look at me now

Now how will I eat an apple?

lamb video

video of crazy lamb at zoo

zoo

lion video! just figured out how to put a video on, this is an interesting on of the men in the lions cage at the zoo
Not very long, but you can get the pictures..

zoo day

We went to the zoo the other day as part of our language learning. As part of school we do "shared experiences" so our teacher came with us and we talk mainly in arabic that day and then when we got home he told all about our day and we recorded it and then we told about our day. It was a good learning experience, but more then that it was just a fun day with the girls. The zoo isn't huge, but it was wasn't near as bad as I was expecting! Lots of lions and monkeys and birds. The girls loved looking at the turtles and all the other big cats besides the lions.
I will post more pics later but two of these are probably the most interesting I have. One is a lamb and if you look closely you can see he has a leg growing out of his head, pretty interesting to see!!! and then there is the craziest, right before we were going to leave we heard the lions making some noise so we went back over there. Now they have about 6 lion cages with about 5 lions in each one. When we got back up there by the lions we could see that two workers (not lion trainer, just people that clean the cages and feed the animals) were in the cage with 5 girl lions and they were teasing one. they had something in their hand like a broom stick or something and they would like swing around her face and she would growl and swipe her paw at them. It was the craziest thing I have ever seen. Two grown men "playing" with an untrained lion! I filmed a little and took a couple of pictures and the girls wanted to stay an watch, but I just couldn't, I did not want them to see a man get really hurt or killed so we walked off, but right before we did the lion had jump to another big rock and so all 5 were together and one of them jump up on the rock with them and kept teasing, I could not believe it, the craziest part was the lions were between them and the door so it wasn't like they could just run out of the pen if they needed too. So needless to say it was an interesting day!

oh yea, the one pic. of annielynne, she is feeding the monkeys popcorn. (no rules at this zoo about feeding the animals) they even had these little iron rods going into the cage and you could throw food in those and the monkeys would come right up to it. we were giving them pop corn and then we saw some man pouring orange soda down it and the monkeys were lapping it up, to funny! It was a huge cage and it probably had 100 monkeys the girls stay at that spot for a long time just watching all the monkeys and feeding them.
Good day lots of laughs in disbelief!
I guess by now nothing should surprise me here, yet it seems like everyday I am surprised by something!!!

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY

I never thought I would ask for a box of frosted flakes, but i did. All I wanted was real frosted flakes and a snickers bar. and I got both, I was excited. You can get some Kellogg"s cereal here but it is expensive so this is the first box we have had, and it tasted good. Also snickers is something you can get her, but it cost a lot more then the other candy so we normally do not get it.
The three cards or from my three wonderful girls. Ayden, of course folded hers like a card and drew pictures and wrote in it, Addie did not want hers folded so it is the big piece of paper, and the tiny little piece of white paper is from Annielynne. Kirk said she loved using the scissors and by the time she was done that was all that was left. She was very proud of it and of course I loved them all. Other then that it was a normal day, so weird sense Sunday isn't a weekend here! So we had school and just our normal stuff.

Girls

Addie doing her favorite thing, dressing up!


Ayden after braids!


Annie Lynne even poses when she is sleeping!

for brynten

Hey Brynten, Ayden drew this for you on our board and she wanted you to see it. I tried to attach it to an e-mail but it wouldn't work. You are the king and she is the queen and that is ya'lls castle and the guards.
hope it all makes sense. The board is in the room we do school in so our teacher saw it the next morning and loved the picture, thought it was so funny!

the flood

Last wed. it rain really hard for about 2 hours and it flooded all over the city. We heard that 9 people in the city died in the flood, so sad. The pictures or of our street, our neighbors across the street bucketing out water, and our front "yard." Which had about six inches or so of water, which left about an inch of mud when it drained! But very thankful that our house is up and not directly on the street and that we didn't flood. One of the houses here that workers use has a basement and they found out the next morning that the water had backed up in the kitchen and bathroom in the basement so it had a couple of inches of "mud" if thats what you want to call it covering the basement. Kirk went and helped them move furniture and clean up, then he came home and soaked his feet in clorox water, good thing he has had is hep A vaccine. The pictures don't really do justice to what it was like but give an idea.
Crazy we moved to what was one of the driest place and we have seen a lot of rain. Our city has not seen rain like this in over 10 years!!! All the workers we have talked to said they haven't seen anything like this. crazy!
and it is still raining every afternoon, just not as bad as Wed.
Like the rain and it is so good for the city, things are even beginning to turn green!!! but really do not like the nasty mud. (sewage systems here have a lot to be desired, so you never really know what the mud is or what is in the water)

this is our "yard." we are standing on the roof taking these pictures.



this is a picture of our "yard" the day after, it will take me a long time to get all that mud and dirt up!!!!

new fruit

trying new foods is always trying and fun. Annie Lynne does the best at trying anything, i'm sure its because she doesn't really realize it is something different. but they all tried this fruit that our teacher brought us. it was interesting, little black seeds that you eat and that gave it a different texture, but it was okay. i think annielynne liked it, addie thought it was okay and of course ayden didn't like it. The fruit is very big here and we always see people selling them on the street.

day out

Just some pics of us overlooking the city and then we went down to one of the most famous places in our city, and the picture of annie lynne she is overlooking a well. They say the well was dug during biblical times! how cool!!!

packages

thanks for the packages!!!
So fun and so encouraging. It is awesome that our God not only provides our needs, he provides so much more!!!

playing with the neighborhood kids

playing with the kids on the street and then they all came in our little yard area, lot of fun, the girls thought it was great!
The oldest kid had and bike and all the girls got to take a turn on it. so fun

reading to the girls

We have finished reading all about Amy Carmichael, Cameron Townsend, George Muller, and now we are reading the story of Nate Saint all of them by Janet and Geoff Benge a series called Christian Heroes: Then and Now. If you have have kids or not this series is so good. Ayden would say her favorite so far is George Muller, because she loves that he took in so many orphans, but she also loved the story of Amy Carmichael and all she did. I love that my girls can learn about Christians Heros and can see how the Father works through prayer and obedience. It is not only good for the girls but has been so encouraging for Kirk and I too.

I just finished reading Shepherding a Childs Heart, by Tedd Tripp. It was also a great book, probably the best book I have read on raising kids. It was so good and looked at everything from a biblical perspective. Would recommend it to anyone who has kids.


Pictures to come on the blog, my camera is not wanting to connect to the computer right now but hopefully soon we will have it all worked out.