Around our house lately...

There has been lots of fort building...

And one six year old boy who can ride his bike. all. by. himself.

He took his training wheels off a couple months ago after seeing some guests' kid riding without training wheels (and he was only 4!) and finally got up the gumption to practice last week. He's been riding ever since...

Monster spider. It jumped. Brant was attacking it while I was on the phone with our banker in America and Elijah was trying to put on shoes, late for carpool, and a guest was knocking at our front door. That's kinda been our life lately.

My sister spent $26 to send two boxes of Twinkies over. Worth. every. penny.

One of Caleb's many costume changes throughout a day...

Ezra on his first day of preschool. This was the closest I got to a smile after a morning of nervous tears. But he loved it. LOVED it.

Another guest (not the 4 year old bike riding wonder) had some extra tie dye materials leftover from a package she had gotten. Brant ran out real quick and found some white cotton cloth (no plain t-shirts here!) and the boys had a fun afternoon dying fabric squares. They turned out really cute. I might turn them into pillow covers.

The One about the Blanket Folding

We make the boys fold the blankets on their beds in the morning as one of their "jobs." They don't sleep under comforters, but occasionally use sheets and have a whole slew of little rags and small blankets they cuddle with. So this morning I walked in to check that he had done his job and found this on Caleb's bed...

The hilarious thing was this evening I said to Brant "You have to look and see what Caleb did this morning - check out my camera." To which he replied "Oh, you saw the picture I took?" I was really confused until I clicked back through the pictures and we realized Brant took almost the exact same picture YESTERDAY morning:

We have a budding artist on our hands. Either that or a wise crack. :) But aren't you glad that both of us are aware enough to document his creations?

And this was for the kindergarten class...

Today at our national church the kids learned about Naaman the Leper during Sunday school. One very eager, new young teacher taught the class and I'm sure wanted to show off the fact that she had a laptop and could use it for ministry. :)
So the lesson included REAL pictures of people suffering from leprosy and a very vivid description of how people suffer and die from the disease. Memories of the Christmas lesson of Herod killing all the babies in Bethlehem came to mind. I think the kids will be scarred for life. Caleb was terrified.
Sometimes I wonder what memories my children will have of growing up here...

Last beach trip of the summer...

New to us beach... last term we went to the same beach the entire 3 years we were here. Since January we've been to FOUR different beaches... so that either means we're finally getting comfortable enough with life here that we're ready to branch out or... I'm not sure what it means. :) 

It was cool and overcast, but still a really fun day with two other families. 

The boat ride is a favorite... 

Smaller beach, but in a cove with no waves and spectacular snorkeling. I think we saw the whole cast of "Finding Nemo" in the reef.

Caleb's pool snorkeling practice is paying off.... he spent most of the time snorkeling in the shallow part, but Brant did take him to the edge of the reef for a bit.

No pics, but Elijah "graduated" to snorkeling without a life jacket. He had a flotation device he held on to most of the time, but he was able to dive under to see better and even went down to the ocean floor to pick up a brilliant blue starfish.

Ezra and his rocks...

Before we left Brant stopped at a shop someone had told us about and picked up some fresh fish... six bucks for all of this...

And this was after grilling them up the next night... So. yum.

On vaccines and drainage ditches on the mission field

Thursday we had a South African couple come stay at the guest house. Nice couple, but very broken English, so we settled them in their room and left them alone.

Yesterday the South African couple picked up two single Dutch girls from the airport who were going to visit for a month to learn more about "the mission field." The Dutch girls couldn't speak 5 words of English, so we left them in the care of the South African couple... who couldn't speak Dutch, but who spoke Afrikaans, which is a very loose type of Dutch, so they could mostly communicate. Mostly.

The four of them went out to dinner last night and the sweet Dutch girl, who was so excited about getting to ride a motorcycle, stepped backwards to take a picture of the bike and promptly fell into a drainage ditch.

Ah, the drainage ditches here... how to describe them? They are narrow, 3 feet deep, cement... and the catch-all for all things nasty. No trash can? Throw it in the drainage ditch. No bathroom nearby? Use the drainage ditch. Building a house and can't afford a septic system? Plumb the dirty water into the drainage ditch.

So on top of smelling revolting and ruining her pants, the poor girl suffered a nasty cut in her hand. Small, but very deep and bleeding profusely. They brought her back to the guest house whereupon the circus of trying to translate tropical wound care from English to Afrikaans to Dutch began.

I brought out the hydrogen peroxide, iodine, anti-bacteria gel, band-aids.... how do you translate all that? I ended up opening up the band-aid to actually show what it was and Brant tried in vain to explain that hydrogen peroxide would "burn" but not actually burn off your skin.... I am still not sure that they knew what the iodine was... but she accidentally poured it on her pants... which meant two pairs of pants ruined in one evening ....And that's life on the mission field.

In the course of the "conversation" it came up that the girl had never had a tetanus shot. Out come the medical books to determine how long we had to track down a tetanus shot before her jaw started locking up. Do you know what the Afrikaans word for Tetanus is? Something like calamari. I never did learn what the Dutch word was.

Tetanus is a very real and present danger here. We had a national friend die a very painful, brutal death about 6 months ago from Tetanus. Left behind a wife and 3 young kids. Opting out of vaccines in nice clean, healthy countries like America or Holland is one thing, but here the diseases they prevent are very real threats and you opt out at great risk.

So at ten o'clock last night when we were feeling we were beating our heads against a wall trying to communicate, we called our good friend here in town who is Dutch, but who speaks excellent English. We explained the whole situation to him, who in turn spent half an hour on the phone with the Dutch girls chewing them out for never having gotten a Tetanus vaccine before they got on the plane. I think "my friend died a painful death from Tetanus and I watched him suffer" came into the conversation as their eyes got really wide.

Then we had a long discussion about penicillin class drugs vs. tetracycline class drugs, which with a Dutch accent "cillin" and "cycline" sound almost the same. In case you're not up on your tropical wound care... you can take high doses of amoxicillin and hope for the best if you cannot get a Tetanus vaccine in time... not a fool proof treatment, but better than nothing. 

So at midnight last night Brant and I fell into bed totally exhausted. Half laughing because of the hilarity of the communication blunders of the evening. Half crying because of the seriousness of the situation and the fear and pain the girl was going through. 

Welcome to the mission field. Don't ever come without your vaccines. Or extra pants.

Things making me smile this morning

- Hanging clean laundry on the line outside in a cool morning. Very peaceful. Reminds how beautiful it is and makes me feel like a super productive pioneer woman.

- New silverware divider in my drawer. Have been searching for one for YEARS and yesterday found one (ONE!) on a random end cap at the big new store in the big town two hours from here. Every time I open my drawer I am surprised by how neat and orderly it looks.

- Freshly ground cinnamon and other spices sent in a package from a friend whose parents own a spice farm on a nearby island. Heavenly.

- Caleb's new toothless smile. Just as his first adult tooth grew in and closed the little gap in his mouth, his second tooth fell out. So cute.

- Signs at the mall yesterday for a movie theater being built! Civilization is slowly creeping into our corner of the world. Really fun to be think about being about to go to a movie someday.

- The boys' constant scheming this morning to trick and surprise me and Brant. Have found someone around every corner or doorway ready to jump and yell "Boo!" I overheard the latest plan being hatched to "put a trip line in the bathroom so when Daddy goes in to go on the potty he will fall and his head will land in the potty."

The secret to parenting...

So, Brant and I felt like we have stumbled upon THE secret of all secrets... I think we could retire rich off this one... the trick to getting the boys to sleep at night without a fuss or a spanking or an endless parade of drinks and potty breaks.... 

Flashlights.

I kid you not. We modified the idea from a friend. For 15 minutes each night the boys are allowed to play with flashlights, read, talk, whatever they want to do (staying on their beds.) When the timer goes off, if the flashlights don't go off and the talking doesn't completely stop, then they lose their flashlight time for the next night. 

It works! They LOVE it. I hear them tell their friends "We get to play with flashlights when we're supposed to be sleeping." They are totally quiet as soon as the timer beeps and only once or maybe twice have we had to suspend their flashlight time the next night. 

We've taken the same concept over to the tents they've been building all summer... they are allowed to build any type of contraption they want to sleep in (we do check to make sure it's decently safe) as long as they are totally quiet and go to sleep when the flashlight timer goes off. The night we had all 5 boys in one tent, we gave them 20 minutes of flashlight time.... then dead silence. Easiest slumber party we will probably preside over. :)