Day 93 - 96 (May 3-6) - Woodgate

We had quite a nice quiet Sunday today.

I woke with quite a headache, so spent most of the morning in bed.

Mim and the kids first went and visited the home of 'Barb', a 93 year old lady who is a permanent resident in the caravan park we're in and has her site set up as a 'fantasy garden'. There are all sorts of statues of fairies, frogs, birds and other creatures, and she's got a nice presentation she does to visitors. Normally she schedules times for people to come in as the park is normally quite full with kids. She also busies herself cooking scones and taking meals to the 'oldies' she looks after (!!).

Mim and the kids then went for a swim while I continued to recuperate. The boys took the opportunity to have a sand / mudfight, using their body boards as shields!

The Grubby Soldiers!

Awww! Mother and daughter!

After much rest I was up and about and early in the afternoon we had our meeting, where we read Deuteronomy 20, where we learnt the importance of maintaining pure worship to God; and Ecclesiastes 12, where Solomon concludes his investigation into the meaning of life. Having so much more wisdom, money, influence and ability than any of us will ever have, he still concluded the only meaning in life is to "Fear God and keep His commandments". Christ of course followed both lessons from these chapters perfectly, so they were a good basis for our exhortation together. We then had lunch, followed by Sunday School - this time I took the boys and Mim took Bek.

After all this sitting down, we felt we needed a good leg stretch. The last few days have been cooler, as apparently they have been everywhere, so we went for a walk along the beach. Again lots of people out today, relative to the past week. The waves weren't great and it was a bit cold to swim, but we had a lovely walk up and down the beach for half an hour or so.

(A bit later in the day I walked Bek and Jude through the schematic diagram of a basic power supply rectifier circuit, as I've decided I might as well have a crack at finding the fault with the caravan power supply now we've got another one and the time pressure's gone).

Family Meeting Part 2

Worksheet Page 1

Worksheet Page 2

When we returned we had resolved to try to finish our family meeting from last week. We had of course done our self-assessments, provided feedback to each other, and reviewed this feedback. But we needed to then take this back to our first worksheet and add any additional goals or areas for improvement we learned from the feedback. We did this and discussed what we found as a group. It was very interesting hearing everyone's views on their overall likes and dislikes about how things worked in the family, and I think we'll put these all onto a single big sheet so we can see the result of everything we shared.

I've added links to the sheet we used to the right, or you can download them here, in case anyone else wants to use them. They're to be printed out on two separate pages. As it sort of evolved as time went on I've added in the three steps to show how it works. The idea, in case it wasn't clear from the last entry, is that each person does Step 1 on their own. Step 2 you sit in a group around the table and pass the sheets around is that you fold the sheet up horizontally so no-one can see anyone else's feedback. Then share as a group if you want to. For Step 3, you take the feedback from Step 2 and review this, and add in any additional strengths / weaknesses / goals based on others' feedback.

Mim and I both feel we've seen a subtle but definite change in the feel in the family, and the attitude of the kids to each other. It's almost as though they've got things off their chest, everyone knows how everyone else feels and what we each need to work on, and so we are working a bit more as a team with a bit less niggling. Also when things go wrong there isn't such a need to spend as much time discussing it, as the person already knows the background and just needs a quick reminder rather than having to have the full War and Peace discussion each time!

Reflection

It is interesting reflecting on our trip so far. As outlined on the About Us page, when we decided to do this trip it was primarily to make the most of our last year together before the kids got too old to be able to do this sort of thing again. We wanted to build stronger family ties while we had the opportunity, and to help them develop a stronger love for God and His ways.

When set off at the start of February, we had lots of misty ideas about places we might go and things we might like to see, ideas we've probably shared already on the blog. Naturally we had no idea how the world was going to change this year, and that we would be pretty well stuck in the same area for five weeks (two weeks in Brisbane, one week at Buxton, two weeks here at Woodgate). It hasn't bothered us particularly, especially here at Woodgate where we have pretty well everything we need! But we have on a couple of occasions commented it would be nice to be able to continue our journey.

A week or so ago Mim's mum commented on one of our photos on the Facebook group:

"...glad you're still out there enjoying your journey, just a bit different than expected. You will still be able to achieve your desired goal of deeper connection and spiritual growth for you and your family..."

It struck me that this is completely right! The inability to move about in no ways limits the ability for us to build stronger connections, in fact in many ways it makes it easier because you're able to be a bit more settled, established in a routine, and not so distracted by new things to see and do. Of course these things are all part of doing a road trip, and 'normal life' is plenty settled and routine enough! But it has certainly helped us to be able to stop for a bit, set the direction we're wanting, and move forward in a way which I feel is proving very beneficial for us all.

For the next couple of days we started winding up our stay in Woodgate as, for a number of reasons including some essential shopping, we had decided to take up an offer we received a few weeks ago to stay with some friends down in Caboolture.

-- Greg