Friday Night Basketball

Last night a few of us on the Oasis team got together to play basketball with a couple refugees from Liberia and Gambia. For them, it was the first time they had played basketball. We had many laughs over shots taken and how the game was played. In the end, while it wasn't high scoring, we all enjoyed getting out and running around. To celebrate a fun game, we all had ice cream back at our apartment afterwards.

The Oasis has a webpage!

This past week the Oasis got a new webpage. After working on and off on it for the past 8 months, it has finally been completed. I hope to have it all translated into German this summer for people in Austria to visit. It is our hope that it is a good resource to learn about the ministry of the Oasis as well as refugees in general. The web address is: http://oasis.iteams.org/

We Received Our Visas!

It’s official. Yesterday we went to St. Polten, Austria to pick up our visas (even Caleb has one!). After spending over a year working on this, we are relieved that this process is finally over. These visas are good for one year and from what we hear are easily renewable.

We would like to thank you all so much for praying with us throughout this process. There were many times when we weren’t sure whether we would receive visas and knowing that we had your prayer support was what gave us peace. We’re thankful for the sense of stability this provides because it hasn’t been easy living in limbo.

As for life at the Oasis, we are gearing up for an Easter program on Monday. We have a short term worker with us from Kyrgyzstan, who speaks Russian and has been able to connect with many Russian speakers. We pray that many of the refugees will come to understand what Easter is about and will want to learn more about who Jesus is. We are continuing to see many refugees from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Kurdistan, Morocco, and even one man from Uruguay. We ask that you would continue to lift up this ministry and the refugees in your prayers.

As for us, we are thoroughly enjoying our new role as parents. Caleb will be two months old next week and we can’t believe how fast the time has gone. He is smiling and “talking” all the time. The weather has warmed up significantly in the last week or so. We have enjoyed taking Caleb on walks and seeing the world around us come back to life after a cold winter. We’re looking forward to having Dan’s parents come to visit at the beginning of May and Regan’s dad coming at the end of May. We know they’re all looking forward to meeting Caleb.

We hope you are all doing well and we hope you have a wonderful Easter weekend celebrating the gift of the resurrection of Christ.

A Quick Recap

I can't believe it is already getting to be the end of March. Time certainly has flown for us, especially with Caleb around. I'll give you a little recap of the last two months...

My (Regan) mom arrived in Austria on February second to spend the month with us. We hoped Caleb would be born right around his due date which was February 3rd, so my mom would get as much time as possible with him. Turns out he really did not feel like coming out anywhere near his due date. So my mom got to hang out with a hugely pregnant and grumpy daughter for the first two weeks of her stay. We did manage to make it into Vienna one of the days and had a great time enjoying the sights and a little treat of cake and hot chocolate at Demel's, a very old bakery and cafe with the prestige of being the Imperial and Royal Court Confectionary Bakery.

The last week or so before Caleb was born included several trips back and forth to the hospital because they had me on what is called a control. Basically my blood pressure was high so they kept having me come in to have the baby's heartbeat monitored and to check my blood to make sure I hadn't developed pre-eclampsia. They had decided to induce if Caleb didn't come on his own by Monday, February 16th but wanted me to continue to monitor my blood pressure over the weekend and come in if it got too high. On Saturday morning after getting my blood pressure taken twice and twice having it be too high, my mom, Dan and I headed for the hospital to see what they would say. After yet more blood being drawn and monitoring the baby they said things seemed ok but they wanted to just go ahead and keep me in the hospital and start the induction early. So that night they started the process and by about 10am Sunday morning my contractions were naturally coming steadily. Labor went smoothly and completely natural, and by 10:08pm on Sunday February 15th we welcomed Caleb Wyatt Peterson into the world. He was perfectly healthy weighing in at 8lb 13oz. We were actually shocked that he was under 9lbs since they had been telling us all along he was going to be a very large baby. I guess by Austrian standards he was big since he was over a pound larger than every other baby that was born during our hospital stay.

We came home a couple days later and Caleb and I have been hanging out here most of the time since. Dan was given the first week off to be with us and has since been very busy at the Oasis. He is currently making a video for the upcoming Easter program. My mom had to go back home on March 2nd, which was a sad day for me. We appreciated her help and insight tremendously. Caleb is a very sweet and easygoing baby. He seems to have settled into a nice routine and is already sleeping 7-8 hours straight at night. We are so in love with him!!! His personality comes out more ever day. We are getting lots of smiles from him on a daily basis and looking forward to hearing his laugh.

If you want to see more pictures of Caleb check out... http://picasaweb.google.com/DanielandRegan . That pretty much sums things up for us. We will try to blog more often in the coming months.

January in Austria

Well it has now been about a month since we returned to Austria. Our two greatest challenges have been adjusting to the winter weather after coming from California, and staying healthy. Regan was sick the first week and a half back with a bad cold and then after about a week of mutual healthiness Dan picked up a terrible cold/flu that has basically zapped every ounce of strength from him. Just yesterday, after a week, he was able to move around our apartment without then having to take a nap. If you know Dan, he has to be really sick to even consider taking a nap! Anyway, all that to say we are almost back to health and now just praying that we will stay healthy for the upcoming birth of our little boy. We are now less than two weeks from the due date and trying to wait patiently. We haven't been the only ones sick around here though. At least six of the ten full time Oasis staff has been sick in the last couple weeks along with all three of the Oasis staff children. We even had to cancel clothing room this past Monday because of illness. We hear that many of the refugees have been really sick as well. I can only imagine that the dormitory conditions at the camp are a perfect breeding ground for passing germs.

On a more pleasant note, Regan's mom, Pam, will be coming to stay with us for a month starting February 2nd. She will hopefully get here right around the time the baby is born. This is her first grandchild and she is really excited to be coming! We can't wait to have her here to enjoy our baby as well as for her wisdom as we adjust to life as parents.

A couple of prayer requests...

• That the refugees and Oasis staff will get/stay healthy
• For the birth of our baby, that there won't be any complications
  
• Safe and smooth travels for Regan's mom
  

And we are home...

Hello Everybody!

We are officially back in Austria. Yesterday, December 28th at 6pm Austrian time we arrived home at our little apartment in Baden! Both Dan and I were overjoyed to be done traveling. Everything went relatively smoothly... with the exception of a delay in Chicago that caused us to miss our Munich to Bratislava connection, which meant that we had to wait about four extra hours to get home, and some very swollen, water retaining, elephant-like ankles on my part. I honestly didn't know ankles could look like that. We were just really glad that the baby didn't decide to come a month early while on our nine hour flight.

The Oasis opens up again next Monday the 5th, so in the meantime we will focus on our visa appointment this coming Friday! Please pray if you think of us, we will drive to St. Pölten early Friday morning, January 2nd, to apply for our 2009 visas. We will be running around this week making sure we have all our paperwork in order and everything that needs to be translated finished.

We will also keep ourselves busy getting our house baby ready. Before we left Austria we had just looked at cribs so this week we will take an IKEA run to get the necessary furniture. We are really looking forward to meeting our little guy! Speaking of baby stuff, thank you to everyone who gave us baby stuff while we were home! We were able to fit everything in our four checked bags and take our stroller though the airport, which was great for lugging our carry-on around! I now think everyone should be allowed to take a stroller when flying. We did get a few funny looks pushing a stroller around but not having a baby with us. One women came up to Dan while I made one of many trips to the bathroom and said that she had finally figured it out, we had got the stroller for Christmas and were taking it home for our baby yet to come. The woman who took our tickets in Chicago seemed very worried that we had forgotten our child as we were boarding, so we assured her we had him with us by pointing to the belly! It was pretty funny.

Well we now need to finish unpacking our apartment and take a trip to several of the local grocery stores to fill our fridge and cupboards with some food! Auf Wiedersehen!

Ultrasound Pictures!

Here's a picture of Regan at 25 weeks and some 3D ultrasound pictures at 24 weeks.