First Crack

I post blogs occassionally on myspace, but I'm getting annoyed that most of my sight is *blahblahbalh* and not really an update. So this is an easier update I believe. I hope my mom in law doesn't hate me for getting her hooked on another sight. This one also is not "commercialized" and hopefully I'll stop getting band adds about 5x a week. Ugh!
I'm a 22 year old mother of 1 and a half, and married to a wonderful man - Matt.
We met at Elim Bible Institute during our junior year and got married only a few months later between junior and senior year (July 05) . We immediately got pregnant with our daughter, Oceana Faith. She was born just 17 days before our graduation(April 06). We graduated at the end of April and moved to Pennsylvania 3 weeks later (May 06). Another 3 weeks after that we moved to New Zealand (June 06).
I'm originally an America, but lived in NZ for 3 years as a teenager when my parents planted a church here. I moved back to the USA for 3 1/2 years. Matt suggested we do our youth ministry internship for EBI at my parents church for 3 months.
After 3 months (September 06), we didn't feel our time was up - so we stayed for another 6 months. And after 9 months total (March 07), we applied for work visas and began to split our time between our youth group and Youth With A Mission's Marine Reach (ship ministry).
In May of 07 we found out we were expecting another *surprise* baby. (I keep telling Matt that one of these days I'd like to plan a pregnancy!) We made a flying trip home in June to see Matt's family in PA and were only able to stay 12 days (+4 travelling and time changing), but it was a fantastic time.
In July 07 we began a YWAM Discipleship Training School just an hour from our home here in New Zealand. It was a school specially designed for families, with a preschool right on the premises, run by Christian women from the base. In order to work with YWAM, a DTS is a prerequisite, so we needed to do one anyways - but had wanted to do one since before we were married.
While we were at the school, on August 23rd, we went for our 20 week ultrasound to check on baby. I remember being scared before Oceana's scan, but it never occurred to me to be scared about this one. Maybe I should have been...
The tests and scans quickly revealed that our son, Joshua Matthew was suffering from a neural tube defect (blog later on the details of that), which had resulted in an encephalocele - the rarest NTD. We were told that we could leave our DTS, as we were exactly halfway through the lecture phase at 6 of 12 weeks, but we felt it was the best and safest place for us to be considering the difficult time we were going through.
We just finished that school 2 weeks ago, and we are back home now doing out 8 week outreach phase here at Waihi Beach, with our youth group and Marine Reach. We're trying to do 30 hours a week, but I'm finding that very difficult to find "ministry" stuff to do 30 hours a week. Clean house 30 hours a week - fine. Sew 30 hours a week - fine. Ministry? We have 10 kids in our youth group - there's only so much planning that you can do!
We're waiting to see how next year goes. Our son is due January 1, 2008, but because of his defect he'll be taken by C-section around Christmas. That means I have 8 weeks left. After that I may be stuck in hospitals for a few months looking after him. I just don't know what to expect for next year.

So that's the quick run down, but I'll do more blogging at another time.