Photo Fridays: Week 29

This week:

 

We dyed Easter eggs. 

We can only get brown eggs here, but I think that we still get some pretty colors.

On Easter morning we went attended the sunrise service at a park near our house.  An Ukarumpa tradition is to have everyone bring flowers, and we decorate the cross, turning a symbol of death into one of life.

Later we did an Easter egg hunt in the back yard.

 

 

I made cherry guava freezer jam this week.  It was my first attempt ever at actually trying to make something out of our yearly surplus of these little red fruits (we have several bushes/trees in our yard).  I boiled the first attempt down too far - the recipe said "boil until quite thick" - and then it thickened more as it cooled, so I think we could almost slice it for sandwiches if we wanted.  But it tastes good, and I've already picked enough fruit to try another batch.

 

 This week I've been helping with an English course that is being held prior to our big annual Translators Training Course.  It's a chance for students to brush up on their English skills before they delve into their translation studies (in English!) for the next six weeks.

 There are about 25 students in the course, and we've been doing lots of activities to practice listening, speaking and writing.  here are some students playing "telephone."

One neat thing about helping with training courses is getting to see some of the same students come back again and again, and to see them advance in their training.  Most of the faces in this course are new to me, but there are a few familiar ones.  The man in the middle, Raymond, I first met through a literacy training course I was involved in back before we had kids.

See you next week!

Photo Fridays: Week 28

This week:

Coming home from church I thought our neighbors looked so sweet walking down the street holding hands in a line.

 The pirates are ready to plunder the market.  The matching p.j's were a big hit, thanks Grandma Kathy.  The boys have never seen the Disney show depicted on them, but that doesn't matter - they match!

The pirates at the market.  I always feel like I'm providing the live entertainment when I bring them to the market with me, because my boys inevitably do or say or sing something that makes everybody within earshot laugh (or at least shake their heads and say, "I'm glad I'm not her right now!")

 Someone tumbled down a slide the wrong way...

The Ukarumpa fire truck being tested by our neighbor, who is on the volunteer fire team.

I wanted some updated photos to hang on the wall, so this is what I ended up with.  

What a handsome guy!

 With a smile...

...and when a cow right on the other side of the building mooed loudly!

 Greg, as usual, was more resistant to the idea of photos.  I did get one of him smiling, but I kind of like this more serious one too.

 One morning we had six little boys at our house for a few hours.  At lunchtime, Caleb was so worn out that he fell asleep with a cracker in his mouth.

 

 Caleb has started "reading" himself to sleep.  It kind of solves our nightly bedtime dilemma.  Greg always asks to go to bed right at 7:00, but insists that he can't sleep without Caleb in bed too.  Caleb does not want to go to bed that early.  So we put him in bed with a few books, and he reads happily for a while until he conks out too. 

 Speaking of Caleb, his vocabulary is just exploding this week.  It has been increasing steadily for a while, but this week he's been coming up with at least two new words a day.  Some of his new words this week include: box, flakes (Corn Flakes), daddy and mommy (as opposed to dada and mama), pee, pancake and phone.  Short sentences too.  This morning he saw me pouring milk in my coffee and he wanted me to do something else for him, so he said "No cup of milk!"  Or he'll say something like "want another cracker."

 

 And lastly, a hairy caterpillar from our back yard.

Photo Fridays: Week 27

Welcome back!  Here is what we had going on this past week:

Daddy was away on another work trip, but his shoes still managed to be all over the house this week.

 "Seriously mom?  Another picture of me?"

 Papua New Guinean students walking home from school.

 The cherry guavas are starting to ripen.

Greg wanted me to play hide and seek.  

"I'll hide here mom, and you go away and count and then come find me."

 A Duplo version of our family, created at 6am one morning...

Caleb loves to sneak away and pound on laptop keys.  Every once in a while you have that dreadful moment when you realize that Caleb has been very quiet, and then you realize that someone left the office door open again.  You rush in to find him happily pounding away.  One day this week he managed to change the orientation of our display!

 Ruby's water dish gets a lot of attention.

 Did I mention her water bowl is also a truck wash for all those muddy backyard trucks?  We have to change out her water quite often...

Yesterday Greg and I made a snow globe with a little cowboy figurine.

Photo Fridays: Week 26

Just another regular week in the Frey household.  

I wish I could represent in photos how busy Brian has been at work this week..  In his words, "This has been an exhausting week to be an administrator."  All week long he was meant to be participating in a course called "Coming Together Through Conflict."  However, he had to keep skipping out on parts of the training because he was dealing with real life conflicts!  He thinks that most things have now been resolved though, and hopefully we'll have a nice quiet weekend.

 Caleb cannot wait until he's big enough to do everything Greg does.  Here he is on the monkey bars.  He'll climb as high as he can, then dangle and drop to the ground.  He lost a button on his shirt because he pulls himself up onto furniture on his stomach all the time.

Greg has a much more cautious approach to life.  He's big enough to climb the monkey bars, but still prefers to have mom or dad close by.  This mom doesn't mind that at all - Caleb worries me sometimes because he thinks he's invincible!

 Greg has been getting these little photocopied books from preschool - one for each letter they study.  We now have most of the alphabet, and the books are a huge hit with both the boys.

 This past weekend we stopped in at one of the teen hostels for a chat with the house parents.  They were enjoying a nice quiet house for once, since all the kids leave during school breaks.  The boys loved playing this hockey game with "Mr. Mont."  He's way crazier than mom and dad, and the boys had a blast chasing him around the big empty hostel.

 

 A new haircut for me!  The Ukarumpa community is really blessed right now to have a professional stylist here who has set up a little salon in an outbuilding in her backyard.  In addition to her regular job, she does hair a few days per week.  I always cut the boys' hair myself, but over the years it has been hit and miss for getting my own hair cut, as people with various levels of experience come and go in the community.

 Caleb loves to prolong our family walks, as long as we are going downhill.  When it comes time to walk back up the the house, however, he usually asks for a ride.

You gotta be quick when photographing kids.  Two seconds before I snapped this photo, there was an adorable, brotherly pose going on, I swear. :)