Happy Sparky

Elijah came home from Awana last night ecstatic. Maybe ecstatic is an understatement. He was on cloud 9.

He got his uniform. And patches.


I have no idea where they came up with YELLOW as the color of choice. :)

It was a good break from the horribleness of the first week of school. We're home schooling first grade and it has NOT started well. So Brant had taken Elijah to club to give he and I a break from each other. :) I wish I had been there to see him get his awards though. Today we "sewed" them on... but as I was breaking out the needle, I remembered my nifty iron-on tape and tried that instead - worked like a dream. You can see the finished product... he wore it all afternoon.


He got his rank patch and a little yellow patch that his book said was for "club attendance." I think they must have been out of red jewel patches as he's missed quite a few sessions this summer and definitely isn't up for perfect attender awards. :)

I've been working on an "end of summer" post with a million pictures (half of which got deleted somehow so I never finished the post in a moment of frustration.) We also took a fun little "vacation" last week that I was going to write about, but my free minutes have shrunk to nil with school starting. You can pray we can iron things out and get into a routine or it's going to be a VERY long year.

A summer day

We had a really fun morning last Saturday. For a while we had been hearing "park" "look out point" "memorial" from different friends in town but had never explored what was out on "that mountain." Finally we had a free morning (too cool to swim!) and decided to go exploring.

What a fun place! We drove up to the army base and they let us on - which was an experience in itself, but one I probably shouldn't blog about. :) We just kept driving up and up and up and ended at the top of this hill on the edge of town with a beautiful view of the town and valley below. Where we had ended up was a memorial park to General Douglas MacArthur - it had been the site of the Allied headquarters during WWII and some years since the national army here had taken over the base, but erected a monument to the American forces.

The weather was beautiful. We just sat and had a picnic and watched the airplanes take off and land at the airport below. Caleb collected pine cones (yes, were high enough up that there were pine trees!) and walked around and took pictures.

Elijah loved using the binoculars.


He is growing up so fast!


This is a view of the town below - from the east... over those mountains starts the jungle - we're literally on the edge of nowhere-ness. :) One of the tribes we serve is right over that range of mountains behind the lake.


The central view of town - we have the "big" airport for our island as it's the only flat spot for miles....

The main part of town (slightly west of the airport) Town literally is one long main street.

"Airplane, Mom, more airplane"


I loved the monument. It kinda reminded me of growing up as a kid and Dad having to stop to read EVERY sign and plaque on the side of the road. They don't really have many of these here - commemorating the past is a luxury you are afforded when you're not scraping to survive day to day. It seemed very "American" to be having a picnic at a park on a summer day and making my kids sit next to the big monument to get a picture! :)


Here's a close up, so you can read it, Dad. :) (Click on the picture to make it bigger.)


This area is filled with tons of WWII relics, wrecks, etc. Some of it's still usable stuff (we have friends living in a Quonset hut that was built during the war!) some is filled with history (one of my students last year found dog tags at a WWII plane wreck in the mountains) and some is just left to rot.... we passed this hut on our way back down the mountain.


So thankful for a fun day with my men!

My helper boy

Today at church the speaker quoted some study that children between the ages of 2-4 years had 6.8 quarrels an hour! I laughed so hard I almost cried. 3 kids X 6.8..... no wonder I'm considering buying stock in Tylenol....

But sometimes they're not like that....

Little of this, little of that...

Last week....

- We celebrated 4 years of living here!

- We picked 9 pineapples from our yard. Brant brought 3 more in today. We're considering starting a pineapple export business and getting rich. :) Seriously though, we figured in the next year we will save enough grocery money from all the free fruit in our yard we'll be able to buy 5 tickets to Disneyland when we are back in the States!

- We had a huge storm come in and knock a huge tree on the road in front of our house... and take out the power lines with it. 25 hours later we finally got power restored. Brant and I moved our mattress to the living room and slept where there are more windows, and in theory, more of a breeze, but it was so hot and sticky we could barely sleep. Ezra slept with us, a hot sticky mess, and since then, every night he has cried "I sleep Mom Dad bed" when we put him in his own bed.

- We baked snicker doodles. It was an hours-long, cinnamony-sugar production, that was way worth it in the end.





- Ezra learned to open his dresser drawers himself and decided he didn't like how i had organized his clothes.


- My little sis had her 2nd baby boy (congrats, Mel!) That means she loses the bet we made when we were in junior high as to how many boys we would each have. (Yes, I lost a long time ago!) I'm looking forward to a weekend of free baby-sitting when we're back in the States.

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Boy-isms
Elijah, blood all over his hands: "Ooh, I got a mosquito, but he was already suckin' someone."

Caleb: "When we grow up we are going to be Dads. But first we have to get our spots. Then we have to get hairs on our chin. Then we can get our black coffee cups and black sunglasses without Thomas on them. THEN we will be Dads."