Our youngest child, Regan, turned three on January 27th this year while we were in Arkansas. Our schedule has been like this over the past 14 months of our lives:
July 2006 Kona, Hawaii
August 2006 Arkansas
September – December 2006 Kona, Hawaii
January – March 2007 Arkansas
March – June 2007 England
June – August 2007 Mindanao, Philippines
August 23-Sept. 1 2007 England
September 2, 2007 Arkansas
She has already experienced more of the world in her short little life than some do in a lifetime. As a result, it is quite interesting to hear her questions and see a little bit of the world through her eyes. As I said yesterday, she came into our house, the one we have lived in since she was born, Sunday night and asked “What is this place?” Similarly, when we returned to England for one week, we went back to our same room. It was next to the shared ladies’ bathroom (the “loo”), but Regan didn’t remember at all. She asked the very first night back, “Where is the bathroom in this place?” as she walked around our little bitty bedroom looking for it.
Once, while we were in the England, she was pulling her eyes back and making them squinty. I told her what I was told when I was a kid. “If you keep doing that, they might stick that way.” She immediately responded, “Ok Ja do it. It’s okay.” Ok Ja was in our training class with us and was a wonderful South Korean woman of God.
This morning, she saw the boys eating PopTarts, something we haven’t had in six months. She had no clue what they were but she knew she wanted one, even though she definitely knew what they were before we left. I want a “cake chocolate,” she said. (As a side note, our boys took forever to decide what they wanted for breakfast. Keaton said, “I just can’t decide. There are so many choices.”)
It is clear that she doesn’t remember much at all about our place here in America. She is enjoying exploring a whole new world, her fourth different world in the past 14 months. As we boarded our last airplane from Houston to Arkansas I counted up how many planes she has flown on. In her short life she has flown on 23 different planes, which is 23 more than I had by the time I turned 16 and about 20 more than I had before I was a working adult.
She has grown so much and learned a lot, much she may not remember. But we see her growing and changing and it is good. It is a challenge, and we do wonder about how she is handling all of it, but we know that God is faithful and will continue to mature her into a godly young woman. We don’t know how difficult it was to be the only blonde girl amongst thousands of children for two months. She was known as “Barbie” in many barangay of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan. Please pray for Regan, as her world is literally upside down right now and we cannot know in every way what it’s like to be three and be a world traveller. We do know that she likes all the buttons in a plane, at least for the first 30 minutes. 