I am hoping to get back into a regular routine of blogging each week, but I am not making any promises!  Over the last two weeks a few exciting things have happened around here.

Last week some new volunteers arrived.  Natalie, from California, will be with Cabrini until March and Scooter, from Illinois and a former Peace Corp Volunteer in Mozambique, will be here until April.  They will both be helping out with childcare, specifically with the education portion of things.  It is nice to have some girls I can relate to around the mission again!  We are also hoping to take full advantage of Scooter’s knowledge of Mozambique while she is here  (she was there for three years) and head that direction at least once.  It is only about 2-3 hours away, but visas to into the country are a little pricey (around $80 USD a person), so we shall see if it happens or not.

Also in the last week Joe arrived back to the mission.  Mikayla was particularly excited to see him and tried to give him a recap of the last month in one day.  I think it was a little overwhelming for him!  We are glad to have him back.

A lot has happened in the childcare department in the last week.  First, all the kids returned to the hostel from school break and started back into a new school year, including three new Grade one students.  We also had our parents/guardians meeting complete with some beautiful singing from the choir and dancing from some girls.  (We have a parents/guardians meeting each time the kids return from a school break.)  Lastly, we accepted a new "baby" to the hostel on Friday.  Her name is Dansile (pronounced Don-see-lay) and she is almost three years old.  She is a beautiful child, but very sick.  I got the privilege of holding her through our 1.5 hour long "Blessing Service" to welcome the students back on Friday evening.  It reminded me of when Simo and Nosipho first arrived at the hostel and made me sad all over again about the untimely death of Simo.

Over the course of the last two weeks I have had a lot of meetings about the education department and trying to get everything rolling on the right foot first thing this year!  It has been a little stressful trying to squeeze in meetings, Mikayla and family time, but we have figured it out!  Ben was great this week because there were a couple of times when it just didn’t make since for me to take a three year old to a meeting or she was still napping so I didn’t want to wake her up and he kept Mikayla.  They had some great daddy/daughter time!  I was even able to take an entire day to head in with some of our high school graduates to go shopping for a trip they were getting to take to the USA.  I am so grateful for a husband who is willing to work from home or take some time off to spend time with Mikayla so I can also do some work!

For Christmas we got Mikayla a soccer ball and so we have been enjoying playing that with her (as well as all her other gifts) over the last few weeks.  Here she is dressed up in her princess gear and rain boots trying to kick the soccer ball!  Too funny.

And here are a few more pictures from our last few weeks:

Touchdown!  Since we have AC in our room, on really hot days we have been letting Mikayla crash on our couch.  Clearly she was dreaming about football here!

Enjoying some cherries!  She loves them!

Enjoying a butterfly caught on an adventure with daddy!

And a really creepy spider found on our fence!  Front side…

…and backside!  Like I said, creepy!  You can also get a feel for how big he is by the size of the regular chain link fence!

Until next week!

Have you missed us?  The month of September (and part of August) was filled with travels to the US (hope to blog about some of our adventures in the future).  While we were there I took a blogging hiatus to enjoy time with family and friends.  But now we are back home and back to the grind!  We were so busy/tired last week that I didn’t get a chance to blog, but this morning I woke up before Ben and Mikayla and decided to do a little blogging.

When we got back to Swaziland we were in the midst of a very busy time for Cabrini Ministries. Ben was working on year end reports and annual progress reports.  Plus we had a special visit from the regional director for HIV care for Southern Africa with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and a bunch of other country big wigs.  This paired with the arrival of other visitors on the same day made for a really stressful and busy Tuesday of last week!  We started our slew of visitors by saying goodbye to two sister candidates from the states and two from Ethiopia who had been here for several weeks (they arrived just before we departed).  We also had a medical team in from Australia doing healthy child physicals throughout our catchment area.  Then we had a three month intern arrive as well as a former volunteer back to do research for a couple of weeks.  Eesh!  It has been a whirlwind. I spent most of last week cleaning and prepping the volunteer house for our new visitors.  I also cooked a lot of extra food last week because the team was gone from like 6am to early evening each day going non-stop.  We said goodbye to the Australian team last Sunday and everyone was able to take a big sigh of relief and breath a little easier.  We were still busy, but able to get back to a semi-normal routine!  We even started our first week of preschool this past week!

Yesterday, we celebrated Joe’s birthday.  It was pretty low key, but we had some yummy food and good laughs!  Ben and Mikayla even made him a rainbow cake for his birthday!  We will really celebrate his birthday in a couple of weeks when both of the sisters are back.  He has requested a Dessert themed party, so that should be interesting. 

Today we will take Sister Barbara to the airport for a two week trip to the US and spend a little time in town grabbing a bite to eat and grocery shopping.

Ben and Mikayla made Twizzler glasses one day that were hysterical!