Life

Six fifty a.m., Friday, and enjoying my last few alone moments before the kids start waking up! The Lord and I meet here, in my office, nearly every morning around 5:30 a.m. There are times I would like to put on some worship music, but I rarely ever do so because the silence is just so sweet! Since we haven't changed our clocks to daylight savings time yet, the sun starts rising around 6:00 a.m., so I get some great views of the sky changing a thousand different hues behind Popocatepetl (the volcano we can see from Refuge Ranch). I usually open up my balcony doors to get some great whiffs of fresh morning air (maybe about 55 degrees outside?) and hear the birds singing their morning song.

Victor has been on crusade this past week to a town just north of Acapulco. We have spoken to each other by phone everyday, taking advantage of the fact that he is in an area with cell phone reception, which is not always the case when he is on crusade. Things seem to be going well on the crusade, although he never talks much about the crusades when he is in the middle of them. I usually find out more about all the Lord did a few weeks after the crusade, once Victor gets rested up and rejuvenated.

When Victor goes on crusade a good portion of our staff goes too! Adrian, Vero, Rosa and Mark went along, as well as Liliana, our staff Ana's daughter....

OK, it is now 6:00 a.m. on Saturday! I know the blog was rudely interrupted and I actually have no clue where I was going with that last paragraph! This is actually hilarious. Well, it is frustrating, but I am choosing to laugh because, like many things in my life, if I don't choose to laugh at my circumstances I will go nuts! I orginally started this blog entry on Wednesday with the title "Life". I knew my last blog entry had been a week before that and so I really needed to write, but two things kept delaying me: 1) I didn't know what exactly to write as there was no specific event or topic to communicate, hence the decision to just write about "Life", specifically life on the ranch when Victor and the majority of staff are gone on crusades; 2) Victor and the majority of the staff are gone on crusade....this means that I must be paying attention to the kids 24/7! When Victor is home I can ask him to take over for an hour or so while I blog or, sometimes, I will skip devotions that day and use that early morning time for blogging. Devotions are my lifeline, literally, but even more so when Victor is gone! So, there was no devotion skipping to be done this week! Morning is my favorite and best time of day, hence blogging on a Saturday at 6:00 a.m., and since I usually try to sleep in (until 8:00 a.m.?) on Saturdays and I don't normally do devotions on Saturday I am not having to skip them today to write.

On Wednesday all I got written on the blog was the title: "Life". Besides my first two reasons for the blog getting on delayed, on Wednesday, specifically, I was helping one of my eldest daughters deal with some guy issues which were pretty much consuming us that day, but I couldn't write about that because it's private stuff :-) and my brain couldn't seem to handle much else besides everyday living. I am beginning to find that everyday living with 17 kids is complicated enough, even more so when Victor and part of the staff are on crusade, and my brain, and heart, can only handle one extra issue at a time. So Wednesday's extra issue was "guys", so "blog" issues didn't happen!

On Thursday it is my turn to take care of the five youngest children while the others go to school. (My five eldest girls, Vero and I take turns caring for the five youngest children. I have Thursdays, Vero has Fridays and the older girls rotate through the other three days of the week.) I didn't even try to write the blog on Thursday because....I was taking care of five children ages 5, 5, 4, 3, and 2 years old. Besides that, as the other elementary aged children get out of school, they join our group as it is a great opportunity to be with Mom! I love Thursdays but, without Victor here to pitch backup, there was no hope of writing a blog entry.

That takes us to Friday, when I started the blog again! Since the blog is dated when you create the entry by writing a title, I erased the entry and started it again to take off Wednesday's date and have it dated on Friday. So, I did a shortened version of devotions and started writing the blog....again! As I was writing, I heard Angie's feet running through the house. Now, Angie gets up to go running each morning, but she usually is careful to run outside and not inside the house! She ran to my door, knocked on it and said: "The mare had her calf!" Well, that confirmed that the mare had been pregnant! (We were never totally sure that she was pregnant because she didn't get pregnant at Refuge Ranch...we try to teach purity and this mare isn't married yet:-)....which means she was just pregnant when we bought her last summer and the owner hadn't realized it!

OK, more opportunity to laugh! I just reread my last paragraph to proof it and found a slight error. Since this blog is called "Life" I thought I would keep in my error and see how many of you readers caught it and, if you did, let you have a good laugh at this blondie! (I know, Dad, you have no clue how I got the grades I did in school:) OK, so the mare did not have a calf! That would have been a miracle! She did however have a "potro" (I cannot remember the name for a baby horse in English)! OK, she had a colt! (Had to check the Spanish/English dictionary on that one!)

Back to the blog...so I jumped up from the computer, in my pajamas, put on sandals and went running out of the house to go see the new colt (I am a fast learner...didn't have to look up "colt" that time!). Well, on the way out, Daniel woke up and called from me from his crib, so I took a detour to his room, picked him up and then went running out of the house with both of us in pajamas to go see the colt (I remembered again!).

Soon, we had 15 of our 17 children, in pajamas, standing around Sonya (short for Sonadora which means Dreamer in Spanish) and meeting her new colt. I have never in my life seen such a small horse before! Her little son is her spitting image! OK, so here comes some more life! I would have some great pictures to show you, but....when Angie told me about the colt, I remembered my camera battery had died the day before and I hadn't plugged it in to recharge it. So, before running out the door I plugged in my camera to make sure the battery would be ready the next time I needed it. Angie lent me her camera and I got some great pictures on it, but Angie left last night to stay at the children ministry director's house from our church so that she could attend a 2011 VBS training at the Christian bookstore in Mexico City today and...she took her camera! Lucy has some great pictures on Facebook, but I can't figure out how to copy them off of Facebook! So, I owe you the pictures!

By the time we all spent over a half an hour ooohing and aaahing over the colt, it was time to get everybody dressed and ready for the day. That is where I left the paragraph hanging and have no clue where I was going with it. The rest of the day we spent cleaning and reorganizing the schoolroom as we hope to start with a full school schedule next week (besides bookwork, we add daily reading time, restart piano and violin lessons, as well as extra classes like Mexican history, P.E. and art.) The schoolroom had never been how I had wanted it because the roof leaked during last rainy season and we had to set up the room around the leaks. Since we are in dry season and the roof has been repaired and should be ready for the rain that starts in July, we finally took the time to rearrange the schoolroom.

In the afternoon I had my "one-on-one" time with Fidel. I spend a half an hour alone with each of the kids each week. They each have their assigned day. They pick the activity that we do together. However, Fidel and I, for over a year now, have played soccer during his time on Friday. It isn't exactly one-on-one, but soccer is one of his passions so that is what we do! Here comes the life part...since Victor isn't here to help with backup and Lolis had the little kids yesterday and was pretty tired of them by 5:00 p.m., I decided to take the little kids with us up to the neighbor's flat field where we play soccer. Well, it took us longer to get started playing than the half hour we spent playing! The trouble is the little kids want to be with Mommy and I am supposed to be playing soccer. I can carry two of them at a time, but not while I play soccer! So, I was trying to get them distracted when Ana decided she wanted to go back to the house. I took her back myself because you can't see the house from the field and I feel uncomfortable letting her go back on her own. As soon as I climbed back up to the field, Daniel decided to go back to the house. So, I took him down too! So, we finally got done with our soccer game at 6:30 p.m. (actually got interrupted for the last few minutes by the UPS guys delivering the school books for our newest children). We ate supper (scrambled eggs in green tomato sauce with black beans), picked up the house, got the little ones ready for bed, put all the kids to bed except the 7 oldest girls (minus Angie who is gone this weekend) because it was our traditional move night while Dad is gone with chips and ice cream!

And now it is today..Saturday..now 6:47 a.m. The sun has nearly peeked over the horizon next to Popo, the new colt is drinking her mommy's milk and Ana, who is 4 years old, has woken up and is curled up in my lap as I type.

Oh, and I learned something today! Pretty good for a Saturday morning before 7:00 a.m., I would say! Since Rosa does all of her cooking in the "big kitchen", actually it is the warehouse located in the main house here at Refuge Ranch, many of our staple food items are there. This includes our sugar, which we buy in bulk and keep in a large container in the big kitchen. So, last night after the movie I got my coffee cup out to get it ready for this morning. I put the coffee in the cup (yes, I drink instant coffee) and began to look for some sugar. We usually try to keep a little bit of sugar in a container here in the house for us to use, but that sugar had run out. Well, it was near midnight, so I really didn't want to go outside, by myself, at that hour to get some sugar for my coffee! So, I started looking around for something to sweeten my coffee with!

Lesson learned: powdered sugar does not taste the same as regular sugar in coffee! That's life... and you might as well just laugh or you could go crazy!