Food, friends and more of the new!

This week we finally were able to get some time with friends out at the place we are staying. It is fun and definitely a blessing to have a place where there’s plenty of room for the kids to run around with friends and makes s’mores etc.

mmmm sticky s’mores!

Stephen and I started a new adventure this past week. We began teaching at the after school program at our kids’ elementary school. It is just an hour a day, but wow is it an hour! Hahahaha. We are hoping that we will get more used to it as the weeks continue, because it honestly was a big adjustment for both of us. This week, I’m teaching the kids cooking. We are doing a Mexican themed week. About half of the class has some kind of latino heritage many of them Mexican and the school has a very multicultural focus. So today we are doing an easy lime frozen dessert that has cookies in sort of a key lime pie ice cream is how it turns out.

yummy: a taste of Mexico with just 5 ingredients: 2 cans evaporated milk, 2 cups milk, 1 can sweetened condensed milk and one cup of lime juice. Layer that mixture with layers of thin cookies. And freeze!

Our kids really like the classes they get to attend at the after school program, and since we don’t have them in anything extracurricular yet, it seems to fill that gap. Anabel continues to role with any punches thrown at her, I think she’s in that super flexible age. She does not want to say goodbye to her friends whether they come to visit the house or if we are visiting another church where she has friends. I assume this is because, even though she’s super flexible, she also has a different concept of time and probably feels pretty unsure about how long this goodbye will be for.

Joel is still adjusting well and most of the time has good things to say about school. Sometimes he gets in a mood where all the sudden he tells us about several negative incidences at school all in one day. Or yesterday at church I guess he had a hard time and was telling the class about missing Mexico and how it is hard to make new friends here. So it has not all been sunshine and roses. But, we are trying to learn through these experiences with him, as life and interpersonal interactions at any age are never all sunshine and roses, so we have to learn how to deal with that. My prayer is always that we can discern what is actually an issue that we as parents need to address, what’s just life that we learn from, and what is Joel maybe experiencing even stronger than reality due to other factors.

Anyway, the hard adjustment for Stephen and I to working at a program that we don’t run, after years of developing our own programs has been difficult! I personally have realized how strong the kids have been, even if they haven’t expressed everything in adjusting. These kids are truly amazing!

with some of our hosts, the grandparents who made the tortillas!

We got to go to lunch with a latino family from a Vineyard Church in Illinois on Sunday. It touched a place in our heart for sure. A place that had been missing fresh tortillas. The grandparents of the family who recently arrived from Mexico wanted to hand make us fresh tortillas, now that is an honor! We got to spend hours chatting about topics relevant to our countries and cultures, and it was very refreshing to reconnect to that part of our lives, even though it is with friends who are new to our lives.