Happy Mother's Day!

This weekend is so relaxing and wonderful that I don't want it to be over. :) Matthew had 5 long, hard days of work last week, and well, so did I. When he came home on Friday night, I sighed a great sigh of relief and said, "Let's go out for pizza." Ha.

Yesterday we just hung out around the house, except for me making a run to the grocery store and a second-hand store. It was very refreshing to hang out together as a family.

This morning the girls were so excited that it was Mother's Day. :) They had all made cards for me, and gave me money to buy the bird book I've been eyeing. I have to tell you about C's card for me. It was a blow to my self-confidence. (not really, but it cracked me up.) It said, "Mom, Happy Mother's Day! I love you very much! Do you know what to do with the money in the box? Buy "Birds of East Africa!" We put in enough money! Dad thought that you could figure that out on your own, but I wasn't so sure. Caitlyn" Hee hee. So sweet.

We only have two more weeks here in Uganda, a week in Kenya and then we are heading home! I am alternately so excited to get back to our own house and nervous about the continuing political drama there.

Bowling and other stuff

Listening to stories on the mp3 player.

My girly-girls.

Caitlyn (she got a few spares and a strike with that thing!)

Aimee (I think she got a spare or two as well)

Sierra (she also got a few spares)

Larissa (she got two spares...she is aiming the ramp in this photo and she had a pretty good eye for it.) Unfortunately this is the best photo we have of her, and I had to crop my head off because I clearly didn't know that anyone was taking my picture at the time. :)

the week

I couldn't sleep after about 5:50 this morning and now I'm enjoying a slow, rainy morning. Two girls are awake and reading books. I'm still in my pjs, since I can't think of a good reason not to be. :) One of these days we'll have some breakfast and get on with life, but for now I kinda like this.

This week has flown by. On Tuesday Matthew had the day off (about his "days off": when he doesn't have flights here, he has nothing else to do. It's so nice for him to have this break from all of the office responsibility he has in Mada.) and we took the girls to the bookstore to spend their money and then we went bowling. We thought he had to fly on Wednesday, but in the end he didn't, and we found a place for the girls to play while we went out and did some focused shopping. Tuesday was fun with the girls, but I hadn't been able to get anything I was looking for. I'm starting to want to actually buy the things I want to take back to Mada, instead of just looking and planning. :) We had a dinner invitation on Wednesday evening, which was fun. Thursday morning Larissa got to go with some friends to a music morning for preschoolers. She was a little nervous about driving off with a carload of people she doesn't know very well, but when she came back she was very excited about her morning.

Today we are going to do school, then pack for our weekend away. Tomorrow we're going about 2 hours away to a town at one of the sources of the Nile. We're hoping to do a boat ride on the Nile and then I'm not sure what else there is to do. The hotel we're staying at has a pool, so I'm sure we'll use that a time or two. :) Tomorrow is our 11th anniversary, so it's nice timing.

Please keep praying for Madagascar. Things are not really improving at all, and it is quite sad to see this turmoil.

Internet!! At home!!

I never expected to get internet at the house while we’re here, so having a decent connection is really a bonus. After having no internet at the house since we arrived on March 30^th, I’m enjoying this with mixed feelings. It’s so good to be back in touch with blogs, e-mail, skype and facebook, but I find it is so easy to waste so much time here. I had been getting so much scrapbooking and painting done, and now it seems hard to find time to do those things. It’s a good lesson for me in keeping my priorities straight.

We had a good weekend. Friday night I went bowling with 8 MAF ladies and had a good time. I even managed to win one game, in spite of being very tired by that time of night. It’s so amazing to me that you can go bowling here, and not even at a completely ridiculous price.

Saturday we mostly hung out around here, but then we did go swimming and to the weekly MAF volleyball game. Our first tradition here has come out of those weekly volleyball games because we never get home till at least 6:00 and the girls still need to have baths before bed. So, we have pancakes for supper. With store-bought pancake syrup. (2% real maple syrup! Sad, isn’t it?)

Sunday morning I had a headache and felt a little off in the digestive department so I stayed home and napped while M and the girls went to church. We were invited out for lunch and the girls played so well with their girls, and we chatted so well with them, that before we knew it we had stayed till after 5:00! When we got home, the girls watched a movie while I gave Matthew a haircut.

Today we tried valiantly to get back into the weekday routine and just as the day was ending, we seemed to get over the Monday slump. :)

I can hardly believe that our time is over more than half gone. I have very mixed feelings about that, but mostly want to go home.

This Saturday is our 11^th anniversary and we are thinking of spending the weekend at a hotel in a town called Jinja. The girls are very excited to be coming along. :) I think we’ll be able to see some animals (probably nothing too exciting) and lots of birds, and possibly have a boat ride on the Nile. We shall see how that all works out in reality. (My cynicism rears its ugly head...that’s what 4+ years of living in Africa does to a holiday-planning individual. :)

the equator

21 April 2009

So, last night didn’t turn out quite like we’d planned. The Italian restaurant we were going to was closed, sadly. It was quite a disappointment, to say the least. We started heading towards the mall, but the traffic was very bad. Then we ended up eating at the American club, just a 5 minute drive from our house. (We’ll try not to think about the time and diesel we wasted up to that point.) We had a nice dinner there, even though we weren’t eating till almost 8:00, I think.

Matthew flew yesterday and today, and has the next two days off (barring unexpected flights). We’re thinking of driving to the equator tomorrow and having a picnic there. I’m mostly not really so hyped up about being at the equator, but at the same time it seems like an opportunity that should be taken when possible.

Today Matthew had a flight that made the rest of us a little jealous. He had to go pick up some people at Murchison Falls. Unfortunately for the girls and me, he found it a little hard to take pictures and fly at the same time, but he saw elephants, hippos, crocodiles, buffalo and a bunch of some kind of deer.

23 April 2009

Yesterday we went to the Equator! It was kind of fun to think of being on the Equator, for real. We ate our picnic lunch as we drove along, and I laughed at all of the funny signs along the way. (We passed the Comprehensive Hotel, the Hotel Stallion, the Best Hotel, the Blessed Supermarket, the Hallelujah Car Wash, Sofa World [it was a small world, after all], Microsoft Phone Center, Kampala International Hair Salon [housed in a refurbished shipping container] and many more.)

At the Equator, we took pictures, looked in the shops and then had a snack in a cafe run by Aidchild. The muffin we had was the biggest muffin I’ve ever seen, and our smoothies and coffee were also jumbo-sized. (Whispering:: I think there must be some Americans around there somewhere...) The drive there and back was beautifully green and I tried to take pictures. Our camera doesn’t take the best landscape pictures to start with and then there was the small problem of not finding any of the pictures from the drive on the camera when we got back. I’m not sure what I did wrong??? The ones from when we’re stopped are there. (More whispering::Matthew left the camera inside the cafe when he paid, and while he went back in to find it, I was debating if finally being able to get a new camera would be worth losing the day’s pictures. He found it. And I still don’t have all the pictures.)

Matthew and I had a date today – lunch and grocery shopping. Truly a married people’s date, eh? :) I had a great salad, which I’m determined to order often since a salad like that isn’t to be found in Mada. Going grocery shopping here is a funny thing. I have to keep stopping to gawk at all of the things that surprise me. Today it was canned soups, barbeque sauce and canned pumpkin. Oh yeah, there were also individual pudding cups for $1 each. Of those things I only bought the barbeque sauce, but it sure is interesting to shop with those options. :)

As I type this, Matthew is working to get an internet connection working at our house. I confess that my faith is small...not because of Matthew, but because apparently the whole scheme isn’t well tested. There is a possibility that I’m guarding myself against disappointment, too. :)

written on friday

I wrote this on Friday and haven’t been able to post it until now. Actually, I wrote more than this, but it’s funny. When I read it today, some of it didn’t seem so important anymore. Maybe I should filter all my blogging that way?

*In August 2008, some good friends of ours moved away from Madagascar to go work with MAF-Chad. It was one of those sad good-byes, because a) we really like them, and b) we had no idea of when we could ever see them again. I mean, they’re Dutch and work in Chad. We’re Canadian and work in Madagascar. It was one of those goodbyes that make me wonder why we chose this lifestyle. Well, guess what? He was here in Uganda this week! It was so great to see him again – the girls were as excited as if one of their uncles had come. :) He brought drawings and notes from his boys and our girls prepared a whole stack of little papers to send back with him. He showed us pictures of the family in their environment in Chad, so now we can picture where they are at a little bit better. They have my admiration. It is hot (38-44C), sandy, undeveloped, unstable and they don’t have a lot of options for recreation.

*Yesterday the girls and I were invited to spend the afternoon with E and her two girls. They are with MAF as well, but we hadn’t really met them until Monday because they’d been on holidays. The girls are 4 and 7. The 6 of them hit it off and played steadily from 11 till 4. :) E and I talked almost that whole time, so I guess we hit it off pretty well, too. I think we’ll be doing more with them before we leave.

*Today is our housekeeper’s day off, so it’s always more relaxing for me. It’s not relaxing in the sense of having less to do, but relaxing because we have the house to ourselves. I didn’t even take a shower till after 8. :)

*I’ve been trying so hard to be more consistent with my kids, to look for ways to let them be aware of the consequences of their choices, and to not let them run over me. It’s exhausting. The whining issue alone is enough to give me more gray hair. (Oh wait, I’m already getting them. Never mind.) I guess I fail to understand why they continue to whine, when I have been trying so hard to make sure that whining doesn’t get them anywhere. Whining makes me want to wear Matthew’s noise-cancelling headset around the house. I’ve been praying that God would help me to be humble, to have life-giving words, and to trust Him for wisdom.

*The weather here continues to be ideal, in my opinion. A cloudy, rainy day or two and then the sun comes out for a day or two. When the sun is out, it’s hot, but not unbearably hot. Today is overcast, but not raining (so far) and just a very pleasant temperature. (Like Red Lake in July when it’s overcast.)

*In response to your questions on the previous post, I made scones for our brunch on Monday. I just made a basic recipe out of my Betty Crocker book, and then I made two cream cheese spreads for them. For one, I mixed cream cheese, cinnamon, brown sugar and vanilla. For the other, I mixed almost equal parts of strawberry jam and cream cheese. Surprisingly, the cinnamon one was the clear favourite. (I just expected the girls to go for the pretty pink one.)

*The rat seems to be gone. We bought some poison and didn’t see any sign of him after that. However, a few nights ago Matthew and I were sitting in the living room and a little baby mouse ran in. Matthew made me block a doorway while he chased it around and eventually ended its poor little life. He was kind of disgusted with me that I felt sorry for it, but I can’t help feeling sorry for a baby mouse who gets taken out in the prime of life. Or something like that. :) The kitchen still has its invaders, but ants aren’t quite as disturbing as a rat or mouse. Ants might not poop all over, but they come in by the hundreds (thousands?) and make me feel like my kitchen is not quite clean. The other day I washed the cutting board and left it in the dish drainer to dry. I never even thought of ants because usually clean dishes aren’t much of an attraction, but I guess there was some little crumb of something left on it. When I came back awhile later, there was a solid stream of ants coming in the kitchen window and gathering on that cutting board. Thankfully, these are the tiny sugar ants and not the long (well over 1cm) ants that come out at night and run around the house in a seemingly indiscriminate way.

Currently:

Reading:
The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis)

Have a New Kid by Friday (Yes, still. I’d love some feedback on how you put this into practice in your family if you have read it.) (Dr Kevin Leman)

Enjoying:
A cool, rainy Easter day

Grilled cheese sandwiches with yellow cheddar cheese

My watercolour “lessons” from a book

The memories of the fun we had at the zoo yesterday (in Entebbe)

Feeling:
Homesick for Mada and my friends there

Happy that we’re making some new friends here

Not ready to really bond with my new friends here

Laughing at:
My husband’s funny jokes

The girls and their funny ways of saying things

Thankful for:
This time of less stress

A house to live in vs. staying in someone’s home

Cool weather, in spite of not having my favourite sweater along

Fun food

Missing:
My routine, friends, house and garden in Madagascar
Having Easter Monday brunch with our MAF-C neighbours in Mada (this would have been our 3^rd year...)

Watching:
Nothing, really, since we can’t download TV here (boo hoo)

Looking forward to:
Exploring more of Uganda

Seeing if I can get a babysitter for next week so that M and I can see a movie together in a real theatre

Having Easter Monday brunch with the other MAF-C family here

Wondering:
If I should make scones or coffee cake for brunch tomorrow

If I will really get back into Facebook now that Lent is over

If it’s bad that I ordered my kids’ lunch off of a kids’ menu that one lady called “nothing but processed rubbish” (I thought that was a bit extreme...)

More details, as much for me as for you. :-)

06-04-09

Our first Sunday in Uganda passed very quickly and pleasantly. We went to church with L and M, a MAF family (also from Canada). The girls had a good time in Sunday School, and we enjoyed seeing church in a new culture. Let me sum up: loud, loud and more loud. :-) The bass thumped in my chest, making me wonder if my heart rhythm was about to be reset. The music was good, but unfortunately, we only knew 2 of the songs. The sermon was on Romans 12 and being committed to a local church body. Afterwards we chatted with the pastor and his wife for a bit. They’re Americans who have lived here for 7 years. They didn’t have a lot of time to talk though, since the next service started about 5 or 10 minutes after we were done. (I think there are 4 services a week.)

After church, L and M took us to a mall that was quite impressive! It has a number of features, including bowling, a large selection of shops (including a nice, not-too-overpriced English bookstore), and a food court. We ate lunch in the food court, which was definitely a cultural experience. We were seated by a hostess, then surrounded by servers from the different restaurants. They all offered their menus, and hovered around the table while we made our choices. There was Chick’n Express (a sort of KFC copy), Lebanese food, two Indian places, Italian food, Chinese food and Cuban food. The girls had boring chicken and fries, Matthew had a delicious pizza and I had chicken tikka masala with naan. I think we all enjoyed it and it worked well for us, since Matthew didn’t have to suffer through Indian food. :-) Our tables were beside the open air side of the food court, overlooking a golf course. Close to the end of our meal, the girls spotted some storks walking on the course. L told us that some years ago, there were only a few pairs left, and were protected. It seems that they flourished under this protection and are now considered to be pests and scavengers.

*I haven’t actually tried this yet, but I think if you go on Google Earth, you will be able to find our house at 0°17’11.81”N 32°35’18.54”E We are in the city of Kampala, but not right in the middle of it at all.

*Yesterday when we got home, I found rat poop in my kitchen. Ugh.

07-04-09

*Matthew isn’t flying today, so we’re going shopping in a bit. I think that people here think we’re a little bit crazy to think that it’s so exciting to go shopping here. :-) The girls also want to go bowling, so we are going to see how expensive it is. If nothing else, I’m sure we’ll have some ice-cream or something. (There’s also a theatre there, but I’m quite sure it will be very expensive...)

*Yes, Jocelyn, we can buy real Cheerios! I’ve only seen two kinds, multigrain and honey. We tried the honey and they were quite good. Shall I bring you a box? :-)

*Jenni mentioned in a comment that the tension seems to be gone...I feel more relaxed than I have in about a year. And for sure, more than in the last 3 months! I have no commitments besides my family, Matthew is relaxed because he is not responsible for anything besides the flights that are assigned to him, we aren’t worried about political drama, etc. It’s a very restful time for us, in many ways.

*I’m back from shopping now and feel very spoiled! :-) We experienced some culture shock...a mall with affordable things...I bought a t-shirt, found a great bookstore with a tempting selection of books that I resisted for today, ate fajitas and got groceries. It seems so different from Mada, and I have to keep telling myself that it’s not the real Uganda, either. I’m hoping that Matthew will take the camera on one of his next flights so that I can get an idea of what the rest of the country is like. It’s becoming clear to me, the more I travel, that you can’t judge a country by its capital city.

*The MAF team here continues to make sure that we have everything we need, including an active social life! Yesterday we went swimming with a few of the moms and their kids. Today we had a lunch invite, that we declined, as well as an offer of grocery shopping. Tomorrow evening we are planning to go out for pizza with one family. Tonight is their weekly prayer meeting. It’s been good to see how another MAF program operates. It’s especially interesting since it’s big compared to Mada.