of windmills to us on our drive there. It was great fun to experience a bigger European captial city (but a much more expensive one)!

playdates

Vanessa and her two children Sophia and Louie and Emily and her daughter Anna Lee all came over to play. Everyone had fun being princesses, playing with cars, playing in the garden and eating yummy chocolate chip cookies!

pumpkin patch ... again

(pictured above Lucy and Maxime)

Lucy had her first school field trip this year and they went to the Pumpkin Farm. They rode a charter bus and had a blast...phil also went to keep close eye on lucy and she is known as the class clown (those roots run deep).

Mr. Chisholm and Mrs. Clarke- Lucy's teachers- they too are class clowns!

on the drive to school

Lucy has a 20 minute drive to school each morning, and on the way she and Clark like to point out all of the things they see...here is just a sampling of a typical morning's drive in the typical order that they appear...

grumble grumble at a high pitch (translated from clarkese is "mommy i see a dog")
I see more dogs
river
small tunnel
boats
castle
castle hill
hi castle
bye castle
drawings on the wall (aka murals) Lucy's refrain every morning is "someone drew on the wall and they are going to get in trouble, we don't write on walls only on paper, right mommy?"
the circle (aka the large traffic circle in prague 6) and comments on all the happenings there like what trams are passing through and if the flowers are looking good, or what color we want it to be or if we have missed our turn off etc.
the river again and if any birds are on it, if so how many we see, if not why, why, WHY are they not here today?
and as we approach we here "yay" from lucy and "blide, blide, blide" from Clark (meaning he can not wait to make a visit to the slide)

Not very typical but lots of fun!

daddy and clark

just like daddy....

me too...

Clark thinks he can do everything Lucy can and to be quite honest he really has amazing coordnation and stamina not to mention no sense of fear.. so his new adventure is swings. Lucy loves to swing for hours on end and very very high, and now so does Clark. In this picture you see Phil holding his arm- really he was just spotting him. And in typical Clark fashion he just wanted to go higher! The higher he got the bigger his smile....

lucy

my boys!

dinner out

This week I got to have dinner out with a new friend Laura. She has just graduated from JMU and is orginally from outside of DC. She works at Lucy's school and has been coming to bible study on tuesdays. We had a great time just hanging and talking about life.

self portrait

somewhere between school and home lucy took this self portrait of herself...

harvest assembly

Lucy had her first Harvest Assembly this week. She and her classmates made an appearance the last 5 minutes.. she walked in with Martin and they all got to sit with the big kids and sing a few songs. A woman from the salvation army was there sharing about not what people look like on the outside but what is in the inside. We were so proud!

playgroup

Prague has great indoor play places for kids that are especially wonderful when the weather is chilly... our playgroup headed to Eden mall play place this week for a morning of fun and lots of running! Clark and Owen ran and ran and ran, they also conquerred the slide and had a blast riding in the cars and of course they are smitten with Anna Lee.

Ponch and John

Watch out Ponch and John because there are some new boys in town... Owen and Clark! They've got true friendship, their motorcycles, and the ladies love them...

Dan the Man

Our field director from World Harvest (a.k.a. our "boss") - Dan Herron - came for a 3-day visit this week. We missed having his wife Gini here too, but hopefully they'll both come next year. We had fun talking about our time in Prague thus far, discussing our strategies for ministry, and praying for each other.

Das Boot

One of the unexpected cross-cultural lessons for us has been learning British English from Lucy's school. Example: they had a "car boot sale" on Saturday. You may or may not know that a car's boot is the trunk. So several cars pulled into the school parking lot with garage-sale-type items. This was right up Shanna's alley - she was the self-proclaimed yard sale queen in the States. And yes, she found some DEALS!

Pink Fridays

Lucy has started a Friday ballet class at her school. She's having a blast with all her new girlfriends at school. (She's the one actually looking at the camera in the picture above)

Young Life in Praha

I had a great lunch last week with our friend Martin Hasek, who's working here in Prague with Young Life. He took me to one of his favorite places, which is now one of my favorites - authentic Czech food in a very cool basement atmosphere. He is now the area director for Young Life, and we got to discuss how he and the team are doing. Besides being the only person I know who became a Christian from watching "The Bodyguard," starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, he makes me laugh a lot.

Let them Eat Cake, with Sprinkles

Lucy and Shanna fixed me an incredible cake, which we all ate after our team meeting yesterday. Thanks, everyone, for a great day and welcoming me to my "Year of the Jesus"!

Pumpkin Patch

On my actual birthday, we started the day by going outside the city to someone's farmhouse - they're nice enough to open it up to the International Women's group of Prague and their families. We and the Syvertsens brought Aunt Dot and our favorite babysitter Andrea along with us. Besides pumpkins they had a pony ride, bunnies, chickens, mulled wine (for the adults), and grilled chicken (possibly former relatives of the other chickens). Lots of pictures...