{"id":3423,"date":"2012-06-25T12:27:47","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T17:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/2012\/06\/25\/this-weeks-happenings-617-624\/"},"modified":"2012-06-25T12:27:47","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T17:27:47","slug":"this-weeks-happenings-617-624","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/2012\/06\/25\/this-weeks-happenings-617-624\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Happenings 6\/17-6\/24"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We had a pretty uneventful week here in Swaziland, but here are a few highlights.<\/p>\n<p>Last week we decided that we would partner with Joe and have a garden together.&#160; We all wanted a garden, but none of us wanted to do the work by ourselves&#8230;enter teamwork!&#160; The ground is very hard at our garden plot (right outside of Joe&#8217;s house), but we were able to dig about 1\/3 of it out and prep the ground.&#160; Basically you dig a big ditch and then alternate filling it with manure, straw and dirt.&#160; This helps to aerate and enriches the soil.&#160; We hope to finish digging in the next week or so and then plant by July.&#160; We will see!&#160; We worked again this week and were able to get three of the four berms finished.&#160; One more weekend and we should be about ready to plant.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 005\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 005\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-005.jpg\" width=\"297\" height=\"444\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>Ben and Mikayla hanging out in the ditch before we filled it back up to make our berms.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>We have always known that we had a condiment obsession.&#160; Most of the time our condiment shelves in the fridge are overflowing.&#160; Since arriving in Swaziland and restocking our fridge and pantry, we have also developed a &quot;heat&quot; obsession too.&#160; Particularly a hot sauce and chili obsession.&#160; We pulled these gems out of the fridge and spice rack.&#160; We also have a bag full of frozen chilies in the freezer and a whole rack of chili&#8217;s drying in our laundry room.&#160; Do you think we have enough?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 011\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 011\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-011.jpg\" width=\"444\" height=\"247\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>From left to right:&#160; Ben&#8217;s homemade Peri-Peri sauce, homemade chili paste, dried bird&#8217;s eye chilies, Peri peri sauce (sweeter), Tony&#8217;s Cajun seasoning (our favorite), a Mexican seasoning we picked up here, Chili powder, Ben&#8217;s homemade hot sauce, dried and crushed chilies, Nando&#8217;s Peri Peri seasoning (Nando&#8217;s is a local chicken food chain), Black mamba hot sauce (delicious), Nando&#8217;s garlic Peri Peri (also delicious) and in the front row we have Black Mamba chili paste and Cayenne pepper.&#160; I guess you could say we love some heat!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Sometimes Ben comes up with the best inventions and sometimes they are just plain silly.&#160; He would call the following a &quot;best invention&quot;, I call it just plain silly!&#160; Instead of pouring Mikayla a glass of milk he took two straws and put them together to make a large straw so she could drink milk out of the box\/carton.&#160; By the way, have I mentioned the milk here before?&#160; It is what they call long life milk and you buy it off of the shelf.&#160; It will last for months in the pantry and then three days once you open it in the fridge.&#160; I hate the taste of it, but for convenience sake it is nice because we don&#8217;t have a grocery around the corner to purchase milk from when we need it.&#160; I am looking forward to a nice glass of real milk when we head back to the states (along with some Mexican food and a few other staples)!<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 018\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 018\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-018.jpg\" width=\"444\" height=\"297\" \/>&#160;<em>Don&#8217;t you just love her mischievous face here?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Early in the week we were painting some rocks for our learning time and I ran inside to get something.&#160; When I came back out this is what I found.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 012\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 012\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-012.jpg\" width=\"444\" height=\"297\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 014\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 014\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-014.jpg\" width=\"444\" height=\"297\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>Turn your eyes for five seconds and this is what a toddler does with paint!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>After Mikayla found out her friend Lylah could draw people a few weeks ago she decided she wanted to give it a go.&#160; (Do you think she gets the competiveness from Ben or me?)&#160; We have been working for a couple of weeks on drawing stick people and she has finally caught on (sort of).&#160; Here are some snapshots of her people from this week.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 015\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 015\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-015.jpg\" width=\"444\" height=\"297\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 016\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 016\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-016.jpg\" width=\"325\" height=\"444\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>Can you see the tiny feet at the bottom?&#160; She hasn&#8217;t quite got the hang of drawing the feet yet!<\/em><\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Ben caught the stomach bug I had a couple of weeks ago at the end of the week so we laid low.&#160; Unfortunately I came down with something on Friday and Saturday we were both pitiful!&#160; Good news though, we are both feeling better today!<\/p>\n<p>Here is a bird for Steve.&#160; I think we have posted this bird before, but it was before he had his Swazi bird book!&#160; These birds look really cool when they are flying because of their long tail feathers.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"Letter R, birds 001\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Letter R, birds 001\" src=\"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Letter-R-birds-001.jpg\" width=\"444\" height=\"444\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had a pretty uneventful week here in Swaziland, but here are a few highlights. Last week we decided that we would partner with Joe and have a garden together.&#160; We all wanted a garden, but none of us wanted to do the work by ourselves&#8230;enter teamwork!&#160; The ground is very hard at our garden [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-3423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-weeks-happenings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kickert.info\/beth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}