The fat baby... Ezra in his whale towel after bath time.

Caleb enjoying strawberry shortcake

Dancing the blues away

So I'm using my time as a single mom to influence my boys in ways their father would not approve. :)

Brant is gone into Nduga land for 5 days, with two other guys who are moving into the tribe in the coming months. They needed to pick house sites, measure out an airstrip and search for usable water sources, among other things. Brant went along, mostly for the experience, but also because there is a slim possibility we might join this team.

So the boys and I are on day 3 of him being gone. :P Do not like it at all. We're doing okay - and I'm having some triumphant moments - like getting us all out the door before 8:30 this morning (8:29!), so I could be at our weekly town team meeting (which starts at 8:30 - but I tried!) I had never driven all 3 boys by myself before and am happy to say we are all still alive.

I've been trying to keep us really busy and doing lots of fun things to keep our minds off missing Brant. Poor Caleb really misses Brant - any time we go anywhere - whether outside or to the meeting this morning or to the library (after the meeting), he spends the first several minutes running around "Daddy? Daddy here?" - looking for Brant.

For the most part it's been working, except that I really miss Brant. I didn't realize how much I just enjoy sharing the day with him - all the funny things the boys do, all the news we get via email, and all the random things I need to tell him (yard worker's dad died, hosting the town team meeting next week, etc) Today Elijah was giving Ezra a pre-bedtime hug and kiss and said "Mom, I like Ezra. Let's keep him forever." Will I remember to tell Brant that on Thursday when I see him again? (Probably yes, now that I've written it down, but you get the point....)

Anyways, tonight during blueberry pancakes and pineapple, we were listening to old techno music and started dancing all crazy in our chairs. It was really fun, spontaneous and incredible non-sense. So after dinner, we had a "dance party" which consisted of me spinning the little boys around and them crashing into each other. Brant hates to dance... though he does try for my sake. So I have determined that my boys are going to know how to dance and be confident in it.... so working on starting early while Dad's not around. :)

Success

Tonight was pill night... once a week we take 4-5 pills to prevent malaria. Everyone here has different methods for getting their kids to take these nasty tasting bits of good health. Most people spread peanut butter and chocolate on bread and crush the pills on top. But since we're not much into high doses of sugar right before bed time, we have opted to teach our 4 year old and 2 year old to swallow pills like the grown little men they are.

Our first pill night took 2 hours... the first hour was spent calculating everyone's weights in kilograms and figuring out how much medicine each of us needed... and figuring out how to cut the pills into thirds and fourths so the little boys got the right dosages. The second hour consisted of screaming and holding the boys down while we jammed pills down their throats - or should I say holding Elijah down... Caleb took his pills like a pro - he tends to be a medicine junkie. After that first traumatic night with Elijah we looked ahead to years of the same and cried. I was a notoriously horrible pill taker as a kid and couldn't swallow a pill to save my life until college. I remember many times where my mom shoved a pill down my throat, poured lots of water in and then shook her head in exasperation as I managed to keep the pill in my mouth....

Anyways, 3 months later, I cut all our pills and portioned them out without checking my cheat sheet for the first time tonight. (I did go back and recheck with the sheet after I was done!) The other major accomplishment of the night was Elijah took the pills in his little hand, put them in his mouth and swallowed them, two at a time, all by himself - his reward of little yogurt drink sitting in front of him. My mother would have been so proud. I was so proud. Another milestone passed.

Let them eat shortcake and feta cheese

Yesterday started as one of those "feeling sorry for myself" days. I continually struggle under the workload of this house - I could use a lot of adjectives before that noun... horrible, awful, horrible, awful, horrible... our house is wooden planks and plastic windows, and truthfully a lot nicer than the one we will have in the tribe because at least here the boards were sanded and planed before being nailed together, as Brant points out. But I hate living in a wooden house. You can see the ground through the cracks in the floor and the sky through the cracks in the walls. Hence, the dirt and dust comes in unabated. It is a continual battle with the broom against dust bunnies the size of Ezra and against the spiders and ants and lizards that think our floor cracks are their open door to our home.

Plus the electricity was off all day yesterday and the generator was out of gas, so by lunch I was hot and sticky and grouchy. So sitting at lunch, we listed all the things we were thankful about living here. My favorite was feta cheese... here on the edge of the world, in this back corner of a 3rd world country, you can buy feta cheese. Granted, not all the time and not at every grocery store, but occasionally you can find it - for less than what you have to pay in the States even. To me, feta cheese is the ultimate luxury item - it has no use or nutritional value other than making salads or burgers or whatever taste a little bit better. So, as we were enjoying our pasta salad with feta cheese, I thanked the Lord for such small luxury items as feta cheese.

Definitely put me in a better mood to remember my blessings, so I headed out to the (air-conditioned!) grocery store to try to procure some food for the week. Grocery shopping here is like a treasure hunt every week... you never know what will be available at the store. Surprise, this week they are out of flour! Hope you didn't need any... For months they have not had any butter, but this week the shelves were stocked with butter. No sugar though... I don't think they have had any since we have gotten here. Anyways, no matter what is on my list, it always take me an hour at the grocery store just to go up and down all the aisles and see what happens to be available this week. It is a good week if I come home with only 2 or 3 things that I could not find at the store; some weeks more than half my list is not available. (Yesterday it was raisins and cereal that were not stocked... we will be eating lots of eggs and homemade yogurt this week for breakfast!) But often times there are treasures to be found... once it was dried fruit from the States, one time I found my coveted feta cheese, and yesterday the treasure of all treasures... fresh strawberries!

Now granted, I had found fresh strawberries once before, about a month ago. The produce section had exactly four tiny cartons of them, and every one of them was moldy. Not exactly how I wanted to spend $4.50. But yesterday, there were actually several dozen little boxes of berries... all plump and bright red and smelling soooo good... and at the reduced price of $2.50 a box, I couldn't resist a couple boxes.

So last night, I made strawberry shortcake. I had left over cream from our ice cream making venture on the 4th and whipped up some biscuits and topped it with little red berries. It was fun to have dessert for no reason at all... the boys were so excited they were dancing all around. We played games together and ate dessert and let the boys stay up and were thankful for good times as a family... even on the edge of the world.

4th of July

Yesterday was really fun. We had a 4th of July party for all the people from our mission here in town. The highlight was the hamburgers. Beef is really expensive here and poor quality, so serving up 1/3 pound hamburgers was more meat than most people eat in a week. The boys had a good time - Elijah cried when the water balloons ran out, cried when the sparklers ran out and cried when we told him he couldn't have anymore homemade ice cream. Caleb cried when he tried to hold his sparkler from the wrong end.

It was a nice end to a long, hard week. I had kinda hit a wall in the whole culture acclimation process and was grouchy and hating every mosquito and lizard and spider that was taking over my house. We had taken over supply buying for a family on vacation, so Brant and I spent all week running all over town looking for the right brand, size and color of toothbrushes! Without Wal-Mart, shopping is a bit challenging here to say the least, much less trying to shop for someone else and hope you found the right type of canned green beans or bought enough shampoo.

Just playing with how to post photos...