You can't hear the music playing in the background and the sounds of happy children laughing as they play peacefully on the floor while I read a book and bake cookies and fold laundry all at the same time.... that's kinda what I was hoping for this summer.
Enter reality.... A really full guest house with guests sleeping on the floor and calling at all hours of the day and night with needs. A cook who quit. A sick kid who won't get better. Teammates who left on furlough. June was a TAD stressful. I'm not quite sure that I saw my children the entire month (other than shuttling Elijah back and forth to get blood work done.)
I did manage to find some apples and have a friend help me make a pie crust and put together a pie for Father's Day. But that weekend happened to fall on "I'm on kitchen strike because I've been cooking for two weeks for 30 people and we're getting take-out all weekend long" so we ate pie and fried chicken Brant picked up on the side of the road for $5. Happy Father's Day!
But July has been amazingly wonderful.... all the guests left the guest house. I think we're going to start running the guest house with no guests in it. Way easier. :) The boys have de-stressed after having our yard overrun with children for a month. They've built tents.... they actually slept in this one....
...and in this one. This was their first sleepover - we had our teammate's boys over for a "camp-out" in our living room. Was SO much fun for the boys - they were bouncing off the walls.
We've had beach trips with friends...
Pool time... Caleb is learning to swim! He is SO proud of himself. He calls it "floating" because he can get around in the pool without touching the bottom. He's also learning to snorkel, which happens at the pool first. At last week's beach trip he was going to try to snorkel on the reef, but it didn't work out.
Ezra... with his flippers and sunglasses and floaties and hat. He is cool and he knows it.
We have been doing a little summer reading contest I picked up online. The kids write the titles of the books they've read on ice cream scoops and when they get to ten scoops they get to go pick out an ice cream at the store.
And yes, I let them pick out whatever ice cream they wanted, and no, I don't normally let them do that. Of course they picked out the biggest chocolate-est things they could find and were totally sick afterwards. Elijah finished his second round of scoops this week and settled for a "mini" chocolate ice cream. Smart man. :)
We had our annual 4th party, which was so much fun. Our teammates back in the States sent us decorations and we pulled out the ice cream maker and cooked burgers. We had six other families come up to the (empty!) guest house and had the yard and playground to ourselves. It was a great party - one where everyone leaves way later than they intended to and kids run around and play in the dark and adults talk for hours. As they were leaving, a friend gave me a hug and said "It really felt like the 4th." I love it. Holidays are hard here; make us miss home a ton. Independence Day is one of the harder ones... living over here with such abject poverty and hopelessness we realize how incredibly privileged we are to be born Americans. So it's a time to be patriotic, but also a time of thankfulness to God that our kids can get the medicines they need and eat 3 square meals a day just because they were born into such a blessed country.
Tomorrow's Thursday. Craft Day. Thankful for these summer days.
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