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This Week’s Happenings 8/8-8/13

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

8/8 – I went to my first meeting with Mikayla this week. It was for the “aunties” on staff in child care. It was nice to meet them each and start really learning names. Mikayla did wonderfully. She immediately jumped right in and played with the handful of kids who were not at school today. She grabbed their hands and walked over to the slide to play. She only came over and interrupted the meeting a couple of times and even that was to tell me something really quick and then ran back over to her friends. She is starting to get the hang of telling them what she wants and doesn’t want. She even marched into the kitchen at the hostile today to ask for a piece of bread like the other kids had.

8/12 – The twins moved in today (Friday). I actually managed to get all three kids to sleep at the same time! Ben took an extra long lunch so he was around to help me out. Wouldn’t it be amazing if this trend continued?? The boys name is Simo (See-mo) and the girls is Nosipho (No-see-po). They are precious but so quiet and super still. Maybe Mikayla’s activeness will rub off a little and they will start moving and talking during their stay.

They slept really well their first night and it only took about 20 or 30 minutes to get them both drifted off. We didn’t rock or anything just laid them in their crib and rubbed Nosipho’s belly for a few minutes. Simo fell right to sleep. They look much better than they did this time last week. They are eating really well and gaining personality. Nosipho is now responding to her name and both babies are waving goodbye. Simo even muttered and utterance that sounded like goodbye when people were leaving the house last night. They are semi-feeding themselves independently. Nosipho is crawling, she drags one leg behind her and crawls up on the other. She will walk if you hold her hands, but her legs are still not very strong. Simo hates standing up and will cry if you try to make him.

The electricity went out a few nights ago for a couple of hours so we got to cook and eat dinner by candlelight. Mikayla has been asking to eat with the candles since then. I am not sure she understands that losing electricity isn’t a good thing!

The plan is for me to drive into town on my own on Saturday to check email while Ben hangs out with the kids. I am nervous about doing it on my own, but also excited about getting away from home for a few hours. Ben heads into town at least once a week for work and I haven’t been away for over two weeks! (Update – made it into town okay!)

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Just munching on some sugar cane we found on the side of the road!

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I put Mikayla’s hair in pigtail braids the other day. This isn’t a very good picture, but isn’t she just too cute!

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Simo on the left and Nosipho on the right!

Tags: Mikayla, twins, weeks happenings
Posted in Life, Parenting |

This Week’s Happenings 7/31-8/7

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

I have decided to try and give a week’s update at some point during the week. No promises for how it will go or what day it will be posted on, but I thought I would give it a shot! Because Internet is really slow here, the posts will probably only include a few pictures. My last two posts had quite a few pictures and took some time to upload. We had free Internet at the time so it wasn’t a big deal, but most of the time that won’t be the case!

If you know me at all you know I have a slight fear of ants. I know they won’t hurt me, but something about the thought of thousands of ants crawling all over me and my house freaks me out. In BG we would at the start of each summer have an ant infestation at our house. They would invade our kitchen and really freak me out. I had Ant killer on hand to immediately douse them and kill them. Of course that is not what you are supposed to do, but I didn’t care. I think the ants followed us to Swaziland, but are way worse. If you leave just one crumb on the the counter they find it within seconds. This means dishes have to be washed and counters wiped down quickly after a meal. Something I am not a fan of or used to doing so quickly. We are getting into a groove though and I am not finding it so hard to do here. Maybe because we don’t have so many distractions. We did find a bug killer called Doom here to help take care of the problem if it arises. Speaking of ants, Mikayla has taken to liking bugs. She will be walking along and discover them easily on the ground. She then wants to get down and examine them closely. Such a curious girl. I guess I will have to get over my lack of enjoyment for bugs so I can explore them with her!

Mikayla’s imagination is really starting to soar. She can come up with something to do on a whim and is able to create the most clever activity from things such as a stick. For example, on a walk the other day Mikayla found a stick. She proceeded to tell me the stick was a dog and its name was Shiloh. “Shiloh” came with us on the rest of our walk and even went home with us. She would periodically stop to pet the stick dog and tell hit good job. It was hilarious. “Shiloh” now resides on our front porch next to our digging sticks.

I made yeast rolls this week. They were similar to Sister Shubert, but not quite at the same level. Tasty though and not that hard. The only time consuming thing was letting them rise, twice! They would have been even easier to make had I had an electric mixer. All I have is a mixer you stir by hand…the old fashion kind!! I have a feeling that my baking is going to really improve here and me and Betty Crocker are going to become best friends!!

It is winter here, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it gets cold. Today for example I am sitting on the porch at 1:30pm and wearing a sleeveless sundress and am perfectly comfortable. It starts out chilly in the morning and gets chilly at night, but the middle of the day is warm. This is going to be hard to get used to! How am I supposed to teach Mikayla about seasons??

Random Mikayla moment this week. She has gotten to where she wants to “talk about something”. So one day I said lets talk about itchy eyes, and asked her what we could do to help itchy eyes. She immediately looked at me and said, “ICHIBAN”. For those of you in the BG area, you know what that means. I think our girl has sushi on the brain!!

As most of you may know, Mikayla is a bit of a talker. Today her talking got the best of her. She got kicked out of Sunday School and church both in the same day. Not really, but kind of. In Sunday school the other kids were so enthralled with Mikayla that they were having a hard time focusing on the teacher. After about twenty minutes of no focus she asked us if we would please go on to church. I knew this was a bad idea because she can’t keep quiet!! So we stalled for a bit outside until it was time for all the kids to go into church and give offering. She did great with this and walked up to the front to put her two coins in the bowl. We then sat down and she lasted for a total of one minute before jabbering again and we had to get up and leave. Because of the acoustics of the church you can hear every little sound so everyone could hear what she was saying and distracting the whole congregation. We are going to keep trying, but until she figures out when to talk and when to not we may not be making it very long in church. And until the kids get used to Mikayla, we may not last long in Sunday School either!! Oh my!!

That is all for now folks. Be sure to read my other post for some very exciting news!!

Tags: Africa, Mikayla, weeks happenings
Posted in Cooking, Life, Parenting |

As We Danced

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

**Post originally written on Tuesday, July 26, 2011, but published later.

Today Mikayla and I had a little danced party. We turned on one of my all time favorite children’s musicians, Dr. Jean, and began to dance and sing. As we sung I couldn’t help but think about our dear friends Lara and Lylah back in the states. Thinking that they may too be dancing today during their learning time – times during the day to “teach” Lylah basics of learning. Here are some snapshots of the four of us the day before we set out on our adventure.

The four of us!

The girls

The adults

I am hoping to start up my own “Toddler School” with Mikayla very soon. I just need to get my hands on a few essentials like construction paper and glue first! I decided today that our first letter will be M for Mikayla. We will do something with monkeys, myself, maps and who knows what else I come up with. We will also focus on the numbers 1-5 in recognition and value, playing some very basic number games. Nothing too structured, but she is so much like a sponge right now I hate to pass up the opportunity to teach her these basics! From the letter M I think we will move on to A and start from the beginning. I am not sure how long we will “study” each letter, maybe a week, maybe more or maybe less. I am just going to have some activities in mind and go from there.

Mikayla has been asking about her kitchen since we got here, so yesterday I took out an empty laundry basket and made her a “stove”. Then gathered her food and kitchenware to make her a makeshift kitchen. I am hoping to get my hands on some cardboard boxes soon to make a real kitchen, but for now she seems pretty content with what she has!

The first couple of nights we were here we ate pizza we had picked up in town and chicken and potato salad the sisters had arranged for us to have waiting for us when we arrived. Sunday we ventured into town for the first time to pick up the essentials from the grocery store. The whole time my head was spinning with conversions and trying to figure out the various ingredients. After about an hour or so of this my head was spinning and I was ready to hit the road back home. After a slight panic when I thought our fridge was broken (turns out the switch on the back had been turned off) and putting our groceries away I set out to make our first official dinner in our new home. We had skillet pork chops with sautéed mushrooms and onions, steamed broccoli and something similar to macaroni and cheese. I found a powdered cheese sauce at the store that I mixed with noodles. It definitely wasn’t homemade mac and cheese, but it was edible! It wasn’t a bad meal and similar to something we would have in the states.

After putting Mikayla to bed I decided to relieve some stress and try my hand at making chocolate chip cookies. This was a challenge! First of all, the oven is a gas oven and has no markings to indicate how warm it was. We had to use our best judgment and finally mastered it after a few batches. Second of all, the ingredients were slightly different than what I was used to in the states. I only had baking powder, not soda like I am used to. I also had a bar of milk chocolate instead of chips (which is similar to how I used to make them with my bars of fair trade chocolate). The brown sugar was packed, but granules like in white sugar. There was no all purpose flour at the store, only cake flour, bread flour, and self-rising flour. I went with cake flour (since I like cakey cookies). When we started baking the cookies they were burning on the bottom, but raw on top. After some modifications to the temperature of the oven and sliding the cookie sheet on top of a broiler pan (thanks hubby for the awesome idea and help), we were able to come up with perfect cookies! They took longer to bake than usual, but we are figuring things out. Everyone in the office liked them and we even had some westerners over for dinner last night and they ate them up! So I suppose they tasted okay. Sorry, but I didn’t think to snap pictures of any of the good ones and only have the extra crisp ones left.

I almost forgot, last night it started raining and has pretty much rained non-stop the whole day. The temperature has dropped significantly. All of you suffering with the heat in the states should be jealous because today I wore my long pants, sweatshirt, wool socks and was still cold! I know I will be jealous of you guys when come December we are burning up and you have all the cold, but for now I will let the jealousy stay on your side!

I will end this long post with a picture of a frog Ben spotted today. It is white in color with small spots. He was just hanging out on our windowsill after lunch.

Tags: Africa, Cooking, Mikayla
Posted in Life, Parenting |

Two Year Pictures

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

Before we left my sister-in-law, Sarah, came down to BG with my brother for the day to hang out and snap some very important two year pictures of Mikayla. She did such an amazing job! I want to post all of the pictures, but thought some of you might like to just see the highlights. If you want to see the whole album, you can view it here.

Tags: Growing up, Mikayla
Posted in Life, Parenting |

The Miracle Drug

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

First of of all, we finally made it to Swaziland. We arrived two nights ago (Friday night for us), a day later than expected and extremely tired. If you want to hear our whole story you can jump on over to Ben’s blog and read about it here. We hoped to post a video of the house, but are not going to have long enough for it to download. We will try again soon! It is a nice house, much larger than we were expecting. Fully furnished, we even have a Crockpot!! I am going to be keeping my eyes open for some sort of stand up mixer to fill our empty counter spaces soon.

Now, back to the story at hand. As most of you may know I was a little bit anxious about traveling with a toddler. Most people asked me if I had entertainment together for myself for the plane ride. My response was a light chuckle and yes of course, I have Mikayla!! I knew she was going to keep us busy most of the long flights. If you know her at all you know that she doesn’t stay still for very long. Others would ask me how I thought Mikayla would do on the flight. My response was, either really well or really bad. I was leaning toward the really bad though. However, in true Mikayla fashion she took it like a rock star. Even with all our delays and long layovers she never got overly cranky. She was in a good mood the majority of the time and we only had to bring out a few of her toys we packed for entertainment. She really enjoyed the busy book that her Mimi and Poppy gave her, as well as a flannel board and story pieces I picked up for her. She woke up today after almost 15 hours of sleep and was excited to play with her new friends and hang out in her home. She jumped right in at the hostile and played with the kids while we stood around a talked with one of the workers.

I think she also did really well due to a wonderful recommendation given to us by our travel doctor. She said to either give her a little Children’s Benadryl or Melatonin (100% drug free sleep aid). Since we couldn’t find Children’s Benadryl we opted for the Melatonin and I am so glad we did. It was like a miracle drug. Even when we had to spend the night in the airport she was still able to sleep a little. Seriously, once she took a 3mg dosage she was out in like fifteen minutes. It was amazing! And not only was she asleep, she conked out asleep. No noises or bumps would wake her. It also worked really well for us and allowed us to get a little sleep on the plane. If you travel long distances at all or are traveling with a toddler, I would recommend this natural remedy to help you out! For both of the long flights Mikayla slept for at least 80% of the time (maybe a little more).

This is Mikayla sleeping in the airplane after one 3mg dose of Melatonin. She slept through all the hustle and bustle of the plane during meal time!

Tags: Mikayla, Swaziland, travel
Posted in Life |

Girls Only Trip

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

I am making several posts tonight for several reasons.

1. I have some spare time and Ben is out of town.

2. I haven’t had much to say until recently.

3. I have been super busy trying to get in last minute visits with friends and family, see places I want to see before the big move, and prepping for the big move. We leave in about a month, July 19 to be exact. I haven’t posted much about it because I have been busy trying to prep our house and lives so that we are prepared for it. That seemed more important than blogging about all the details we were dealing with! Once the move is complete I hope to post more about the process and all the fun stuff.

With that being said, last week Mikayla and I took a girls only trip with our dear friends Lara and Lylah. For Mikayla’s birthday they gave her a trip to the zoo. So, we packed up our bags and headed to Lara’s parent’s house in Indiana, just outside of Evansville. We spent Wednesday afternoon and evening swimming in their fantastic pool, eating a delicious grilled steak and salmon meal prepared by her dad and vegging on the couch catching up. On Thursday we braved the heat and headed to the Evansville Zoo. The girls had a blast and actually outlasted their mothers. The heat got to us before they were tired of seeing the animals and playing. It was a great trip! Thanks Lylah and Lara for the awesome birthday gift!

My little water bug! She was pushing me away so she could swim "on her own".

Two little cuties!

Ms. Sassy Pants herself.

Grilling time.

Checking out the animals.

Lylah was a champ when it came to feeding the giraffes…

Mikayla on the other hand was a bit timid. I am blaming it on the duck incident from the week before!

Tags: friends, Mikayla, summer, swimming, zoo
Posted in Life, Parenting |

Strawberries and Ducks

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

A couple weeks ago we took our strawberry loving girl to a local strawberry patch to pick some berries. We didn’t last long though because I forgot the sunscreen and it was blazing hot, nonetheless it was a great trip! She was a great hunter and was able to spot berries faster than Ben or I!

We also took a trip to a local park filled with ducks. We took a loaf of bread and after a quick picnic lunch began the feeding frenzy.

Mikayla had fun feeding the ducks at first and then one duck bit her as she was trying to hand feed it. After that she didn’t want to feed the ducks anymore.

Tags: Mikayla, summer
Posted in Life, Parenting |

Family and Friend Photo Book

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

This project took much longer than it should have and some of the pictures are really old, but I still think Mikayla will love to look at it when we move this summer! Click on Photobook below if you are interested in looking through it.

Photobook

Posted in Life |

Happy 2nd Birthday Mikayla

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Mikayla last year on her birthday and then this year (very excited with crazy bed head!).

I had planned to write a lengthy post of all the accomplishments Mikayla has made in the last year, but to be honest I am too tired tonight. Maybe another night. For tonight I just want to wish the sweetest two year old a very happy birthday! We had a great day of donuts, bubble baths, visitors, a park date, Chick-fil-a and of course rounded out the day with a little Stakz frozen yogurt! Mikayla even woke up to a birthday decorated doorway.

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Posing in front of her birthday sign before our donut date!

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Just hanging around the park like two year olds do!

Happy birthday sweet baby! I am sad you are growing up so fast, but can’t wait to see what the next year holds for you.

Tags: birthday, Growing up, Mikayla
Posted in Life, Parenting |

Clips for the Congo

Friday, April 8th, 2011

In case you missed this post, my friend Lara is working towards adopting a child from the DR of the Congo. I am partnering with her next Saturday, April 16 from 9-3 to sell our hair clips and other crafty creations to help bring her baby home. The craft bazaar will be at T. C. Cherry Elementary School and will have a variety of crafts and vendors set up. However, I must say the best booth will be our hair clip booth! I hope that you will plan on attending and helping to support Lara and her family, and pick up a few hair clips for all the cute ladies in your lives! You can check out my shop page or Lara’s album on facebook for some samples of what will be there. There will also be some new, never seen before items that you don’t want to miss! Hope to see everyone there!

Tags: friends, hair clips
Posted in Life |