Dear Anna Kate,

Today you are eight years old. You are resilient, smart, confident, courageous, helpful, and a blessing to our family. What a year this has been for you. Honestly, in preparing for our move to Latvia, I was most nervous about how you would handle all of the changes, being already 7 years old. But God has been so gracious. While you have had difficult times, you have faithfully carried your worries to the Lord and he has held you fast. You have been challenged beyond what you’ve ever experienced, but you have risen above those challenges in every situation, and we are so proud of you.

~ Moving to Latvia was not easy for you. While we have always been open about talking about the hard things, you really never complained. Not when we sold our house, not when we sold most of our things, not when you were without some of your special things while they were in the crate for six months. In fact, at our yard sale last spring, you hand painted 40-50 sand dollars and wrote “Pray for Latvia” on each one and sold them as your way of helping our family and reminding people to pray.

~ Once we arrived in Latvia, you started school after only being here for 10 days. Being outside the big city, an international school was not an option, so you started right away at the local public school. Aside from two 40-min English classes per week, your education is entirely in Latvian. You were a little nervous on the first day, but God was so good to give you a little girl in your class who had spent a year in the States and speaks some English. She helped you out a little bit your first few weeks and was such a blessing.

~ While we had a feeling you would do well with the language, you truly amaze us! You understand just about everything at school now, and you often figure things out quicker than Mommy and Daddy and let us know what’s going on. You have an amazing ability to remember new words after only hearing them once and have no fear to speak and use what you’ve learned.

~ We are so proud of how you have reached outside your comfort zone to make new friends here. You have a couple of good friends from our church in Ādaži, and several good friends from your class at school. We will have a full house on Friday evening for your birthday party! You speak exclusively in Latvian with your friends here and you have no trouble making yourself understood or understanding what they are saying.

~ Speaking of friends, you do a wonderful job of keeping in touch with special friends and family members back in the States. You faithfully keep track of who has emailed you and try to email everyone back frequently. You also write a monthly newspaper to send out to all your extended family members. You usually include current events in your life, book reviews, poetry you’ve written, and of course, a joke corner!

~ You still have an insatiable love of reading. If you don’t have anything else you have to be doing, you will most often be found sprawled out somewhere in the house with a book in your hands (or sometimes a Kindle these days!). Some of your favorite books this year have been Anne of Green Gables (read out loud with Mommy), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (read with Daddy), Understood Betsy, the BFG, and Stuart Little (which you read in Latvian)

~ You also really love to do arts and crafts. Your favorite day of the week is Friday, when you have a double class period of art (90 minutes). One extra blessing of being in school this year is that your regular classroom teacher is also a professional art teacher. One of my weaknesses as your homeschool teacher was art, so this has been so fun for you! You have come home with some really beautiful projects and you get so thrilled when one of your works is chosen to be displayed in the hallway at school.

~ While most of your schooling is now done at school, we still do some “homeschool” in the afternoons. You are continuing to progress through the Math-U-See curriculum (you have mastered multiplication!), and of course we do a lot of read aloud and English language literature at home.

~ You have really blossomed in your violin playing this year. You are working on Minuet 3 and will be finishing Suzuki book 1 soon. You are starting to read music and not only learn by memory. You are also playing with more style and musicality every day.

~ You are a huge help to me around the house. You hang up all the wet laundry to dry, you sort, fold, and put away dry laundry, you load and unload the dishwasher, you help me peel and chop vegetables, you make a pot of oatmeal for the family in the mornings, and you do it all without complaining (well, except the laundry sometimes…)

~ You have assumed a great responsibility for yourself and school. Each day when you come home you do your homework (if you didn’t already do it at school), and you check your schedule for the next day and pack your backpack with the correct books, notebooks, gym clothes, etc.). I rarely have to remind you about anything.

~ This winter has been full of new experiences for you! We almost always have snow on the ground, and you have loved it! You go outside every afternoon with your sisters or neighbor friends to play. Snowman building is always a favorite activity, but you really love to sled. We have several small hills near our apartment and you never seem to tire of it! You also have learned to ice skate this winter. Our town put in an ice rink at the school track/soccer field, which we have enjoyed. You were a little unsure on your feet at first, but the last time we went, you set a goal to skate a mile (4 laps around the track) and you exceeded it!

~ You still love board and card games. Your new favorite board game this year is Monopoly, which you got for Christmas and we didn’t know was in Latvian, but which has been great for our language practice! Your favorite card games are Thirty-One and Pounce. You also still really love Yahtzee. It’s been pretty fun to be able to really play games and not have to go easy on you!

~ Just one more funny note about you: You definitely have a sweet tooth. Moving to Latvia has been fun for you because they really like their chocolate. Every time one of your classmates has a birthday or a name day, they bring candies for the entire class. After the first time or two, you realized it would be too hard to try to remember the names of the candies and colors of the wrappers, so you started a collection of wrappers of the candies you really like. You have a Ziploc baggie of flattened out candy wrappers so you can show me before I go to the store!

~ You are still an early riser, but you are most certainly not a night owl. Every single night, you are the first one of your sisters to fall asleep. In fact, if we have a late night activity, or even if we have friends over, you will often come to me and say, “Mommy, I’m just so tired and think I need to go to bed.” However, it doesn’t matter how late you are up, you will wake up before 7am each morning. On school mornings, you are allowed to get up at 6:45, but on weekends you dutifully wait until 7, as you’ve done every morning since you were two years old.

~ Speaking of mornings, one of the most important ways we’ve seen you grow in maturity this year is in your walk with the Lord. You made public your profession of faith in Christ last spring and your daddy had the privilege of baptizing you at Malvern Hill on Easter morning. This year you have become so faithful about beginning your mornings in God’s word every day. You either use one of your devotional books that we have given you, or you read through a book of the Bible and then spend time in prayer before you begin your day. We have had some wonderful conversations about what you are learning and you really seek out answers to your hard questions. We have also seen God working in your heart in that when you do make unwise choices, you are becoming very quick to repent and to desire to change.

~We have had so much fun celebrating you today and look forward to another day of celebration tomorrow! Today we just had a family day, starting with monkey bread for breakfast! After our tutoring, we all went into Rīga for a big birthday surprise – getting your ears pierced! Tomorrow you will have several church, school, and neighborhood girls over for a baking party!

Anna Kate, you are a joy to our family and we are amazed by you. Honestly, I’m not sure how other families move overseas without an Anna Kate to learn the language first and translate for them! In all seriousness, though, you are a blessing to us and we are so thankful that God gave you to us to love and to raise and to teach and to learn from. Happy birthday, precious girl.

Love,

Mommy and Daddy

Here are your birthday pictures over the past 8 years!

February 8, 2010

Your BIRTH day!

1st birthday

2nd birthday

3rd birthday

4th birthday

5th birthday

6th birthday

7th birthday

8th birthday!

One final note: What a huge difference between February in Camden, SC (7th birthday flower picture) and February in Latvia! Also, it was 14* Fahrenheit when this picture was taken, but we had to get a picture without a coat really fast, and she was really brave!