Summer Activities

Katy and Zechariah are on summer break. Weird you say? Katy agrees...and she also misses snow. 

The kids are restless though. Throughout the school year they are in school from 8-5 Mon-Fri so we had to find something for them to do. Katy is in Gymnastic classes and Z is going to start speech classes soon. 

Katy started Gymnastics today. She had a blast but did fall one time, she's totally embarrassed too that she fell. But she is my daughter, I hate to break it to her but she's destined to be clumsy. :(

Our District

Lima is divided up into Districts, Josh works in La Victoria it's right next to the District that we live in, San Borja. We enjoy visiting Barranco and Miraflores every now and then with the kids, and Josh and I visit the Centro of Lima frequently (District Lima). We have team members in Los Olivos and just recently Cailtlin found a nice place for herself in Lince. So the team is scattered about everywhere now.

Our Neighborhood of San Borja is a small middle class district. Our neighbors actually just moved into San Borja from La Victoria, something that they are very proud of. San Borja is rather nice there are parks everywhere, Starbucks on almost ever corner (not every but there are ALOT). There is a large government building by our house called the Pentagonito (Cuartel General del Ejercito del Perú) they have a park and LOTS of fitness classes and fitness events around it.  

Our neighborhood is very quiet and tranquil, we've been told this on many occasions when we have people at the house during the evening.  Although during the day we may have something like 20 people working in the park to cut the grass and flowers, and or a guy on a bike riding around blowing a whistle for people to know that he's around to sharpen knives. Our ice cream man is also different here there isn't a big truck that plays music, we have a guy on a bike with a freezer on the front and instead of annoying loud kids songs he blows a whistle that sounds like a duck quacking. Another fun thing our recycling truck plays the Celine Dion song from Titanic too.

We like our neighborhood, and feel safe living here. We are walking distance from the kids school and from a lot of other things that we can do as a family. We wish you could all visit so you can experience everything that Lima is.

Happy Mother's Day!

Hey everyone!

I hope you are having a wonderful Mother's day. 

We've been a bit lazy around the house this morning. Although as soon as I've posted this I'm going to clean up the house and wait on groceries to be delivered. A mom's work never ends even if it's mother's day. This afternoon though we have some fun activities planned. 

Yesterday Katy and Zachary (the name Z has decided to use at school) had their school play. There are a few videos below that you can watch. It takes a bit to upload them to youtube so there will be a few more video's of Z's performance.  Zechariah's School "Little Twain" has few enough students that they were able to do one big show with everyone. While each class in Katy's School "Mark Twain" did individual class skits. Katy's class sang "Como un Angel" or "Like an Angel". She's been practicing with a youtube video of that song for weeks now.

We hope you have, and wish you all a very happy mother's day!

After the plays.

My morning coffee and donut in bed. I asked Zechariah if he was going to bring me coffee in bed and he replied with "yeah and a donut!" 

Katy trying her very first cup of coffee, she wanted to see what all the hype is about. It's very very very watered down and she added sugar, she said it was ok.  

Tour of Our Home Part 2

In this part of the tour you'll get to see the kids rooms. They both picked the color for their rooms and Katy requested the bunk in her room have room for her to put a desk under. She'd like a bean bag to put under there to read in. But for now she has the extra chair from the living room in there.

Tour of Our Home Part 1

Hey everyone I've been asked about what our house looks like here in Peru from several people. I did have a post where I had a bit about our home but I never uploaded a photo tour like I have in the past. I'm planning to do this in parts though because it'll take a while to load all the pictures into one post. 

So for starters You get to see our roof top deck and living area/Kitchen. We also just had it painted everything was white when we moved in, and it was primer so we needed to paint everything. Since we needed to paint we opted to pick out colors for the rooms. The terrace is so much better now that there are darker colors, it's not so bright and you don't get and instant headache from the brightness.

The Dog house is my next project. I'm going to paint it gray.

Enjoy!

Making Wishes

Remember awhile ago I mentioned some of my favorite books.  One of those was Flat-Out Love by Jessica Park. In the book one of the characters has a Christmas tradition of laying under her tree and making wishes for the coming year. I told this to the kids and they decided that was a great idea. Josh says we are weirdo's but here are our under the tree photo's and even the cat got excited and she makes wishes under the tree as well.

          

Going to School

Katy and Z have been in homeschool basically since a few weeks after we settled into Lima. But over the past few months Josh and I have discussed how getting the kids into a school program here might be the best idea.  

Its a very hard decision to make especially when you live in a foreign country. The American english speaking school is pretty far from our house and we'd have to take a taxi every day to get to it or the kids would have to ride a tiny bus to it. Also the american school is rather expensive, like so high I wondered if it was actually a college. So after talking to several missionaries and discussing what we thought our kids could handle, together we decided on a small private school that is very close to our house, very reasonably priced, and has a great curriculum.

The school is very small, the staff is friendly, the students are exceptionally behaved, the programs that the kids will get to be a part of are pretty amazing, the classes are very small and a lot of the teachers speak english so when Katy or Zechariah are more extensively learning the language the teachers can help with explaining something to them in english and such.  They do have an hour of english class each day where they will be learning english, grammar, etc. 

There are opportunities for them to learn dance, music, tennis, swimming, etc. There classes go from 8 am to 5 pm and they are sent home without homework. 

The kids were able to go to classes for free this past week and they loved it. They are already making friends and such as well. 

On the second day I went to pick up both kiddos while waiting this boy kept peeking out of the kitchen/lunchroom at me and smiling. One of the teachers brought Zechariah out and then went off to grab Katy from her class. While Zechariah and I were waiting on Katy the little boy who had been peeking around the door came out and asked me "¿Eres la madre de Katharina?" Are you the mother of Katharina? I replied with Si/yes and he smiled really big and when Katy came down the stairs with another boy from her class he came back out to wave bye to Katy and both boys wished her a good afternoon and see you tomorrows, and so it begins.  :)