Our School Break So Far

My kitchen is a wreck and the curtains I am making are lying on the ironing board waiting for me to put the ruffle back on the bottom -the one I had to rip out all 60 something inches of stitches from last night. So, instead of cleaning and sewing I decided to do a little update, just to let you know what’s been going on around here in the southern hemisphere.

Recently Luke and Abby went with Charlie and a group from our church, Igreja Baptist das Mahotas, to do a children’s outreach in another neighborhood. They played games, told Bible stories, sang songs. Charlie was asked to bring balloons but all he could find were those tiny water balloon kind. Luke was amazed at how the smallest of children could blow up these balloons that he could not.

Coleson has been cooking and baking lately which is horrible for my waistline but very delicious. (Well, what used to be my waistline.) He’s even mastered the art of making homemade tortillas. Then, yesterday he decided he wanted to learn to sew. (Shhh…..don’t tell his friends!) I was not using the sewing machine at that moment so I showed him how to sew a straight line. He went to town making a little bag. Then I had to leave the room and while I was gone the bobbin ran out of thread. Abby, age 8, had apparently been watching me so she showed him a full bobbin and explained to him how to change it out. Yes, this is the same thing I had to watch a YouTube tutorial to figure out because I could not remember how to do it. Oh and the boy plays a mean guitar. One of the things he sewed was a little pocket for his guitar picks. I tell him all the time he's going to make a great husband someday.

Will has been organizing soccer games with the neighborhood boys. They come to our gate to call him out to play. He’s 15 and over 6 ft. tall and they are all about 9, but they love that he plays with them and he supplies the soccer ball and plastic cones for goals. He likes it that he gets to boss a group of kids around and not get in trouble for it. I guess you could say he is honing his leadership skills! Will keeps me on my toes with his dry wit and deep sense of justice. This boy has probably given me 98% of the gray hairs on my head but I love him so much. He recently shaved off all the “fur” growing on his face.

#3 son, Luke, joins in the neighborhood soccer games until he gets fed up of being led by his older brother and comes in declaring that he’s never playing again, life is horrible, soccer is stupid. Then an hour later he is back out at it again. He’s also been drawing up a storm. Today he taught his oldest brother how to cut a paper chain of children. Impressed I asked him where he learned to do that. He said, “You taught me when I was in 1^st grade!”. I did??? It’s that memory problem again.

Abby has been my right hand man in the kitchen as always, anticipating my every move. She loves to help me. Until she figures out that she’s actually working she suddenly has somewhere else she needs to be. I try and convince her that washing dishes is just “water play”. We recently discovered that the child can’t see much past a few feet in front of her face. She has to sit right in front of the TV to see it and recently told me that at school she had to go stand right in front of the board to see what her homework assignments were. (She never mentioned that to us nor did her teacher!!!) Sunday night at church she said she couldn’t see the words to the songs up on the screen so she said she just sang them out of her head. She has an eye appointment this coming Monday morning.

Abby sitting right in front of the TV. We were watching

the old movie, Woman of the Year, starring Katherine

Hepburn and Spencer Tracey (1942). We love that movie.

And yes we still are still old school and occasionally watch videos!

You know those old clunky VHS tapes???

Abby and I took Tater for a walk yesterday.

We found this checkerboard that some neighborhood guard

had made out of an old piece of wood and 2 liter pop bottle tops.

Luke recently declared himself the family photographer.

Most of the pictures look like this.

Charlie’s been busy with work , which lately has included rescuing wayward bats that made their way into the boy’s bedroom. I don’t even want to think how that creature got inside our house.

Since the kids have been out of school I have been refereeing skirmishes, cooking, washing dishes, sweeping, hanging out laundry, sewing, coughing, sneezing, blowing my nose, shopping, answering questions, arguing, discussing, laughing, trying to find ways to get out of playing school with my 9 and 11 year old (I convinced them to set up the stuffed animals and dolls on the stairway right beside me so I could observe their classroom while I sewed.). Thankfully I have not had to clean up throw-up, clean a wound, plunge a toilet (that’s for the big boys to do!), touch a bat, or kill a mouse. But the summer/winter is not over yet!