jour·ney [júrnee]process of development: a gradual passing from one state to another regarded as more advanced, e.g. from innocence to mature awareness

Saturday, April 26, 2008

The People's Church team

The week of April 19-26 was one to remember. My home church sent down a construction team. Having people from your home church come visit is an honor to any missionary. Being able to share my experiences with people from my home church was great. My aunt, uncle and cousins were able to come down with the team. Also, Beck Webb, an old friend was able to come down. I loved getting to know all the other team members, they were a blast. There was constant laughter the whole week. The team worked hard and played harder! One night, Andy Green, a fabulous cook headed up the kitchen. With the help of the rest of the team and a couple girls they prepared a wonderful meal for the whole Ranch. I think that I can speak for everyone at the Ranch when I say that we loved the meal. It was a great idea, and everyone at the Ranch was blessed by it. We really liked the green beans! I was able to take the team down to the waterfalls, which anyone who has read my blog before knows is one of my favorite places to go. The teams seemed to have a lot of fun playing in the waterfalls. Really the team seemed to have fun doing everything they did, from card tricks, to putting up walls, to eating cookies, playing soccer and football, going to church in the community, and visiting the medical brigade. They were such a joy to have. The teams main job was to work on the staff housing, they put up the porch (shown in picture) and I think some interior walls, along with plastering and sanding. My aunt and cousins got to visit my class, they picked berries, they applied polyurethane, sanded, and picked up sticks out of the coffee field. Not only was the team fun but they were a blessing too. I was sad to say good-bye to them. It was a great week and I was so thankful they were able to come.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Photo shoot

On this particular day I thought it would be a nice idea to take a picture with my class because I had one of the other teachers digital cameras handy. So I gathered my kids together and bribed them to stand still to take a picture with me. Here are all of our attempts at one good picture . Even the last picture isn't that good but everyone is looking at the camera and I guess that is all I can ask for with 5 preschoolers! Here I appear to be smashing Cristian and Marlon...Daniel is making a face and Yolibeth looks as if she doesn't know what were doing ( I know this because that is not here "camera" face.) Jennifer at least has her act together.
Ok this one is worse than first. I'm no longer crushing anyone, but I'm not smiling either. I look scared, which maybe I was...Yolibeth looks like she wants to eat someone. Marlon is forever distracted by what the other kids are doing, just like in this picture where he is laughing at Yolibeth. Daniel looks smashing with that beautiful smile. Cristian and Jennifer look like they should. We are improving by this picture where Jennifer, Cristian, Yolibeth and I are all looking at the camera and smiling. I'm sure inwardly I was crying since Marlon is standing on my feet, which look twisted to the side in a painful way topped by 35 pounds of Marlon. Daniel is being "funny."Finally we have a keeper. Not the best picture ever but pretty darn cute! We are all looking at the camera. Everyone is smiling except Marlon, whom I'm sure is mad because once again I said to him "Stand still and look at the camera" and he is way past interested in taking a picture. In fact he was probably past taking pictures before the first one was taken, so it was a challenging 3 minutes for him. Daniel is kind of blocking Jennifer a little and is doing something interesting with he shirt that he took off, I guess he wanted to show off his muscles. Jennifer is the winner of "Good picture taker" because she is the only that is ready for every picture. Yolibeth looks sassy with her foot kicked up. Cristian has a fake smile on his face...but hey he is 4 what do I expect?

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Superpowers!

The other day I was reading to the kindergarten class when I noticed one of the kids sticking a metal hair clip into the electric outlet. I of course took the hair clip from them immediately, and started explaining the dangers of sticking stuff into electric outlets. I told them how it could really hurt them. They asked me lots of questions about how it worked and what might happen to them if they did in fact try to stick something in those fascinating little holes in the wall. I answered all of their question and felt that I made it very clear that getting shocked hurts very badly and they didn't want to mess around with it. Then Junior looked at me and said "I have superpowers so it wont hurt me if I stick something in there." I told him that unfortunately it still hurts people that did have superpowers and not to stick anything into it. I thought that Junior's response was such a classic human response to someone warning us against something that could be harmful to us. To some degree I think most humans think that we are invincible. We pick and choose what advice we listen. We might even listen to what someone says and say, "yeah they have a point, that might be true for someone, but I think it's OK for me." As we get older we have less and less people telling us their opinions about life, but God's word stands for all of us and there are lots of commands God gives us that we do not heed to. We think "but that is such a little thing...it doesn't matter." The thing is though, if it didn't matter to God then he wouldn't have said it in the first place. Listen to Junior's response made me laugh initially, but made me really think about myself and the way I as a human respond so often to advice given to me.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

54

That's how many ticks we pulled off her!Gross right? That's what I thought. She obtained these little friends rather quickly. With the help of Ron we got them all out. I soaked her in tick and flea spray. Hopefully the ticks will leave her alone.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Letters

Here are two precious pictures. The first picture is the alphabet written on a white board by Jennifer. She did almost every letter by memory. She likes making her letters and was quite proud of herself. Although some of her letters are backwards I think she did very well. Jennifer is a very smart little girl. The second photo is mostly the same as the first. It is once again the alphabet, only now in Daniel style. You can see Daniel holding his white board. Daniel is much more shy about his letters than Jennifer, so he wanted me to write most of the letters on a separate board for him to copy. He is a sweety! I'm proud of both Jennifer and Daniel. I love looking at their shakey letters that they worked so hard to make. I enjoy having them in my class and watching them learn new things everyday. I love to watch their delight as the learn how to do something new. What cuties!