We have been so busy living life lately, that I have neglected blogging! Here are some quick recaps of what has been happening in our lives.
We celebrated Ben’s 30th birthday in style over the last few weeks. The celebration began the weekend of his birthday when we went to one of the biggest events in Swaziland – Bush Fire (www.bushfire.co.sz). It is a huge music and arts festival over three days. We didn’t attend the whole thing, but went for the day on Saturday. Mikayla had a blast running around, dancing and after some coercion from daddy playing on the blow up inflatables. If you know us at all, we aren’t big music people, but still had a lot of fun. We stayed with our friends Peter, Callista and Aviva that evening. We had a relaxing Sunday at their house playing and going for a small hike in their neighborhood.
Ben hanging out with Mikayla and Aviva at Bush Fire.
Last week we welcomed three members of Cabrini College in for a two week visit (Anne, Edna and Melanie). We have had a great time getting to know them and of course Mikayla is loving all the attention they are giving her.
Ben was gone last week for four days at a conference and unfortunately while he was gone I came down with a stomach bug. Mikayla spent a lot of the week watching TV while I napped on the couch. After four days of puniness I was finally feeling better on Sunday. As bad as I felt, we are very fortunate to have stayed relatively healthy during our time here. Luckily I began feeling better just in time for our big Pig Roast as part of Ben’s 30th birthday celebration.
One of our staff members, Sharon, gave us a pig and so the boys (Ben and Joe) decided to tackle roasting the whole thing. On Thursday I took two other staff members (Stadium and Fodo) to pick up the pig and we spent the evening watching them slaughter it in our front yard! Mikayla had a blast and thought the whole process was pretty interesting. Then on Sunday the boys got to work prepping the pig for his cooking session! You can read more about in on Ben’s blog here. The meat was delicious and between the pig and all the other goodies, we ended the evening completely stuffed. We have been eating roasted pig since Sunday – including some delicious pulled pork quesadillas!
Mikayla has been really grasping onto concepts quickly lately. She surprises me each day with her knowledge and things she knows that I didn’t know she had picked up yet. She can now spell her last name and probably most exciting of all is that she wrote her whole name by herself for the first time this week. I sat next to her and showed her how to form each letter and then she would make it on her own. For a couple of the letters I laid my hand on her wrist to help control her movements, but she made the movements all on her own. She was so proud of herself when she accomplished it.
First attempt with sidewalk chalk – a little hard to see.
Second attempt on paper with markers. As you can see she wrote really large at first and we had to start over. She was really concerned about her "y" because it had a loop on it instead of the straight down diagonal. I explained to her that some people do the loopy "y" and that it was okay. She was cool with it after that!
That is pretty much all the big stuff that has been going on! Hope everyone has a great week!
Tags: birthday, Growing up, weeks happenings
[…] and Mikayla really enjoyed the games and activities we did. And in case you missed my last post, Mikayla learned to write her name all by herself this past week! She is getting so […]