family

So it was good to be in Canada like i said in the last post. We had a great time with my family and Elijah got to meet everyone. He loved getting to see all his family and definitely loved all of the attention. He had a great time playing with his uncles especially.

He's definitely feeling better. He's sitting in his swing with his big smile. He's going with Lori to her family girls get together. Here are some photo's of our time in Canada and Eli with his family.

Flying through the air

Well we are sitting in LAX. We left Toronto about 7 hours ago. We are just waiting for our plane to board which should be any minute. We had a great time in Canada. it was fun seeing everyone and getting to enjoy canada but we sure are ready to get home.

I leave on Wednesday for Rwanda for two weeks. I'll blog more about that this week though. I'm going to work with the DTS for the two weeks. But i have to start putting my laptop away now.

Ben Folds?

Kind of an interesting video by Ben Folds. I saw this on a friends Blog and thought i'd put it on here.

My blog name must change

Lori told me today that she wants her own blog. We'll see how that goes. I bet she'll blog more than me now just to prove me wrong. So this isn't going to be "words with will and sometimes lori" anymore. It's just going to be "words with will."

Last night I fed Eli. We just started giving him Rice cereal and he loves it. He started out just taking the spoon nicely and enjoying his cereal.


Then he decided that he didn't want to just sit there and enjoy me feeding him. He was ready to use the spoon by himself.


Once he stole the spoon from me, he threw it down on the floor and decided that utensils weren't necessary and just wanted to chug his food out of the bowl.


I had to wrestle him to get him to finish his food. Lucky for me he has no defense against the leg lock. : )

new pics

So i just got some pictures off of one of the DTS students camera's. He got some sweet pictures of me and Eli. So we were praying at one of our Staff houses and I was standing there while everyone was praying. I'm leaning against the counter when i feel a strange warm sensation against my body. Eli decided to pee all through his diaper and then onto my shirt. As you can see from the picture Eli was extremely happy and i was not.


So a couple of weeks ago we went to Boomers for a fun day. Once a month our staff stop working and just have fun together. This month our DTS joined us and we all had great fun driving go-carts, mini golfing, playing arcade games and bumper boats. So me and four of our students went on a adventure on the bumper boats. From left to right are Zach, Matt, Me soaking wet, Katie and Crystal. Notice that I'm the only one soaking wet, well even wet for that matter.



And then i got this sweet pic. A couple of weeks ago while we were getting ready to go to San Francisco i needed to shave. i came out and had this sweet look. Needless to say i went right back in and shaved it off when lori saw it.

No name for me....

I was trying to think of something creative to title this blog. But instead of taking tons of time to title the blog. I'll just talk about our last couple of weeks.


We can now take a little bit of a breath for now. The DTS that I have been leading leaves for Kenya and Rwanda on Tuesday. I have really enjoyed leading this DTS but I'm ready for a little break.

Four weeks ago we spent the week in San Francisco for one of our lecture weeks.
Then we went straight to Modesto(also in California), for a weekend ministry time. We got to do some really cool stuff in Modesto and learn about the injustice's happening in this city. We helped them plant a community garden, that once it produces produce,
they are going to hand out to homeless people in the city and people in need. We also did a community garden.

We took the DTS camping up the coast to one of our fav camping spots called Plaskit Creek. We surfed and hiked at this other campground called Lime Kiln.
It was a fun weekend. Although we forgot several things like can openers, flashlights, and utensils to eat with. But we managed. I cut our cans of chili open with a hatchet. Luckily no one at shards of metal, that we know of.

We leave for Canada on April 11th for 2 weeks or so. It's nice we had a bunch of Airmiles so we were able to fly from San Luis Obispo to Toronto for like 200 total. It's going to be a nice to time to rest, see all our family and friends.

Then I get back and i go to rwanda for 2 weeks to do a pastoral visit to the dts and make sure that they aren't killing each other. It will be really good. I'm looking forward to going.

taking a day to breathe

so once a month our ywam base takes the day and we stop working and spend the day in prayer. It's actually really a great refreshing and restfull day. We call it Silence and Solitude. We generally don't have an agenda, except to just quiet our minds and listen to God. One of the things that we try to do is contemplative prayer. I don't really have the time to type it out here. So look it up on google or something. Basically it's just quieting your mind and listening for God's voice.

So this last week we went out to this beautiful state park called Montana de Oro. We went out there with our staff, and DTS students. I spent the day with my ipod and
walking along the coast taking pictures and listening to Damien Rice and some Ryan Adams. It was an amazing day, it was beautiful and warm (sorry people that are living in cold places). It has been amazingly beautiful here this last week. I was just looking for God in Creation and being able to spend the day worshiping him looking at creation. Like in:

Psalm 19:1-6
vs1God's glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon.
vs2Madame Day holds classes every morning, Professor Night lectures each evening.
vs3Their words aren't heard, their voices aren't recorded,
vs4But their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere. God makes a huge dome for the sun - a superdome!
vs5The morning sun's a new husband leaping from his honeymoon bed, The day breaking sun an athlete racing to the tape.
vs6That's how God's Word vaults across the skies from sunrise to sunset, Melting ice, scorching deserts, warming hearts to faith.

This was out of the message. Gotta love Eugene Peterson. And a nice pic of our little guy. He's getting so big. He's great.

Time goes fast

Like I said in our last post. I'm horrible at blogging. I guess it comes down to the fact that i never know what to say. But we have been doing pretty good. We have been super busy now that the DTS has started. I'm excited about the students we have here. They are a great group.

Elijah is such an amazing little boy. He really is becoming a little boy. I see him and can't believe that he is only 3 months old. He makes us laugh all the time, and i feel like i'm always saying "lori, look at how cute he is." Which is usually followed by me going and getting the camera and taking 1500 pictures of him in like 10 minutes. Here are some pictures of him from the last month or so. I love taking pictures of him and it's been great. Well that's all i got. We're doing good.

talk to you guys soon

I'm horrible at blogging

So i'm sorry for all the die hard bloggers who type one out every day as they are getting ready for bed, or sitting with their morning coffee. I'm just horrible at taking the time to type these out. This blog is my once a month serious blog and quite random. You can skip to the end if you want to just see pics of eli...anyway...here goes:

We have been so busy, the DTS started today. We have been running around all week, frantically getting all the last minute stuff together and it has finally arrived. I'm going to be leading this dts(will), so there is a little more responsibility on me. I'm so excited for it though. I'm ready to see all these students (15 in total) have their worlds completely changed(hopefully).

So i've been reading this book that is totally rocking my world. It's called the Irresistible Revolution, by shane claiborne. Freaking amazing book, super challenging stuff in it, and lots of taboo stuff. Especially living in a super conservative, republican part of the states. So in these last chapters i've been reading they've been talking about war, and how it's not really christ like, besides the whole just war theology, and old testament thoughts on war. He goes on to talk about christ and how Jesus was about loving his enemies. It's been amazing. One of my friends phil, his blog is listed over on the side. He had a link to this blog by a guy that was commenting on something shane claiborne had said. He talked about showing love through a noose and the recent saddam hussein execution. He went onto talk about terrorism and war and the sauls of tarsus, osama bin ladens and saddam hussiens. I'm kind of glad God didn't have Saul wiped out, or something like that. It starts to make you wonder. Saul was doing horrible things killing christians and was one of the most feared people(like some of the radical terrorists of today i would imagine). It just makes you wonder what God thinks about all this.

It's just making me do a whole lot of thinking. So here are some pics of eli. He's getting so big. We are doing good, starting to get a little more sleep. And speaking of sleep...i must go...

Driving to the snow!

I love that i can say that. Sorry to my friends in Canada that have it permanently, but after growing up for 21 years. I love the fact that i have to drive to snow. We went to Lori's family christmas this weekend up to Shaver Lake which is in the Sierra Nevada mountains (i think).
Anyway it started out snowing just a tiny bit on saturday night. So we took Elijah out for his first snow picture ever. We went to sleep and woke up to atleast 6 to 8 inches of the fluffy white goodness. I think i'm only calling it that because i get to drive away and leave it there.


I felt so un-canadian as i was digging our car out of the snow. i was using a dust pan to dig my car out of the snow. That's also the real picture of our new car. It was so nice up in the snow this weekend. i had fun using the 4 wheel drive as well.

We are having a blast with Elijah, and loving being parents. He is starting to sleep well. It's so much fun. i love him so much....he's now passed out on my chest as i type this out. I love just having him lay here. I love our dad n me times.

some more pics of me

Well we are doing good. Eli is staying healthy and strong, Here are some good pics of Eli and his mom last night. He is just so amazingly cute. I can't get over it. He's so nice and alert right now, and getting rid of his jaundis. He's making so many funny facial expressions. He's constantly making us laugh.

I'm finally here...

So on Tuesday, November 7th at 6:34pm, our new little boy came into the world. Elijah Chaz Barrow weighed in at 8lbs 13 ounces and 21 inches. He was a big guy. Lori had to have some stitches, due to Eli being huge and Lori not so huge. He's being doing really good. We brought him home Thursday afternoon. He has a little bit of jaundis (i think that's how you spelll it). So we are trying to get him to eat lots. Eli wasn't latching on quite right so lori got a little tender so we are taking a day off and having formula today. He had a reaction to the stuff they put in their eyes, so he had great big swollen eyes. They are now back to normal pretty much.
Last Night was great. We went to bed around 12 and he slept until his feedings, was up for about ten minutes and then back to sleep. We were able to sleep last night it was great.

God is good...

So when we got married about 5 and a half years ago, Lori's grandparents gave us a 1989 Dodge Colt. She was faithful but we sold her to someone else in September. It was sad to see her go but her time. We sold the Colt because I was lucky enough to get onto the wheel of fortune and won myself 4 grand. It was great. So we moved into the 90's and bought a 1995 Honda Accord Wagon. I wish i had a picture of it...maybe i'll post another one another day. So we've been driving that sweet Honda for about 2 or 3 months, and minus a few flaws like needing to replace the front cv boots and half axels, it's been a faithful car. God has definitely been good to us this year. We've been to Portland, Louisianna, Las Vegas, and Nicaragua, and now we are expecting our boy any minute now.
So last friday we were at our Missions night at our church, and our pastor was like "i hear congrats are in order". We had no clue what he was talking about. He said "congrats on your new car", Lori told him we got our car in June but thanks. He then told us that someone gave a car to us this week through the church. We had no clue. Someone gave us a 1991 Nissan Pathfiinder.
This isn't the actual car, but it looks almost identical, same color, same doors. I have one of those wheels across the back hinge though. We couldn't believe it. We are so stoked. We were wondering what we were going to do in January when the DTS starts. I'm going to need to be there most days and lori only part of the days. We were trying to figure out how it was going to work out with the baby and all. I know lot's of families make it with one car, but we were definitely thinking it would be alot easier with another car. We even thought about getting a motorcycle or vespa, but i've not had very good luck sitting on vespa's.
It's been amazing to see the way that God has provided for us this last year. We are definitely very thankful and feel really blessed.
Here are a couple of pictures of Lori from the last week. The one on the left is from a week ago today, and the one on the right is on thursday which was Lori's due date. Still waiting for some significant amount of contractions to get this baby out here.

dinner with jon lovitz

Well yesterday was an interesting day. I slept in a little while and tried to catch up on some rest. We then had to go to our church for this saftey class, because we work with kids at our church. It was allright, then we had our YWAM baby shower for us. It was for people that know us through YWAM. Afterwards my good friend Jeremy from Onetruth clothing wanted to go out for a burrito. So we drove to this yummy restaurant called Tio Alberto's. Good mexican food. We order our food, and sit down. Because we live in such a crazy college town and it being 10:30 on a saturday night, it's very normal for there to be alot of drunk people. We were sitting close to the door when some drunk college kid started screaming through the door about going to subway. I was like what is this guy talking about. It turns out Jon Lovitz was eating at the restaurant with us. Well he was eating with some other people but we were in the same little mexican restaurant. Apparently he did a comedy show at our local university and then came out for some late night mexican food like us. You may know Lovitz from such great hits as City Slickers, Wedding Singer (He's going crazy, and i'm reaping all the benefits), old school yellow page commercials, The Benchwarmers, and most frequently the subway commercials (which explained the crazy drunk kid yelling about subway).
That was our little Californian moment of running into random famous people every once in while. Thanks to those of you that cheered me up on Friday.

Blah

Today is just one of those days when you wish you could just go back to bed and wake up tomorrow. I don't know what's going on but there's just something that's getting me down today. Everything is pissing me off, and people are driving me nuts. But then i stop and i still feel like crap, but there's so much good stuff happening. I'm about to be a dad. i have an awesome wife. i have so much to be thankful for. Especially after i just read my friend ang's blog about all this crap that's happening in the sudan. but regardless i'm still having a crappy day. i found this cool picture on flickr.com. it kind of represents my day it seems dark and gloomy, but there's still some good in it. We're about to go and have thanksgiving, i know it was on monday. our staff all get together every friday night and have dinner, so we just decided to have our canadian thanksgiving tonight instead. Sorry that this hasn't been a happy joy blog.

The Stages of Lori

Well here's a collection of the stages of lori. I threw in one of us together. The first picture is of us camping. We went right around easter. It was pretty fun, even though it rained most of the time.



These are some pictures of Lori getting her birthday present. She got it way back in February. The first picture is about 20 minutes into it, and the picture on the right is the finished product.


Here are some pictures of Lori along the way. The first one was 17 weeks, then 20 weeks. The last two were taken today and Lori is 36 weeks. The other two were somewhere in between i'm not sure exactly when they were taken.