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Over Thanksgiving Weekend, we drove an hour away to Kijabe where RVA is located. We spent from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning at our annual AIM Kenya Spiritual Life Conference. It was Great!
We stayed in a dorm and had 3 dorm rooms and a bathroom to ourselves. The dorm parents where wonderful. All the boarding school kids are on Christmas break so the dorm was empty except the family that lives there. An answer to prayer to have Seth in his own room at night.
We ate in the cafeteria 3 times a day. Very good food, no cooking for me or dishes.
We had a speaker from the UK who was very good. The theme for the week was ‘Guarding the Truth’. Very pertinent. I came away refreshed and ready to persevere some more. I managed to make it to every session and Ryan only missed once.
The kids did VBS with a Narnia theme. Caleb loved it! Levi had a class for his age group. Towards the end, he was hesitant to go but his teacher said he was in the 99th percentile of everything. I was very proud. Seth didn’t like his nursery but managed. There was consistently 2 Kikuyu mama’s for every session (morning and evening). And even if he wasn’t crazy about it, they got to know him. He took naps in a separate room full of pack and plays. Took his bottle for them. They got to know when he was tired when he puts his hands behind his head. And they held him most of the time. Occasionally they would join Levi’s classroom and he plaid with duplos. I was thrilled that he was over his stranger anxiety enough to stay in nursery.
I went to conference with low expectations (having preschoolers does that to moms) and was pleasantly surprised and blessed. The kids did great, no one got sick. We were exhausted but had lots of family time every afternoon. Ryan and I got to hear God’s Word.
Caleb recently figured out the remote control for the TV. It's tempting to teach him how to work the VCR. Especially when we (the parents) wish to sleep in on Saturdays. He could start a movie and get cereal for him and Levi. Maybe Seth could talk for a while in his crib and we can sleep in til 7 am. That's all we want, to sleep in til 7 am. But the VCR is out of reach, so no go. 
I love the view from my kitchen window. The rains are here in earnest making everything green and flowering. It looks a bit like an English garden if I do say so myself. Ruth came over to borrow something and stepped into my kitchen. She lives 2 houses down and has the same back yard space that I do. And she exclaimed how pretty my yard is. It really is.
We try to eat at our picnic table as much as we can but lately with the rains, it’s been a bit cool. The other day I made myself a fantastic cup of coffee. Whipped cream, hazelnut flavor, just perfect. And took it with some home decorating magazines to sit in my back yard where no one could see me. I sat uninterrupted for 45 minutes. Seth was napping and the 2 big boys had boots on and were puddle jumping. BLISS!
I have had a horrendous cold/flu for the last 2 weeks. We have all had it in the following order Caleb, Ryan, Levi, Me, and Seth. I who never get sick have been sick once in September with strepp throat type symptoms and now this. Seth sounds like he has a frog in his throat. The end of sickness is in sight. I drank 8 ounces of fresh carrot juice yesterday. Not bad. Can’t get Seth to go near carrot juice. He loves milk in his bottle. Period.
But I am happy! I like my house a lot. I love my yard. My kids are doing great. Home schooling is getting easier. Even math and hand writing. I am not homesick for the states but do wish I could be at my folks for Christmas. We are putting our tree up this Saturday. The kids can’t wait. And I have been busy Christmas shopping. The toys here are either cheap and too breakable or way to expensive. So I am becoming more creative.
Conference is next week at Kijabe. Over thanksgiving weekend. That is always fun. No cooking. No sleep. Good speaker. See lots of other missionaries I only see once or twice a year. And we usually get sick, again!
I can’t wait to get to heaven today. I have different reasons on different days why I look forward to my Lord’s return. Nothing lofty or anything, actually quite selfish. I get tired of counting two things.
I made a list of all the different accounts that need to stay balanced each month.
Two credit cards
US check book
Kenya account
Supporter salary statements
Work Funds
All of these relate to each other. If one gets off balance, the tower comes tumbling down!
In heaven I don’t have to count. Even now when there is enough to go around, I look forward to the day when there will ALWAYS BE an ABUNDANCE!
I weighed myself this morning like I do every morning. I usually guess what I feel like I weigh before I get on the scale. The number I see will tell me what will be comfortable to wear the rest of the day.
I’ve lost 15 pounds since Christmas. That is a pants size. What motivated me was that there were so many clothes in my dresser that didn’t fit. What a shame. Now they fit and my Christmas, Home Assignment clothes fall off me. This made me happy for a while but on days like today, I just wanted a comfy pair of jeans that gave a little in the waist. Either I have jeans that fit well or are bunchy in the crotchy. So to get comfy jeans, I could lose another 5 lbs. I am quite sick of counting weight watcher points and feeling chubby when I really am not. My close friends have noticed that I’ve lost since returning to Kenya. I’ve had three kids and major surgery and I notice it on me even if no one else does.
When I do my grocery shopping, meal planning, and baking. I think should I really buy this cause I’ll most likely be the one to eat it? How can I cook this meal with fewer calories even though my hubby and kids could use a little extra fat on them? Should I bake this cause my kids like it or I like it?
I thought of my sister Sarah today. She has identified ‘eating’ days. I think they come monthly. And I am having one today. I am just hungry and trying to stay disciplined. I might succeed. I might not. Don’t ask me tomorrow!!!
In heaven, I will look amazing! And I can eat from my Lord’s Table as much and as often as I want. And the food will not taste like it’s made from low fat milk products and sugar free sweetners.
Mocha’s made with full caffeine, Hershey’s chocolate, and whole milk. Give me a triple.
Lucky Charms with extra charms and more than ½ cup serving.
Toast with butter and fully sweetened jam.
Lunchmeat sandwiches with extra cheese and lots of mayo.
Iced Tea with lots of sugar.
Chips with dip.
Chocolate chip cookies dipped in milk.
Sirloin steak with mushroom sauce.
Twice baked Potatoes.
Fresh cooked veggies with butter and salt.
Salad dripping in Ranch dressing.
Cheesy garlic bread.
Beverage of my choosing.
Chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream with chocolate syrup, walnuts, and two cherries on top.
And the next day would be a completely different menu for eternity!
Every Monday Caleb and Levi attend monkeynastics. It’s a South Africa based program and I am using it to replace the home schooling PE program I am supposed to be doing with Caleb. I’m not a PE kind of person and they have a lot more fun at monkeynastics than they would have with me!
Levi’s class is for 2-3 year olds from 11:00 to 11:30 am and Caleb is 4-6 year olds from 11:30 to 12:00 am. It’s at another compound 2 blocks from our house.
They love it. They do something different each week and are also learning how to stand in line, wait their turns, pay attention to directions, and not chatter all the time. As I watch them, the program is a lot about coordination and balance. Throwing balls at a target and catching it as it bounces back at them, walking on a short balance beam, locking their elbows to hold their weight on parallel bars.
Levi can be quick to say I can’t do it. But his class size is small enough that the instructor takes time with him until he succeeds. Than we cheer, his confidence is bolstered, and this past Monday, he didn’t try to give up at all!
Caleb asks almost daily, is today monkeynastics day. He’s slowly learning the days of the week. They get special t-shirts to wear and at the end of the term, they each get a medal. I get to watch my kids have fun and talk to other moms I don’t get to see very often.
The baby had a hook in his tail. And then the diver came and helped the baby dolphin and the dolphin was scared. He saw the diving knife and then the mom and dad went to get it. And then the two sharks came and wham and wham, the mother and father whamed it. And blood was buffeling out of the shark. And the diver didn’t help the sharks because they didn’t have any hooks in him. And the shark was coming after the baby dolphin and the diver. The mother dolphin came along and whammed it in the gill.
The End.
Read this first and the pictures will make more sense!
Wow!! Where do I start to tell you about the great vacation that we had, so I guess I need to start at the beginning. We left Nairobi at 7:45 Sunday morning, Ryan and Dawn were in the front seat and Oma sat behind Dawn and then Sethers in the middle and Levi behind Ryan. Caleb had his own car seat way in the back behind Levi. And off we went!! Caleb had his own little nest in the back with his treasure box, blanket and bunny. He sits there so quiet you don't even know he's along. Seth is still too small to sit forwards so he faced me and that was good because I can see him all the time. Levi was great, jabbers some but else plays with his toys. We stopped at noon for french fries and chicken at a restaurant gas station and to use the toilet. Oops, I forgot we stopped two times before that for a bathroom break behind the bushes. What fun, you kids know because you have done it. Anyway we got to the restaurant and used the toilet there which is a porcelain hole in the ground which you squat above and pee on your legs it so great!! The boys of course could go by a bush and they were done. The roads are really good about 75% of the way but the last 20 miles is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. They are doing construction and the road is barely wide enough for the big semis and other cars. So people go crazy, passing on the left off the shoulder, there were times I just shut my eyes and didn't dare look. Ryan was a good driver; it’s the other people who were crazy. We seen tanker trucks rolled over on their sides and lots of big trucks stopped halfway up a hill because they didn't have enough power to go further up. So around 2 p.m. we hit the really, really, really bumpy part, Caleb had been sleeping maybe 20 minutes and then when the bumps came he woke up and shouted at Ryan "Dad, stop it, Dad stop it!! He had big big tears rolling down his cheeks. But he settled down after a bit, on the way home Seth was sleeping in the bumpy part and I had to hold his head with my hand so it won't roll all over.
We got to Mombassa around three and went shopping for a few groceries and vegetables. and then had to take a ferry across to our cottage. The kids liked that. It held trucks, bikes, cars and lots of people. The space from one side to the other was maybe two blocks. We got lots of looks at our truck and our white faces and blond hair and even the gray Oma in the back seat.
We arrived at our house at 5 p.m. and were very pleasantly surprised at how it looked. The people who had been there before called it "rustic" which can mean a whole lot of different things. I will explain it to you. It was a building that had three houses/apartment/cottages, whatever, I will call it our house. When you walk in on your right wall was three bedrooms. Seth slept in one in the pack-play and Levi and Caleb each had a twin bed to themselves, Dawn and Ryan had a double bed and Oma slept on the front porch. It my opinion I had the best spot. OK so then starting from the back door again you had the kitchen and bath, then dinning room and living room all one big room. The front porch went the whole length of the house. Martha - the caretaker - had made a bedroom out of sheets over the windows and a sheet cut off my bedroom from the rest of the porch, I loved it. The first morning was the greatest, I could hear the ocean waves hitting the shore, and you know how I love that. The sunrise over the ocean was so beautiful and so were the sunsets. About the house inside, I guess you could say rustic - it was very `clean, with cement floors sort of painted in spots. There were mosquito’s nets above the beds, but we didn't need to use them, I found one mosquitoes the whole time I was there. In the dining room was a picnic table for our table, and some chairs and a bigger couch and a love seat in the living room. It was interesting that most of the windows between rooms and had been taken out, so you could step over half a wall and be in the next bedroom. They had curtains on but the noise factor was always a problem. Dawn and I like it because we could go in one bedroom and peek at Seth in his bed. They also had fans, which was nice. They did hear me snore but I heard Ryan snore too. I slept so good there, of course after running after three boys and doing dishes till they came out of my ears kept me going.
We really enjoyed the tides of the ocean, it came in at 6 p.m. and out at midnight and then came in again 6 a.m. that’s why could hear it in the morning when I woke up. We were so close to the water, you could see the ocean from our house out of every room. Anyway, by 10:30 a.m. it was starting to go back out and from one to five was so much fun. You could walk and walk out and find all kinds of good things. The first day Caleb started collecting crabs. They were very small with a quarter size body and lots of legs. He had a yellow bucket which he carried everywhere and colleted things. On Wednesday I found a hermit crab on the sidewalk and dared to pick it up and show Ryan. It had little claws, and I didn't know if it was poison or not but I carried it anyway. Well, after that Caleb started collection hermit crabs. By Friday he had at least 12-14 crabs in this bucket. He put sand in and water and they lived very happily. Some had checker tops and some were white and others all different colors. There were poison shells that looked like a ball with porcupine shells on them, a sea urchin - if you stepped on them you would be in big trouble. Around 4:30 Caleb and Levi would go swimming in the little pools of water in the ocean.
We didn't get any help doing dishes but we did have someone do laundry for us which was very necessary because lots of time the boys went thru three or four sets of clothes a day. There is a fisherman who fishes early in the morning and comes to the house with fresh fish. We told Martha we wanted shrimp, they call them prawns. So on Tuesday he came with about 100 fresh shrimp fresh from the ocean. He cleaned them and deveined them for us for about $10. They were yummy we made shrimp scampi, and barbequed them on the charcoal fire.
On Tuesday, Ryan, dawn, Caleb and Levi went to a nice hotel were you could pay to swim for the day and have lunch there. They took their snorkeling stuff along to see how the boys did in the pool with their snorkeling stuff. They both tried but Levi’s was too big for him and they enjoyed swimming more. I had a nice quiet day with just Seth.
They wanted to go to this island, which was about two hours away where you snorkel and ride a dhow but they decided the boys were too little and it would be better to do it in a few years.
Friday night we started packing up and left there yesterday morning at 8:30 and didn't get home until 5:45 last night. It was a very long day. Dawn gave Levi and Seth benadryl in the morning and they slept some and were a bit calmer. In the afternoon they got another dose and they slept again. But Seth was so tired of the car the last hour was a long time. Today we are all tired and stayed home from church to recuperate from our vacation.
Sayings from the boys _ Levi said to me last night "Are you going to stay here, you can't” Why can't I stay here, I said, " because you need to go home and live with Babu. He said, " you are a Oma, not a mother like my mom is." I said, but I’m your mom's mommy, he said no, your not. End of story.
Caleb - I blow kisses to Jesus all the time, I have Jesus in my heart and my head He's in my head so your thinking about him and he's in my heart which shows you love Him.
Seth - he is starting to worm crawl on his belly. If you entice him with something a couple feet ahead of him he will crawl to it. When you put him to bed on his back, and look he's sitting up playing with the side of the pack n play. His favorite word is Hi, and he uses it a lot. He also says “Boo, dis, dat, and mommy and daddy. We are working on Oma. But no luck.
View of the Kitchen.
Front Porch and Oma's bedroom on the end.
Seth on the Verandah
Caleb and Levi at the gate to the beach.
