Got "turned in" to the Media by our Neighbors...

Yup, we are now minor celebrities in our community. It's so weird... Anyway, below is a link to the newspaper article that ran July 4th.

http://www.examiner.net/homepage/x737355458/Theres-no-place-like-home

Bunnies y Flowders

Every morning we give the kids 3 pills; one OTC Claritin (actually it's Costco brand), one Flintstones (also Costco brand), and one calcium chew (chocolate flavor, also from Costco). ***sidebar*** The kids take calcium at the pediatricians' recommendation. When we first took Oscar to the doctor, he was complaining about his elbow (and before that feet in Colombia until we bought him some shoes that fit him better) hurting him. The doctor took an X-ray of his arm and found no damage, but did find his bone tissue to be very thin. Henceforth, calcium.***

Anyway, the calcium comes in a foil wrapper. Every morning I get 4 flowers (or flowders as Oscar pronounces them). One from each kid. Below is a picture of my flowders from this morning.

Flowers by (left to right): Claudia, Mayerly (es una copa today), Diana & Oscar

**********

Our yard seems to be a bunny haven. This is the second clutch (it's a clutch of bunnies, right?) to be born in our back yard this year. The kids are facinated by "los bunnies". I took this picture yesterday over my lunch hour. It's a good thing too, because by the time I got home from picking the kids up from school, they had all left the nest. Hanai (our dog) found one in the yard and was carrying it around in her mouth which led to shrieks from Mayerly and Claudia that "Hanai esta comiendo un bunny!" (Hanai is eating a bunny - if you no habla espanol) -sidebar- Hanai doesn't eat bunnies, she just wants to play with them, the bunnies just fail to understand that... Anyway, I retrieved the bunny from Hanai and it was completely unharmed. Everyone gave a little pet and some picos (kisses) on the bunny's head (which it really did not appreciate) and I set it free under the firewood rack.

Six Flags - St. Louis, MO

Over Memorial Day weekend we met my (Anne's) good friend Dalila, her husband Jeff and their daughter Nicole in St. Louis. It was our first first family trip out of town. We went to Six Flags and to the St. Louis Zoo. The kids had a great time and so did we (I hope we weren't too much for Dalila and Jeff, since they just have one kid right now :-).)

Claudia and Mayerly were too small to ride most of the roller coasters. I rode the Evel Kenevel (don't know if I spelled that right) with Diana and the Screaming Eagle with Oscar. I don't think Diana was real crazy about the roller coasters. We all rode the Tony Hawk roller coaster - Mayerly rode with Tim and evidently screamed to be let off the whole time. Claudia rode with me and laughed her head off the whole ride... I tried to talk Oscar into riding Batman with me, but he decided that he didn't like the idea of his legs dangling on a coaster. Maybe we'll get him to ride the one at Worlds of Fun. Oscar must have told me 'Thank you, Ma' (-sidebar- he's trying to say "Mom", but he has trouble getting that last consonant on most English words) at least five times. I asked him 'For what?', he said 'For dis (making a gesture for the whole park/zoo)'. I ask you, when was the last time you heard an 11-year-old boy thanking one of his parents for a trip to the amusement park or the zoo?

In other news...

notice Claudia's new hairdo. She can pull any barrette that I have bought out, so as soon as her hair got long enough, I started putting it in teeny, tiny pony tails. She looks like a toddler, but at least she looks like a girl.

Diana's eye isn't hurt. She's wearing an eye patch for her strabismus. The doctor said to try that first. She has to wear it all day for a month and then we go back in July to see if that is working at all. It's hard to get her to wear it, and the silly things don't stick very well to sweaty skin (it is almost summer here in the humid midwest). We're doing the best we can with it.

Claudia, Mayerly, Nicole, Diana & Oscar w/ Pepe LePew

Claudia, Mayerly, Diana & Oscar

Oscar, Claudia, Diana & Mayerly with Taz

Mayerly and Claudia

Nicole, Tim, Mayerly, Diana, Claudia & Oscar with Tweety (this is toward the end of the day)

Bikes, Parque and Fiesta

I'm just posting some recent pictures with this one. The girls (except Claudia) got their faces painted at school this afternoon.

The girls on the swingset

Diana with a 'tigre' face

Mayerly with a 'mariposa/gato' face

Our swingset that the kids call 'el parque'

This is the view of it from my office window upstairs

Diana, Oscar and Mayerly on their bikes

Short Update

We finally got the immunization thing squared away last Thursday (at about 4:30 pm). The girls started school on Friday and they absolutely loved it! Their teacher is bilingual and there are kids in their class that speak Spanish. I only hope that this does not slow their learning of English, since that is the main reason we put them in public school.

I go back to work tomorrow (5 hours per day). Things haven't gone exactly as we had planned, but when does anything? We've just kinda rolled with it and we are surviving.

-Anne

Ode to Hanai

Just wanted to give some credit to our 2-year-old Golden-Retreiver-mix Hanai. She was (is) not used to having children in the house (except for the occasional nieces and nephews). She has been sat on, hugged, kissed, dragged around the house by her collar, paws stepped on, fur pulled, fur rubbed the wrong way, screeched at... you name it, they've done it to her. She has been very tolerant in my opinion. We brought her home first since she is pretty laid back. Our other dog (Hank) is a 7-year-old terrier- mix. He will be living at my (Anne's) mom's house for awhile... he would not tolerate any of the above - at all.

Hanai (han-eye)

Oscar (ohz-car)

Diana (dion-ah)

Mayerly (my-airly)

Claudia (clow-dia)

First Professional Family Picture

Pictures!

This one is of just the kids...

Tim doesn't like this one, but I do...

While we were in Bogota, we bought all the kids handmade (Colombian, of course) sweaters. Before it gets too warm, and before they all outgrow them, we got our picture taken. We also got individual pictures taken of each child in his/her sweater. I'll put those above this post (if the kids can refrain from calling me in to referee their skirmishes long enough).

School

We finally finished shots for all the kids... so we thought... so I turned in the paperwork yesterday morning to enroll the girls in school. They said everything looked like it was in order, so they should be able to start today. However, last night at 4:40pm (when it is too late to do anything about any problems) the school nurse called Tim and told him that their shots are not current and that we need to get more shots. We had blood drawn and testing done to make sure that the shot records from Colombia were correct - and our pediatrician said that they were. The nurse also wanted to know when (month and year) they had all had chicken pox. We don't have that information - again - that's why we had blood drawn on each of the kids. I'm going to the school tomorrow to see if they will accept the shot records from the US Embassy doctor. I'm also going to see what I can do about the chicken pox thing . What a pain...

English

The kids are all starting to pick up more English. Here are some of the funnier things that they say...

Goose nigh (Good night)

Vamos a la house (We're going home)

A-goo ghoula (Good girl - to our dog Hanai [pronounced Han-I])

Seent-ow (Sit down - also to Hanai)

Comb on (Come on - Hanai has been very useful in teaching them short phrases...)

Noooo Can-I (what they usually say to Hanai about a hundred times a day)

Estop it (Stop it - this one is not always directed at the dog)