Try it yourself...

Indoor Activities

Need:

*Dominoes
*Eccentric children

The kids discovered a brilliant game today. I left them in the room with some dominoes and when I came back I discovered that they had divided them up between themselves and they were each sitting on little piles of them. When I asked them what they were doing they said they were birds and those were their eggs. They sat still on their “nests” for a delightfully long time, giving us all an unusually quiet afternoon…the blessings of Animal Planet :)

Xavi (2): “I’m having blue birds! And Kaylee is having ostriches! And Jono is having snakes”

Me:“Wow! When will they hatch?”

Xavi: (quizzical stare)

Me: “Are your eggs hatching?”

Xavi: “Yes, mine are catching! Because they like to catch fish!”

When life is a b...big whale :)

A little brown cork
In the path of a whale
Who lashed it about
With his angry tail
But in spite of the blows
The cork quickly arose
And floated serenely
Before the whale’s nose
Said the cork to the whale
You may sputter and frown
But you can never keep me down
For I’m made of the stuff
That is buoyant enough
To float instead of drown :)

English Corner

It's coming together :)









...and to all you scoffers out there (you know who you are), my frog puppet IS a smashing sensation



Someone made these great contributions to the English corner, complete with pronunciation key and all… “Ok niños…MAI BADI: I like to esmel…I have good jiring and very good sait. This apple teist very nice, later I shall wash my feis.”…(ahem) anyway, it was quickly remedied with some handy-dandy white-out : )

A Paisa Delight...

A Mango/Lemon lollypop filled with salt...I was an unfortunate, unsuspecting victim...





Consider yourself warned

Naming the Baby

Since I haven't posted in FOREVER and way too much has happened...I decided to start with something totally non-essential, and work from there :)

I was just going over my attendance records from my class in Casita de Corazones and was (once again) deeply impressed by the uniqueness of their names. These are the top eight I thought were worth sharing:

Yanid Yansuri Yulesi Montoya Cadavid
(¿?)

Yurleidy Quinchia Quintero Gomez
(Your Lady)

Yusnavi Andrea Catañeda Restrepo
(US Navy)

Olnavi Gomez Colorado
(Old Navy)

Wachiman Tuberquia Gutierrez Velez
(Watch man?)

Wachinton Jairo Gutierrez Velez
(Washington?)

One Dollar Danilo Idagarra Toro
(yes, one dollar…read it in Spanish and that’s what we are obligated to call him…I feel like a criminal every time)

but this is by far the sadest one...

Jai Wei Giraldo Rodríguez
(highway)

Love you all! And I'll be back with a more informative post as soon as I can :)

Family moment

This is a horrible picture, and my family will hate me for it, but I love them! And it’s such a classic “moment”. Mom and Sarah totally into something on the computer, Charity into Alan, and Ben dying of embarrassment…his usual reaction whenever a significant amount of the family is together…making the same face he’s going to make when he sees this post. I love you all and miss you so!

Memories

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow “the twins” became those two people in the picture. My whole life they’ve been “the twins”—the tiny, tiny twins—and now they’re all grown up.

In a family of 8, just the three of us really grew up together, and I can’t imagine my life without them. They gave me “oldersistership”…and all the crazy experiences that come along with playing that role.

I remember chasing Ben around our property after he put on one of Sarah’s skirts and refused to take it off (he was just three, don’t judge him too harshly).

I’m ashamed to admit that once I left them both up in a tree and completely forget about them until way after dark…in fact, I didn’t remember until my mom found me, busy with Sarah’s Barbie’s (chopping their hair and turning it different colors with food coloring). She heard the twins shouting out of the darkness while on her way to bed after a meeting, and she was not very happy with me.

But I think it’s only fair to mention that I wasn’t the only one doing nasty things. Sarah once tried to make “smelly stationary” by soaking scraps of paper in a bowl of my precious of princess perfume, which she generously emptied from its precious princess perfume bottle, and everyone besides me thought it was cute and creative.

One of the worst moments of my life was when Ben fell out of a tree (yes, we spent a significant amount of time climbing trees), and landed head-first on a rock (he had been hanging upside down. I remember carrying him up to the house with blood spouting out the top of his head.

When we moved from Ecuador to Chile my mom told them she wasn’t going to pack any toys. They could bring what they could carry, so they both packed a bag as big as themselves and trudged along the whole way with their prized possessions on their backs, they looked like two bent over turtles. When we got to Chile and my sister waved at us from the veranda above, they both fell backwards onto their bags as soon as they tried to look up and were stuck with their feet up in the air.

Sarah used to be my copy-cat until she got old enough to realize that I was a dork and she was way cooler than me. I remember soaring over the bed to greet her in the morning after her first party, but I missed the bed completely and landed head-first on the floor on the other side. She was always all beautiful and fashon…while I struggled with dressing issues and…brushing my hair.

Ben is one of my favorite people. He’s handsome and talented (and he plays the violin, by the way), but what I love the most about him is his good nature, and his ability to bring comic relief to any situation. If I could choose to be lost on a desert island with anyone in the world it would definitely be Ben, because he can turn the most stressful situations (…and people) into something amusing.

And now they’re all grown up, and I miss them! And I want us to be three goofy kids again…forever!