Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Who Says It Doesn’t Snow In Africa?

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

If you caught last week’s Toddler School post you will know that we studied the letter W and focused on winter.  I feel that it is important to continue to teach Mikayla about the seasons even if we don’t really have big differences.  Since it is winter back in the states and my friends have been posting all kinds of fun activities they have been doing with their kiddos, I couldn’t pass up the chance to jump in on the fun.  On Sunday we (by we I really mean me, but Ben was a trooper) decided to make it a winter fun day.

We began with a breakfast of snowman pancakes and bacon.  Mikayla had a blast using the sprinkles my grandma sent her for Christmas to decorate her snowman.  And if you look really closely, you will be able to see that she made two eyes and a mouth all by herself!  She had a blast and proceeded to make and eat three snowmen pancakes when she usually only eats one!  (Apology for the lack of shirt, but it is hot here so she only sleeps in underwear most nights.  We hadn’t gotten dressed yet!)

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We laid low for the rest of the morning and then while she was napping I hung up snowflakes all around the hallway and living room.  I have been secretly making these when Mikayla is cutting in her cutting box.  When Mikayla woke up we told her there was a surprise, but that it had gotten really cold in the house so she needed to put on a scarf and hat.  Her reaction was priceless.

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After she explored the "snow" we had a family snowball fight using marshmallows.  She thought it was hilarious to throw snow at mommy and daddy.  After our snowball fight, we built a couple of snow forts by stacking the marshmallows.

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Trying to catch the snowflake.  She actually got a little frustrated that they weren’t falling down for her.

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It took her a few minutes to catch on to the snowball fight, but in the end she understood to throw them and not hand them to you!

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Building a snow fort with daddy.

When we were tired of throwing snow, we moved on to building a snowman.  We took empty plastic grocery bags and stuffed them with other grocery bags to complete our snowman.  She lost interest pretty quick, so we didn’t actually decorate him. However, she was able to make the connection that she was dressed like her snowman we made last week all on her own.  She just looked up at her footprint snowman and said that she looked like him. 

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Our wimpy snowman – it is no Grandma and Grandpa Kickert snowman!

After all the snowball fun, we made some snow to play in.  We mixed 4 cups of flour with 1/2 cup of baby oil and mixed with our hands.  When we were finished we had a mixture that was a snowy consistency and could be molded fairly easily into snowballs.  Mikayla had fun using her Goofy and Donald Duck characters in the snow!

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Our final winter activity for the day was driving through a snowy scene on our Wii Mario Cart game.  She was not the best driver, but she still had fun!

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We had a fun winter day, even if it was 90 degrees outside!  She actually kept saying, "I am going to go play in winter now".  So sweet!

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This Week’s Happenings 1/16-1/22

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

A bagel obsession began this past week.  It started by making Finding Joy in My Kitchen’s Pumpkin spice bagels.  They were super easy to make and very yummy.  When those disappeared in a day (we shared some with the sisters of course) I started pondering what I would try next.  The next day I was bored while Mikayla was napping and decided to try adapting her recipe into an apple cinnamon raisin bagel.  I swapped the pumpkin (which I used butternut squash in the first place) for some homemade apple sauce, added some raisins and about a teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg for the spices.  I kept everything else the same.  They were also delicious.  Ben wanted some onion and garlic bagels, so while my apple ones were rising I used this recipe to make a plain bagel.  Before cooking I brushed with a watered egg white and then sprinkled on a mixture of onion flakes, garlic powder and coarse salt.  They were a little heavy on the garlic, but delicious!

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Garlic and onion are on the left and apple, cinnamon and raisin on the right

We also tried our hand at making hummus with our tahini paste we found over Christmas.  Delicious as well (even if it was a little lumpy since we don’t have a food process or blender)!  In the states we always bought hummus because it was relatively cheap and convenient.  However, making your own is just as cheap and probably healthier.  Plus, you can season it to your own personal taste buds…an added bonus!  We also made a maple bacon biscuit that was pretty tasty.  This one was definitely not healthy, but we love all things bacon!

It rained a lot on Monday so Mikayla got a chance to play in the rain.  Please excuse her lack of clothes, this was a spur of the moment decision.  In hind sight, we would have put her in her bathing suit, but oh well!  I think she loved it!  Turns out the rain was actually the remnants of a tropical cyclone (hurricane) in the Indian Ocean, no wonder it rained so much.  It ended up being cloudy and raining off and on for the rest of the week.  Not complaining though because it kept the temperatures lower.  I actually slept covered up with the comforter most nights!

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We also spotted a couple of new birds this week.  Anyone care to venture a guess as to what they are?

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This is the same bird as the first one, just a little cloudier of a picture and of course one is a male and the other a female.

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This guy was extremely hard to capture, but if you look closely you will be able to tell what it is.

On Saturday we headed to Matsapha (where the airport is in Swaziland) to pick up a long term volunteer, Janet.  By a strange twist of fate, she also happens to be from Kentucky.  We met her briefly during our first trip to Swaziland. She will mostly be helping at healthcare with the pharmacy, but I am sure you will be hearing a lot about her in the upcoming weeks.  Next week, Sister Diane’s nephew, Joe, will be arriving.  He will be here for at least a year, but probably two years.  I hear he is a bit of a computer guy, so now Ben will have someone to talk tech stuff with and I won’t have to fake acting interested.  I don’t really care that he set up a Linux box with an IMAP/SMTP server running over an 802.11g wireless network with WDS capabilities.

Sometimes daddy likes to play blocks with Mikayla, but we decided that he is not very good at sharing.  Every time Mikayla would take a block or knock his tower over he would get very upset.  Especially when he was trying to make the largest possible tower using all her blocks.

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Pushing Mikayla out of the way while building his tower.

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Look at that tower!  And don’t you just love the "capris" Ben is sporting?  In his defense, it was muddy and he was trying to stay clean.

Mikayla sported a couple of new dresses this week.  Some were hand-me-downs from very special friends and others were remakes of items in the house.  Check her out:

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This dress belonged to a very sweet young lady who lost her battle with cancer in March.  Her mother, Jennifer, gave us this dress just before we were leaving.  We spent a lot of time talking about sweet Bella on the day that Mikayla wore this dress.

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One morning I asked Ben to put a skirt on Mikayla and this is what he came up with.  He was in the kitchen and was feeling lazy so he just grabbed the Dr. Seuss apron that my friend Lara gave me for my birthday last year.  I think it works pretty good as a skirt too!

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Last, but certainly not least, is this fabulous hand crafted dress courtesy of Dacia and Callie!  It is actually the dress I used as a model for Mikayla’s two year old birthday dress (also made by Dacia). Callie has outgrown it, so in an awesome care package from our friends (thanks again everyone) Dacia sent it on to Mikayla.  It is still big, but we love it anyway!  Lots of years of wearing for this dress!

To end the week – who doesn’t love a spoon covered in chocolate icing to lick clean?

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Chacobsessed!

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

Do we have an obsession with Chacos?

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**Special thanks to Melissa and Maggie Jolly for the Chaco loaners for Mikayla!

**And also a special thanks to Chacos for hooking us each up with a backup pair!  And of course for making some fantastic shoes!

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This Week’s Happenings 1/9-1/15

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

We had a pretty quiet week.  Ben worked a a lot and Mikayla and I played a lot!  She did request on several occasions for the twins to come play though. 

In the last week or so Mikayla has learned to gallop.  She thinks it is fun and so everywhere we go she gallops.  It is so cute, but don’t take my word for it.  Watch it for yourself!

In addition to learning to gallop, Mikayla has gained a new cooking obsession in the last week or two.  When I start cooking she pulls her chair over to the counter and gets a measuring cup.  Then she proceeds to "make dessert" with the spices on the counter and any scraps of veggies and what not that are leftover from my cooking.  She will spend the whole time I am cooking doing this and is so serious about it.  She even knows the names for most of the spices.  Most of the time the concoction is inedible, but she always tries it!  Here is her latest concoction.

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This concoction included matches, noodles, water, spices galore, some wild berries found on the mission, onions and I think apple peels.  Yum yum!

Sunday was Sister Barbara’s birthday, so on Monday we cooked her a meal of her choice which just so happened to be one of our favorites…MEXICAN!  We still had some chips and salsa leftover from our Christmas finds so we served those with black beans, rice, guacamole, chicken fajitas and homemade corn tortillas.  The corn tortillas weren’t truly authentic because we didn’t have the right kind of corn flour (it requires a special one), but they still turned out pretty good.  Ben said he liked them better than the flour tortillas I have made in the past.  We topped the meal off with some chocolate covered pretzels made by Mikayla (of course I helped a little).

On Tuesday night we had a big storm come through.  Probably an hour before it started raining we lost power.  And then the rains came!  It was actually so windy and rainy that the wind blew the rain sideways and into our house.  Mikayla’s room was flooded and our room got quite a bit of rain too.  We quickly realized what was happening and shut all the windows and then set to work to clean up the mess!  Lucky for us we didn’t have anything too valuable on the ground.  Mikayla had some books and a couple of toys lying around, but we were able to get them all dried out with only a few wrinkles.  Unlucky for us was that the power didn’t come back on for almost 24 hours!  Humidity + plus heat + no fans = HOT!  Since there was no power all day on Wednesday, Ben decided he would try his hand at cutting our grass with a "slasher" (similar to a machete).  He posted a video on his blog that you can check out if you are so inclined.

Back around Christmas I started reading Harry Potter.  I have put it off for so long for no good reason and finally decided I would give it a go.  And I am so glad I did!  Like my friend Catherine said to me when I started reading them, they are not the most well written books, but I still love them!  Just ask Ben, I couldn’t stop reading them until I had completed the series!  I read all 7 books in just over 2 weeks.  If you haven’t read the series yet you should really give it a shot.  Just a question though for all you HP fans…are the movies worth trying to track down to watch?

Friday morning turned out to be pretty exciting for Ben and not in a good way.  Mcamiso, one of our drivers, stopped by early to pick up our propane tank to get refilled and asked Ben to help.  When they tipped the tank back there was a cobra coiled up underneath it.  Luckily the snake was pretty docile.  Between Ben, Mcomiso, Socks (the dog) and some garden tools, the snake was dealt with swiftly. 

On a more warm and fuzzy note, Friday evening I made cookies for the “Ambassador” for the EU (European Union).  Never thought I would say that when I moved to the bush in Swaziland!

To all you friends out there with little kids, here is a fun cooking activity that your kids can help out with (or make completely on their own)…pudding pops!  Basically you make pudding (which they can practically do without your help) and then pour into a popsicle mold or ice cube trays.  Add a stick of some sort and then freeze.  The best part is that because they are pudding they don’t melt as fast and are way less messy!  Doesn’t mean much to you guys getting snow right now, but for us battling the heat at the moment it makes great sense!  Your kids can feel proud because they can make them on their own (with a little supervision of course)!  And like with any cooking, licking the spoon is the best part…just ask Mikayla!

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2011 Year in Review

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

This past year has flown by!  It is hard to believe that we are already in 2012 and my sweet baby will be three in less than four months!  Looking back on this year I think that the theme would be trips and experiences!  It seems that we took a lot of trips and did a lot of things with family and friends in 2011.  Here is a quick picture recap of our last year.

January

We played in a lot of snow and savored every minute of the cold since it would be our last for awhile!

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February

We played in more snow.  We actually had a decent snow season for Kentucky last year.  We ended the month with a breakfast themed birthday party for myself since that happens to be my favorite meal.

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March

We celebrated Dr. Seuss’s birthday in style this year.  My sister got Mikayla an early birthday gift of a the cutest Dr. Seuss dress and I made a couple of clips (Cat in the Hat and Thing 1 and 2) and we went to the library to see the Cat in the Hat.  We also did lots of fun Dr. Seuss activities at home.  Ben left for two weeks in Swaziland and Mikayla and I hit the road to Atlanta for some fun with our friends Catherine and Molly.  Ben also "stopped" working at Corsair this month. 

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April

At the beginning of the month I joined my mom and my sister and her kids for a circus in Bowling Green. Mikayla slept in her big girl bed for the first time and got her first hair cut this month.  We went to Dinosaur World with my mom and sister and her kids.  We also hosted an Easter lunch with some family and friends.  Mikayla really got into looking for the eggs this year.  For Mikayla’s birthday this year we chose to give her an experience rather than an actual birthday gift.  So we once again loaded up the car and headed to Chattanooga. 

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family pic

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May

We hosted a candy themed birthday party in honor of Mikayla’s 2nd birthday.  I turned in my letter of resignation to my school home of the last six years, T. C. Cherry Elementary.  I said goodbye to all my loving students and packed up all my teaching belongings.  Ben took Mikayla hiking a couple of times while I was at work.  Ben is not big on birthdays, but we managed to have a pizza themed birthday party for him anyway!  Ben also slaughtered a chicken in our garage!

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June

We went strawberry picking at a local patch.  We visited a lot of parks in Bowling Green.  Mikayla and I took a final vacation with our friends Lara and Lylah.  We went swimming in her parents pool and hit up the Evansville Zoo.  Some of my sweet college friends and their kids (those that have them) came to Bowling Green for some fun at Chik-fil-A.  I also got to spend some quality time with my dear friend Catherine and her daughter Molly (same friends we went to Atlanta with).  We also took Mikayla fishing for the first time at my grandparents farm.

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July

We went camping with some of our favorite people from Bowling Green.  We moved out of our house and in with Ben’s brother (Tim) and sister-in-law (Chelsea).  We packed up, gave away or sold all of our belongings, said final goodbyes to our family and friends and got on an airplane for the biggest adventure of our lives – we moved to Swaziland, Africa.  After an adventure in getting there we finally arrived!

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August

We spent a lot of time outside playing in the cooler weather.  We hosted two malnourished, TB positive twins (Nosipho and Simo) for a month and helped to nurse them back to health.

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September

We continue to watch our "three kids" grow and play together.  Then we sent the twins back to the hostel after the school break was over.  We took our first "bush walk" through the bush in our backyard.  I also began teaching Mikayla Toddler School where we focus mostly on letters and numbers.  We went on our first safari drive and bought a handcrafted kitchen table.  We also started our obsession with bird watching!

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October

Mikayla and I spent a lot of time learning during our Toddler Time, baked a lot, tried out some new recipes and enjoyed family time.  We also celebrated St. Phillips with the St. Phillips Day Feast.  We went on another safari drive and saw a lot of giraffes!  We also got to experience what it was like to have your house swarmed by hundreds of flying termites.

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November

We went on a second "bush walk", which was quite different than the first.  Everything was green and grown!  We hosted our first Swazi Thanksgiving with a bunch of the staff members of Cabrini.  We also celebrated with the Cabrini staff for the Feast of Mother Cabrini.

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December

We did some holiday baking, including the famous cinnamon rolls!  We made cinnamon ornaments, gingerbread cookies and much more.  We drove through one of the nature reserves and messed up our new vehicle we had just purchased.  I joined the staff for an all staff overnight training in town while Ben stayed at home with Mikayla.  We traveled to South Africa for our first African Christmas.  Saw lots of animals at Kruger and enjoyed some tasty meals with Sister Barbara and Sister Diane.  We even did some swimming!  We got back home and hosted the twins (mentioned above) for another week.  We ended the year by celebrating New Year’s Eve with some new friends we almost bought a car from – Peter, Callista and their daughter Aviva.  We played Settler’s of Catan, ate some yummy food and watched some fireworks at midnight!

 

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This Week’s Happenings 12/27-1/8

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

We got home from our Christmas vacation on the 26th and then spent the 27th prepping and preparing for the arrival of the twins.  We were supposed to have Nosipho and Simo picked up and brought to us on the 28th, but it was the evening of the 29th when they got to our house.  We fed them a quick dinner and then all three kids took a bath in Mikayla’s tub.  The school break this time around is 7 weeks and the childcare staff had some concerns about the twins (who were now pretty healthy) returning home for that length of period.  So it was decided that after a few weeks they would be picked up and brought to us for the remainder of the break.  However, after their arrival and spending a couple of days with them it was decided that they were being well cared for at their homestead.  So, after a week and a few days we returned them home on Friday.  It was a little more chaotic with them this time around.  They are both walking and running and are much more active than they were in August when we kept them the first time.  I think Mikayla enjoyed the company and even asked last night when the twins would be back!

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Three kids in a tub…doesn’t get much more entertaining than that!

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Nosipho and her many faces

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Smiling Simo

Mikayla has enjoyed playing with all her new Christmas toys in the last few weeks.  Despite being far from family she seemed to get a lot of toys this year!  Her aunts and uncles really made sure she was well taken care of in the toy department!  Thanks everyone who sent us packages!  A special thanks to Pam Cate for some amazing peanut brittle!

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Mikayla and Nosipho enjoying a ride on her swing.

We got a call from our friends Peter, Callista and Aviva to spend New Years at their house.  We happily accepted and on New Years Eve packed up all the kids and headed to Mbabane (about 2 hours from our house).  We enjoyed a great evening of laughter, white bean chili and Settlers of Catan!  That’s right folks, we met a fellow Catan player in Swaziland – Keri.  She was a friend of Peter and Callista’s who joined us for New Year’s Eve.  A Swaziland tradition (at least in town) is that to ring in the New Year, at midnight fireworks are set off.  Since we were on top of a large hill we got a great view of all the fireworks being set off.  We stayed up entirely too late and the kids woke up entirely too early the next morning, but we all had a good time.  We were even able to have a couple of Skype conversations with friends who were ringing in the New Year in the states!

This was also a sad week as we lost a very important member of the Cabrini crew.  One of the sisters’ dogs (Boy) got into a fight with a 7′ black mamba (a poisonous snake) and lost the battle.  Boy managed to kill the snake, but in the process the snake bit him and killed him.  We were all very sad to hear the news.  I think Socks (the other dog) was the saddest of them all.  He spent the next day moping around our front porch and didn’t chase a single bird (his favorite pastime).  He seems to be slowly getting back to his normal self and I even caught him chasing some chickens the other day.  On Friday some of the staff members killed another mamba in our front yard and he started to go help and changed his mind when he saw what it was.  So he isn’t back to himself completely, but he is slowly getting there. 

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One of the few pictures of boy we took!  He was a good dog and reminded us a lot of Shiloh.

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The mamba that killed Boy.

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Mikayla enjoying a mango the Swazi way.  By Swazi way I mean eating it skin and all!

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Week’s Happenings – Christmas Edition

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

We have had a busy Christmas season, although it hasn’t felt much like Christmas here.  The 100 degree days, lack of snow and Christmas decorations made it difficult to really get into the Christmas spirit.  We did our best by listening to Christmas music, hanging stockings and putting up a tree.  Most of our Christmas vacation was spent in South Africa.  We were actually talking to a friend from home this week and decided that our holiday season seemed more like a vacation than a holiday season, so it was different.  But I think we all enjoyed ourselves despite missing family and friends.  The sisters were wonderful and took us under their wings to celebrate with us.

On Thursday of last week we slept in and then headed to Komatipoort, South Africa right on the Mozambique border.  We spent the evening driving around and swimming.  We woke up early on Friday morning and headed to Kruger National Park.  It is one of the biggest game reserves in Southern Africa and is the best known.  We saw some incredible animals.  Whole herds of elephants, lions, giraffes, impala, rhinos, hippos.  You name it and we probably saw it.  We saw four of the Big Five within the first few hours.  The only animals we didn’t see that we really wanted to were cheetahs and leopards.  Although at one point we were pulled off with several other vehicles, including a tour guide, where there was supposedly a leopard in the tree.  We never saw it, but like to pretend that we did!  I am not going to include all of our animal shots, but you can check them out on Ben’s Facebook page if you are curious.  Here are just a couple of snapshots. 

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First elephant we saw for the day and probably the largest!

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Warthog family.  First time I have actually seen a baby warthog.

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Nothing like eating on the go!

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Drinking giraffe. 

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Don’t you just love Mikayla’s hair in this picture!  I swear we brush it every once in awhile.

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I wanted to take this giraffe skull home but Ben said it would be illegal.

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One of our last sightings of the day was this monstrous rhino.  He kept trying to get away, but we finally captured a few good shots.

After a full day of driving around the park (we covered over 300km) we headed towards Nelspruit, South Africa where we spent the rest of our Christmas.  Nelspruit was incredibly western, with almost any type shop you can imagine.  If you didn’t know better you wouldn’t have thought you were in Africa.  On Christmas Eve we drove around the city and checked out some of the shops and malls.  It was amazing how much like the States it felt.  We were lucky enough to find some really special finds.  There were tons of clothing stores, two good outdoors shops, a couple of great liquor stores with good wine and familiar spirits, and a huge Toys R Us (although we didn’t go in this store for obvious reasons).  We even found a candy store that sold Willy Wonka candy!!  Then at the grocery stores we were able to pick up a few things we don’t really see in Swaziland too often – Funfetti cake mix (no Rainbow chip icing though), tortilla chips, salsa in a jar, taco seasoning, corn syrup (stocked up for rolls next year), tahini paste (for hummus), pretzels and few other odds and ends.  That evening we headed to visit with the sisters for pizza and a few games of Boggle.  We also attended the midnight mass before heading back to the hotel. 

We woke up on Christmas morning not really feeling like Christmas at all, but we still tried to get in the spirit of things.  Mikayla opened her stockings and couple of small packages from us.  It took her a good half hour to open her stocking because she would only pull out one thing at a time.  Then she would ask questions about it or play with it for a second before moving on.  We ended up giving her the big gifts before we left so we wouldn’t have to pack them and worry with customs at the border.  All in all I would say she racked up this year with gifts.  She got a table and chairs, her rocking giraffe swing (check out Facebook for the video), a tea set, blocks, a mop and broom cleaning set, tons of books, a new dress, some Signing time DVDs and a few other odds and ends.  And she still has a couple of other packages on their way that haven’t arrived yet.  She was excited about each of them and jumps from one thing to the next now that we are back home.

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Waking up Christmas morning.

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Playing around in the hotel.

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Stockings and small packages on Christmas morning.

After showering and opening packages we headed back to spend some time with sisters for a Christmas brunch and then back again for a fabulous Christmas braai.  Mikayla and Ben were even able to do a little swimming!  We crashed early Christmas evening and then headed home the next day. 

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Cheesy girl enjoying swimming outside in December!

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Swimming with daddy!

We spent yesterday relaxing at home (I started reading Harry Potter and can’t put it down), cleaning and organizing.  Sometime today we will be picking up the twins for a months stay at our house.  The kids from the hostel are on holiday right now (summer vacation) and the twins have been back at their homesteads for about three weeks.  This will be a much different stay for them because they are both relatively healthy now and extremely mobile.  Both are walking/running all over the place!  I think this time it will feel more like we have triplets than just three kids. 

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Kruger Bird Pictures

Monday, December 26th, 2011

We took lots of pictures of animals while in Kruger (you can find them on Ben’s Facebook page), but here are a couple of bird pictures for you.  We haven’t identified all of them yet, but will when we get back home.

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Not a great shot, but still a cool bird!

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This bird was just hanging out on top of a hippo!

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Some of these birds have amazing colors.

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This was some sort of eagle, I think an African fish eagle.

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Love this guy – we have actually seen him around our house too.  His color is beautiful!

I am sure I will post some animal pictures later, but if you want to see them now you can go to Ben’s Facebook page.

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This Week’s Happenings 12/12-12-18

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

Ben had a three day meeting in town this week.  We were sad for him to leave since I was gone so much last week.  But then on his first night he called and said he ended up with a suite and that we should find a ride into town to come stay with him (our car is in the shop).  So on Thursday we got up early and hitched a ride with one of the Cabrini vehicles heading that way to enjoy some time with Ben (although he was in meetings for most of the time).  We got to enjoy some AC, excellent Internet and some rain!  I am starting to get spoiled with all the getaways!

Speaking of getaways, we finalized our holiday plans this week.  We will spend some time in Kruger (one of the largest game reserves) and Nelspruit – both in South Africa.  We will also be spending some time with the sisters.  We will surely miss our families and friends a lot this week, but are hoping to have some decent Internet so we can make some video calls.  We will keep you posted on that.  When we get back we will pick up the twins we kept earlier in the year.  They will have a months stay at the Kickert’s abode during the "summer" break!

We have been thinking for awhile that we wanted to get Mikayla a pool to play it.  It is just so hot!  Well, we finally purchased one this week and I think she is in love.  Originally we planned on getting one of those wide shallow pools, but I think this is going to be even better because she can submerge herself and we can use it as big bath tub if we need to.  It will actually come in really handy when we are keeping the twins.  We have also been having some problems with our shower so it will be nice to bathe ourselves as well.  It is amazing how small things can make such a big difference here.

swimming pool 015

swimming pool 019

Just hanging out in her new pool/tub!

On Saturday I did some baking for the sisters.  They wanted to give some homemade goodies to the priests and sister here.  They had given me a couple of box mixes they picked up in SA last week, but I had some butternut squash that needed to be used.  So I decided to throw some "pumpkin" (aka butternut squash) muffins into the mix.  When I had some leftover puree I decided it was a great chance to try out some Pumpkin Monkey Bread I have had on my radar for a bit.  I am so glad I did because it was delicious.  Maybe even better than traditional monkey bread.  I found the recipe here.  I didn’t take any pictures because our pan was actually too small and it fell out as it rose so high during the baking process, but trust me it was amazing!  Try it, definitely worth the wait time.  If you do try, be sure to read the recipe all the way through before starting because it requires two rise times. 

For all you Clark folks – we will be thinking of you this week as we make the annual cinnamon rolls!  It’s just too bad we will have to eat them all ourselves!

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Feast of Mother Cabrini Video

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the Feast of Mother Cabrini we celebrated and promised a video.  If you are still interested you can click here to see the video. 

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