updates

What HAS been keeping me busy?

1. Dishes, laundry, sweeping, scrubbing floors, tending my children, getting booster shots... who knows what else?!
2. Baking and cooking re-discovered and new recipes - I've recently been making Paneer (cottage cheese), and I tried my hand at hummus (though I was missing most of the ingredients, but still people ate it!) and I even managed to make donuts for my man!

3. AP CALCULUS PARTY!!!

The cake! (Thanks to my creative neighbor who decorated it!)

The AP Calc AB and BC classes were offered to take a practice AP exam after school on Tuesday followed by dinner at our house. 9 students took the teachers up on the offer, so we had a Calculus party!

"What does one do at a Calculus party?", you may ask...

This.

And this.

And hang out eating and talking about all sorts of things... including what certain calculators can and can't do, how impressive their physics teacher is to be able to do any calculation in his head, and has Mr. Burchell ever challenged that physics teacher to a "math duel"?!

It was a fun get-together all around.

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Then we've had some rain recently that has cleared the air a bit and I asked my photographer husband to go and take a picture of our valley - because I'll miss this view:

We're about 5000 feet above the city below us and we can see it from our bedroom window, although there are trees in the way. So Nate took the camera to a clearer spot and got a nice picture for me.

In 7 weeks we'll be on the other side of the world missing the view of this valley.

Good days

Baby Dechen (and her mom) came for a visit and my kids were just thrilled!
We've gotten to play at the playground several times recently.

Will is learning how to 'pump' his legs on the swing.

Hiking all over. So many steps and the kids do so well climbing up and down them.

This is the kids' favorite 'rest-stop' on our hike home from school.

Will - taking a few minutes to lay in the brush and relax before the last 5 minute-hike home.

Annie LOVES baby dolls and spends most of her time wandering around with one under her arm or in a backpack on her back.

A date!

Our neighbors (who are like family to us!) called last night to say that they would take our kids after church today and we could have a date afternoon. WOW! So we decided to take a hike away from town because we can't usually go very far that way when we have our kids in tow. We walked/hiked for about 3 hours, I think and had a really nice time being together and talking and enjoying the scenery (which is very dry right now). I took a couple of pictures of my handsome man and the surroundings. In the left hand corner of the picture above you can see the tall radio tower in the distance behind Nate. That's where we left our kids with our neighbors a few hours earlier.

Dry land. Those terraced fields are longing for rain.

Mountain Dew from a bottle! So refreshing after a long walk on such a hot, dry day.

We had such a lovely date together.

Math

If you haven't already found it, I highly recommend this post (...by my amazing husband). It's very well-written and so insightful.

Progress Report

This weekend all the students at our school got progress reports. The last quarter of the school year is underway and we're making progress at our house as well.

1. Annie's nose is all better as you may have noticed in the pictures from my last post! YAY!
2. My foot is almost all better and I am running again.
3. Nate made some good headway in his Narnia reading this weekend... now THAT'S progress!
4. Will is making some progress on learning the sounds that the alphabet letters make. If I'd just sit down and work with him more regularly, I think he might figure out how to read.
5. Annie is potty trained! FINALLY!!! - all day long (except naps) without diapers and only the occasional accident.
6. Our kids are great hikers! I just wanted to let the whole world know that they both plowed up our moutain and across it and back this afternoon without any complaining! Even I was impressed- and told them so! You'll just have to take my word for it, but they are an exceptional 2 and 4 year old on the 'hiking' scale.

And THEN...

Here are lots of pictures to catch you up on our house lately. I think I have them in chronolgical order mostly. First, Annie has been helping Pappa make lots of chai these days.
And THEN there's the... ...cutting, cutting, cutting. One night I had accidentally left out the SAFE scissors (the plastic ones that can't cut anything but paper and are not sharp- n.b. grandparents!) and some scrap paper we had been cutting and I woke up at about 2 am to strange sounds from the living room. Sure enough, it was Annie, trimming away little tiny pieces of paper! Somehow I managed to convince her it was still bedtime and she should go back to sleep.
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And THEN: We've had a good week of celebrating Palm Sunday.

Will working on our story board - adding palm branches and t-shirts for Jesus and the donkey to walk on.

And THEN there was Good Friday:

I made hot-crossed-buns that we had warm for breakfast on Friday. I figured it was a good day to do it as we were going to talk about the cross and we could eat leftovers for the next two Easter mornings as well and keep talking about the meaning of the cross.

And THEN it was shorts weather and my Will has outgrown some of his old shorts, so I sewed this alligator pair for him and he was thrilled. Not your typical "new Easter pants" I guess, but perhaps more generally useful.

And THEN we decorated Easter Eggs:

And THEN it was Saturday:

Saturday we spent the day hiking to Flag Hill. Will tried climbing all the trees (there are LOTS) and Nate kept him from getting too hurt in the process.

(also, check out his cool shorts!)

Annie collected pinecones and had a blast watching Will and running around the open space.

The rhododendrons are still blooming, but many are now dressing the ground with their faded pink petals.
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And THEN today, Easter Sunday, we got up while it was still dark and walked for about 45 minutes to an Easter Son-Rise service at a Church in the center of town. 10 Churches held the combined service outside on a lawn. It was really neat to walk and meet other Christians from all the different Churches all heading to the same service before dawn. Some were singing, some talking, and always the greeting of "Happy Easter!" and "He Is Risen!"

When we returned home, we ate the last of our hot-crossed-buns and Nate hid Easter eggs for the kids to find. They LOVED this 'game' and once they had found all 26 eggs, they ate the trail mix that was inside a few of them and begged to do it again. I think that in total we have hidden and found Easter Eggs about 20 times today! They don't mind that the eggs are always empty - they just loved finding them. Thankfully at the end of the day we managed to get Will to hide them for Annie so that we could just sit and sip chai and watch!

Happy Easter! JESUS IS RISEN!!!