School is out!

Weather-wise it has been a glorious week here.  After a couple weeks were it was genuinely cool during the day (requiring a light jacket and everything) and downright chilly at night it warmed back up this week and while the mornings and evenings were crisp, it was sunny and lovely during the day.  We shall see what the next few weeks of "winter" bring and whether it will cool off again or hold steady until things start to warm up in earnest in late August/ early September.

K finished pre-school this week.  Not pre-K, which is what she would have been enrolled in next year if we weren't moving her to the Montessori school.  Between play-school, pre-school and pre-K I swear I can never keep them all straight!  So, school is out and she will be at a new school for next year for several reasons.  For one, her previous school more or less laughed at us when we inquired as to whether T could enroll in play-school in January.  Due to a whole host of factors classes are full there, and almost everywhere else in town as well.  But the larger factor is that K's teacher this year seemed, by the end of the year, to just not like her very much and I am concerned that he shared this attitude that she was a "bad" kid or "trouble-maker" with all of the other teachers in the Early Learning Center.  Now, I am not claiming that K is an angel.  She is not!  In fact, I frequently describe her by recalling one of the early scenes in Jurassic Park.  Remember the one where they talk about the velociraptors systematically testing the fences for weaknesses?  Yup, thats my daughter!  If there are structure and clear expectations and consequences in her universe, she is great.  Take those elements away and she will run amuck and push boundaries to her heart's content.  Take, for instance, the issue of wearing shoes.  She doesn't like to wear them.  I don't really make her wear them at home, but if we leave the house she is supposed to have them on.  And she is supposed to wear them at school.  But she always had her shoes off when I picked her up because no number of times of me telling her to keep her shoes on at school were going to matter when she experienced no consequences at school for taking the shoes off.  She still got to play and participate and go outside, so why would she leave them on?  And asking me to try to get her to keep her shoes on, when you as the teacher and assistant don't actually follow through is just not going to work.

Also, the school was a bit too guitar-playing, kumbaya-singing, touchy-feely for my liking.  For example, over Christmas holiday K learned to write her name with help from our nanny.  She could write the whole thing, all of the letters, without tracing or having to copy it. She went back to school and they are constantly coming home with coloring sheets or things they have painted, or stuff they have cut out and glued.  I noticed that either her name was not on her stuff or that the teacher was obviously writing it.  I pointed out, you know, she can write her name.  The teacher agreed, said he had seen her do it.  I asked, well, can you ask her to write it on her artwork so she is practicing it.  Well, we don't want to make them write their names because then they might not like doing it anymore.  Seriously!  For real?!?!  She can write her name, she should be writing it on her paper!  And now she actually can't do it anymore.  Has forgotten how because there was no repetition.  Anyway, those are a few of my gripes with her old school.  And yes, I am aware that a Montessori school will not, by its very nature, have a lot of structure.  But at least I know that going in and can compensate as I see fit.

In other news, K the destroyer and eater of worlds broke a good friend's arm on a bouncy castle on Friday morning.  Not on purpose, of course, but ugh, I still feel awful.  I feel extra awful because the medical care here is so crappy they can't even really figure out if it is a broken arm or if it is a dislocated elbow or if it is broken whether to put a cast on it and if they do put a cast on it the cast will be an old-school plaster one.  Its a kid's broken arm, not brian surgery (which I KNOW they can't do)!  Very upsetting and disturbing.

What else... we FINALLY got our AFN satellite working again.  The timing was good in that we manage to miss all of the interminably long NBA season but there is still plenty of good baseball left to be played.  I am concerned that with school out and TV functional again we are going to need to set some serious screen time boundaries for the girls since while we were subsisting on DVDs alone the TV time was pretty limited.

Not much else to report and this whole thing really lacks a cohesive point so why don't I just wrap it up with some cute kid shots?

The girls enjoying some sort of book club/ tea party created by K 

T trying to get K to "papu" her (carry her around on her back).  I fear K would be more than happy to oblige which would almost certainly end in disaster.

T with a baby, and, oddly since it hasn't rained in two months, rain boots.

T still loves Cleopatra and hugs her almost every time she goes in or out the front door.

The monkeys at play in their natural habitat

Their ability to not only find dirty but also to ensure that they are throughly coated in it is really quite impressive!

Typical

My weekly trip to the grocery store this morning included an experience that is just so typical of our time here in Africa.  Overall, it was quite a successful trip.  The store had parmesan cheese (which had been out of stock for months, and by out of stock I mean none anywhere in town, rumor is that the one importer in the whole country had his truck stopped at the border, possibly for failing to provide proper, ahem, compensation to the border guards and it was held up for so long that the whole shipment went bad and it took another month or so to get the next shipment) and nice looking eggplant, both of which were on my list.  They also had the greek yogurt I like and the little baby bell mini cheeses K likes in her school snack (stocking up for the last week of school next week, sniff sniff, tears).  In fact, I found everything on my list and I got in early enough that I beat the crowd and check out lines were short, all of which was very exciting.  Then, in the checkout line I noticed that the foil seal on top of the six-pack of small fruit yogurts I picked up for the girls was defective on one of the yogurts.  It wasn't sealed properly and was leaking a bit.  I brought this to the attention of the check out person and she sent the bagger off to pick up a new one, all of which made perfect sense and was surprisingly efficient.  Things went off the rails when the woman came back with another one which was also defective, explaining that "they are all like that."  And then they were both surprised and somewhat offended when I said no, I won't be buying the improperly sealed yogurt regardless of whether they are all like that or not!

The yogurt is a small, almost insignificant thing, but it is such a typical example of how things go wrong here.  The yogurt is sold under an international brand but is packaged and distributed locally.  I have seen their plant in town.  So, something obviously went wrong at the packaging level but instead of deciding that it was not appropriate to send out an improperly packaged product the plant went right ahead and shipped out a batch of leaky yogurt.  So, fail one for the plant.  Then, the store had no issues with accepting and stocking faulty yogurt, fail two for the store.  Finally, the staff at the store actually I thought I was the one in the wrong for taking issue with being sold leaky yogurt.  After all, they are all like that so they must be fine!  Fail three for the store.  Oh, and, as I was finishing up a guy at the next checkout line over was having the exact same yogurt experience but in the end he just accepted it and bought, for full price, the defective yogurt.  Fail four for the consumer who accepts what should be an unacceptable product.  As I said, the yogurt is a small thing, but all of the things that had to go wrong, all of the bad judgement or no judgement at all the contributed to getting to that experience in the checkout line are totally typical and unfortunately are not limited to yogurt.  Imagine for a moment when that sort of thinking (or lack thereof) gets applied to business deals, property transactions, policing, the judiciary, and foreign policy.  And now how about a collective heavy sigh.....

On a much, much lighter note, the bunnies are rogue no more!  Our gardener constructed a lovely little pen for them and they have not managed to escape yet after 4 full days of imprisonment.  They seem happy enough (it is honestly a bit hard to tell) and it is nice that the girls can come out and watch them from the porch whenever they want.  I am also hopeful that with some time and patience and lots of lettuce and carrots we may be able to get them a bit more comfortable with people such that they could occasionally be petted or held.  We shall see.

Bunnies in their new home

T enjoying her starter Brio set C just brought home from Germany.

She looks all cute and innocent....

One last shot of K from sports day last week.  If you look closely you see she still suffers from Schumitsch tongue.  The only real way to focus!

Bunnies and Birthdays

It has been so long since I posted that Blogger revamped its format and it took me forever this morning to figure out how to do a new post.  But I did, finally!

First, let me take this opportunity to introduce you to our new bunnies, Madeline (in white) and Beast (black and white), names courtesy of K.  Madeline is a female young adult and Beast is a teenage male so yes, it is quite possible that they will do what bunnies do and we will soon have several more bunnies.  But, these are yard bunnies, meaning they live outside, eat whatever vegetation they can scavenge and generally are only marginally cared for by us so I am assuming that through a combination of nature taking its course and the occasional donation of bunnies to someone else we can keep the population to around 5 or 6 total in the long term.  Originally, the plan was that the bunnies would just have the whole front yard in which to romp, and I had the gardener put up chicken wire on the fence thinking that would be sufficient to keep them in place.  Little did I know that I was dealing with very creative and very greedy bunnies!  They keep escaping into the back yard which is, of course, where the vegetable gardens are.  Now, I don't mind so much if they nibble on my garden as we never manage to eat everything out of it anyway, but they are also terrorizing the staff garden which is much more obnoxious and unacceptable so on Monday I will have the gardener build a large pen for them and they will have to stay in there.  How we are going to catch them to put them in said pen I have no idea, though I suspect the pool skimmer net may be involved...

Madeline and Beast being naughty, greedy bunnies and hanging out in our garden.

K and T are both doing well.  School is wrapping up over the next week and a half and K had sports day on Friday.  While the school provided a very elaborate and fun set up at a certain point the kids discovered a hill and realized that rolling down it was a lot more fun than anything else.

T is finally starting to use words to articulate thoughts which is making life somewhat easier, though frequently her requests are for things she just isn't going to get (most frequently juice... she is a little juice addict).  She also mimics absolutely everything K does, which is cute about 80% of the time and incredibly annoying the rest of the time.

T modeling dressy shoes with pj pants.  Quite a look!  And she makes that face almost every time anyone points a camera in her general direction.

In other news, K had her 4th birthday party last weekend.  No, her birthday isn't until July but since almost everyone leaves either to move on to their next post or to go home on R&R at the end of this month she would not have had any friends with which to celebrate.  I suspect this may quickly become a theme of life overseas with lots of early birthday parties.

We went with a dragon and unicorn theme, complete with two cakes, big chalk dragons and unicorns sketched on the playhouse (by someone with more artistic talent than I), a dragon and unicorn pinata and other assorted stuff and things.  Plus, as it was brunch, lots of mimosas and bloody marys for the adults. I think everyone had fun.  At one point we had a swirling mass of 30 or so kids in the back yard, which was a bit chaotic but mostly in a good way.  

K about to blow out her candles.

One of the rare "family" photos in which I am actually included.  Unfortunately, T's nanny was doing such a good job of keeping her entertained and out of the way we had no idea where she was so she got left out.  Poor second child. 

But, this is photographic evidence that she was present at the party!

The dragon- red velvet cake inside so he was nice and bloody when we cut into him.

The unicorn- made by using a silicon mold so the external shell is a mix of peanut butter edible clay and marzipan, decorated with edible luster dust and the inside was chocolate cake and chocolate pudding.

The calm before the storm.

K attacking an innocent, but candy filled, unicorn... I am note sure who thought it was a good idea to arm children with sticks, let them take swings at something, and then have them trample each other in a quest to gather fallen candy but who am I to mess with tradition.