Spent over an hour in the truck typing today, so here is some misc stuff! More coming in soon!

We seem to be drinking a lot of pop lately. 300 ml is a little less than a can (330ml). Well, there is always cold pop in the fridge, so when we are thirsty, that is what we grab (me and Bri anyway). Some times we do 2-3 a day! I am sure I will have a mouthful of cavities soon if I don’t already! I need to start putting water in the fridge I know, and we have juice we can make; but you know-that would be an extra step!

I took my second set of braids out. They were still in god shape-I think I had only had them for about 8 weeks, and they probably could have done another 3-4. Unfortunately though, I developed a very dry, itchy, flaky scalp. So I will be taking some time off of extensions to let my scalp heal a bit. Henry had a bunch of cradle cap I just got off, Myron has some, and Mariah for sure has some dandruff. I would have to think it has to do with the change of climate for us, wouldn’t you think? None of us had dandruff before we got here.

We are basically finished with school for the older girls for the next month. They are going to keep doing math and they have a few personal workbooks that they just need to finish up, but not much; should be done by next week. We have to catch up on our Language Arts, but that should take less than a week too. I went through the curriculum for next year and it turns out there were a few more things I needed to get. So I ordered them and had them sent to my mom, who will send them here. HOPEFULLY that won’t take too long, but we are three packages short and they were all sent a month ago, so it is hard to say. I really hate choosing curriculum. I just don’t know if I (much less the kids) will like it. There are some things we have that I really don’t like that much, but I paid for it-so darn it we are going to use it! There are just so many choices, and it is hard to know without seeing. But even when you get a chance to look, you just don’t know until you are able to try it for awhile. I figured it was time to get going on a foreign language with the older girls. I was going to use Rosetta Stone, but found it was a lot more expensive than I thought. We had been doing American Sign Language as our foreign language, but I let that drop off this past year with all the changes and everything else. I don’t know if I will really get back to it. It is hard to teach a language you really don’t know. I know some sign language so that was going okay. I liked the idea of Rosetta because it is a computer based learn on your own program. But I think we will wait. So we are going to be learning Latin together I guess. Yes, Latin. I know, seems strange. But as Latin is the basis for most of our English, it should also help them with their Grammar and Language Arts too. It will also help when they decide what other language they will learn in high school as most of the Romance Languages (French, Spanish, etc) are closely related too. If Cybil (and us!) does decide to go to Rift valley, they have French and Spanish so that would be a good help for here. I don’t know what Mariah may want to do later. Who knows, once they have the foundation of Latin, I may decide to spend the cash and get Rosetta. Actually, when I was looking at it and all the choice of languages, they said they wanted to learn Arabic! Wow! That’d be a toughy-but they would probably have a guaranteed job when they got older as translators somewhere!
Greta will be sitting in more this year on the school work and Hailey will get more focused time on learning to read. I have a preschool workbook for Joe that is more like a coloring book. I think I may have Cybil work with him on that-it would be good for both of them!

Still no one to help around the house. I would really like someone, but obviously we’ve been burned twice now, so I am not in a big hurry. I made up a chore chart that we use every day now. Hopefully it will help us to get up, get it done, and get to school work!

Last week we went to the Lusaka Ag Show. Kind of like the Minnesota State Fair with the Kandiyohi County Fair. They had the competitions for animals, flowers, veggies, all that. We didn’t get to that part though-not too exciting when you don’t have someone’s stuff to look for. There was an “amusement park”-the big blowup jumping toys mainly. We didn’t take the kids with us; it was a long, hot day as it was. There were of course lots of booths and people to talk to. Unfortunately, most of the people weren’t very helpful as they didn’t know the answers to our questions, didn’t know prices, etc. But at least we saw what was there and got names of people to talk to. We did look at and price windmills. We could use them for watering livestock and possibly some irrigation, or just pumping water. We didn’t think we had enough wind to do windmills so we didn’t look at them very much before we came. We also looked at a small 3-point digger with crumblier on the back (they called it a cultivator). It would be a perfect addition to what we have and would get lots of use as we prepare the fields.
There were plenty of other activities as well-marking bank contests, dance contests. President Banda was also there when we were. The white couple with a baby stroller couldn’t walk down the road where the police cars were parked, but everyone else could coming the other way. I guess the Cadet wasn’t doing his job on the other side of the street!

“Where’s farm? Where’s your farm?” Wherever we go, we seem to hear it-the bank, the store, the gas station. Do I really look that much like a farmer??

Well, we did it. We pulled the trigger and bought a newer vehicle. It is a 1996 Land Cruiser. (Isn’t it sad when your newer vehicle is a 1996? It is still almost 15 years old! Two of our vehicles in the States were 1992s when we left in 2008! And they are both still in the family being used!) It has a snorkel on the top for exhaust, it is in immaculate condition inside-the last owner really kept it up. He used it to drive all over southern Africa doing his work-we found Kenyan coins, some from South Africa, Angola too. It has more miles, but they are road miles, not just in the city. As Tim Taylor would say, there is a lot more POWER! AAR-AAR! We are getting a basket luggage rack made for the top. When we go to town with all the kids, there is just no room inside for anything else. This is really the largest vehicle we are going to be able to have for the road we are on. We had to use money from our furlough fund to help pay for since we couldn’t get a good trade-in price on ours due to its condition. We struggled with doing it, but believe it is the right thing to do as we may be doing some more things in town in the future; it’s just safer than ours was. We’ve have also had 2 or 3 people ask about our van in the States since we pulled the trigger on this one! Continue to pray that we would be able to sell that van as well.