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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

School starts in a week! and imagination takes us to London...

I babysat a 2.75 year old the other day that says “oh man” often, and it’s adorably precious. He wouldn’t take a nap, and I called his mom and she said to try a video, so I put in a Francis Shaffer lecture that I had never seen before, but unfortunately there were images that were not baby appropriate, and he didn’t fall asleep either. We tried another movie, Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” (read the book it’s better than the movie) but that didn’t put him to sleep either.

We have 3 new girls. 2 (sisters) came last week, and one came yesterday. It was hard to talk to her b/c her eyes were welled up with tears even though she was smiling. Could you imagine something horrible happening to you, and one indirect consequence is that you’re taken away from the only source of love and comfort you’ve known all your life, your 8 brothers and sisters. They are protecting her by putting her here, but I can’t imagine that she feels that protection.

My girls are upstairs singing and playing the guitar together right now. I’m glad to hear them hanging out like that, it doesn’t happen often.

C—-‘s family that tried to adopt her visited this past week. She was ecstatic the whole time they were here, hanging out and loving it. It was a high high, and then a low low. She cried Friday night, trying to hide herself in a closet so as not to bother everyone, and she might have been embarrassed that she’s crying. My girls just turned up the music and tried to sleep. Then she cried off and on all Saturday. It was tough.

School starts next week, which means getting up a lot earlier, more stress in the morning, etc. It feels like summer break was short, but my two “homeschoolers” have been working on their stuff all summer, so maybe that’s why it felt short.

Our streets were graded last week. It is AMAZING the difference on some of the roads. I didn’t get a chance to take a picture though.

One of the men in our town has a jeep, the old rusty kind without a top, and his kids have a toy jeep. As I was outside the other day, he passed me and I noticed a rope attached to the top of his jeep. This rope also was wrapped around his little boys truck. 3 were in the real thing, and 2 in the toy one. SOOOO cute, albeit a little dangerous.

M might have a job! She sold handcrafts (bracelets, bags, etc.) at the market last Friday with a friend of ours. It sounds like she’ll be doing it every Friday. I think this might be the type of job she could do really well at. When she asked to go, she told me she needed to “learn how to work” and I said, “yes, you do.” But I didn’t act excited for her, b/c the moment an adult is excited about something, it’s uncool for a teenager. I chose to make it sound like a privilege. “Did you study enough this week, do your chores, is your room clean? Well then I guess it’s ok with me.” Although I would never want to say she can’t go work, I gotta make her work for it. Har har.

I’ve been waiting for the perfect hot day to swim, jump in the ocean, etc. all summer long. Well, it’s starting to get cool again, and I didn’t do much swimming b/c it was always windy. Now I’ve found out that it’s windy all summer long here. Opps!

We have this problem in our laundry room, that if someone wants to put their things in the dryer, but it already has clothes in it, they dump them out and put the clothes wherever there is room. Well, we’ve started to use clotheslines instead to save money on electricity and gas, and I thought this might also mean less mess in the laundry room. Not so much. I asked C---- to wash her clothes, even though there were some clothes on the 5 clotheslines we have. The next morning I notice all her clothes are on the line, but J---‘s clothes aren’t. I went into the laundry room, and here are his clothes piled on the machine. Apparently, she wasn’t satisfied with using the 2 empty lines, and had decided to take his off the line even though they weren’t dry yet. ☺ what a bad habit!

L--- , 9 yrs old, was left in charge of stirring a rather large pot of pea soup the other night. He was standing on a chair of course, since he’s short. I walked into the kitchen and here he is talking in a funny accent about how we are in London b/c they have a lot of pea soup in London. He has the best imagination ever.

Having the therapist here that specialized in trama of children was FABULOUS. I learned so much that I didn’t know. If only she could have stayed doing therapy with them. But we’ll just be the best parents we can.

Steve Y has heart bypass surgery on the 18th.

Teenagers are so funny. I noticed the other night, that one of them was doing things so other people would notice them, but in such a way that it looked like they weren’t trying to be noticed. Does that make sense? Being seen while acting like they don’t want to be seen.

Well, I put up more photos, adding some to an old album, and making a new one! Enjoy.

Mexico 8

Mexico 9

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