A Year in the Life: August, 2018

Youth camp continues through the first week in August.This camp is sponsored by the Fort Walton Beach Church of Christ from Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. They have been putting on this camp each summer for the past nearly 20 years, and it is always a great week and results in several baptisms. We are grateful for their partnership with the camp and our family (this church recently became part of our family's personal support team).

During this week, I am working 14-16 hour days in the kitchen while Rusty is mostly at home with the kids, although he does have a few responsibilities throughout the week. Also, I am already thinking ahead to next week and the next camp. There is a menu to finalize, groceries to purchase, and orders to place for meat, chicken, bread, and fruits and veggies.

Camp ends on Saturday, August 4th. After lunch, the campers depart, and the camp feels strangely empty and quiet! I begin to immediately do laundry -- with only 2 full days before the start of the next camp, I will keep our 3 washers and 2 dryers running nearly constantly in order to get enough sets of sheets washed and dried so beds can be made for the next set of campers. We send the rest of the staff home to rest for the remainder of today and tomorrow. They have worked hard all week long, and I am so thankful for them! I shower, clean up, and put on normal clothes (and even a little make-up!), and then we go out to dinner with the Florida team to celebrate another successful youth camp.

On Sunday morning, I serve breakfast to the team and we have a short worship service at the camp followed by a meeting to talk about next year. Then we go out for lunch together. Afterwards, we say goodbye and they head off for a few days of R&R. I continue doing laundry most of Sunday afternoon and evening.

On Monday, August 6th, the staff return, ready for another week of work. They spend the morning cleaning cabins and making beds in preparation for Basketball Camp. The counselors begin arriving in the afternoon. We do some training sessions with them, and they help decorate and set up. After dinner, we have a devotional all together.

On Tuesday, Basketball Camp begins. This week, Rusty is helping with the camp all week as one of the directors, while I stay at home with the kids. One of my staff will be running the kitchen all week. Alex is old enough to participate in Basketball Camp this year, so I will have just the three younger ones with me at the house.

I use my few days at home to get everything in order for Kids Camp next week. I do most of the planning and organizing for this camp, and there is still a lot to be done, so it is nice to have a few days at home to focus on it.

Basketball Camp ends on Saturday with an all-day tournament. The campers leave in the late afternoon and I begin the laundry cycle again. On Sunday, we attend church at Pisulí and then do some grocery shopping before heading home to get ready for tomorrow.

The staff are back to work again on Monday, August 13th, for our final camp of the summer. They clean and prep cabins while I set up for Kids Camp. The counselors arrive in the afternoon and are a big help with the decorating. We are doing Egyptian decor this year, to go along with our theme, "The Life of Joseph," and they make some amazing wall decorations out of brown paper, markers, crayons, paint, and glitter! We have dinner together, followed by a devo.

Kids Camp begins on Tuesday afternoon, with the arrival of the campers. This is one of my favorite weeks of the year. Although planning, organizing, and directing a camp is a lot of work, I have also found it to be hugely rewarding! I have help in the actual directing of the camp from Syndi and Guillermo. They do a great job, and we make a good team. After the registration dust settles, we have 47 campers this year, a record high!

Kids Camp runs for three full days, plus 2 partial days for arrival and departure. The schedule I have found works best is to do a Bible lesson in the mornings, followed by games and a craft to reinforce the key point. The kids then meet in small groups with their counselors to have some discussion time and to practice their memory verse. After lunch, we have them rotating in groups to art class and sports. Then we have an "afternoon activity," and after dinner each night, an "evening activity." For the first afternoon, we play Bible Smugglers outside. The kids love this game! Our evening activity is indoor games, including Bingo, and a hilarious game called "Captain's Orders," which they never seem to tire of.

On the second day, we have an Egyptian themed treasure hunt in the afternoon. After dinner and the campfire devo, there are s'mores, followed by outdoor games with glow-sticks. The third afternoon is set aside for a service project. This year, the kids are making 40 no-sew fleece blankets to donate to a prison ministry. We have also invited a Christian brother who served time in prison and now heads up a prison ministry to talk to the kids about his experiences and about the importance of ministering to the incarcerated. After dinner, we spread out thin mattresses in the auditorium, give all the kids bags of popcorn, and have a movie night. In keeping with the week's theme, I have chosen "Joseph, King of Dreams."

Kids Camp ends on Saturday morning after breakfast and a closing ceremony. The campers leave before lunch, and we have a brief meeting with all the counselors before sending them and the staff on their way. We are now completely done with summer camps -- hooray! -- although we still have one final group coming to the camp next week. We have a few days before their arrival to do laundry, clean cabins, shop for food, and put away all the supplies and decorations used during Kids Camp.

Our final group of the summer is from the Bible college. They are doing their new student orientation. It is just for one night, Wednesday night, August 22nd. By Thursday afternoon, we are completely done with groups for the summer! It is a good feeling. On Friday, we have a big cleaning day at the camp. We prepare a special lunch for all the staff and I make a cake to celebrate those with August birthdays. It's a good way to end the summer and to thank everyone for all their hard work.

Ben's birthday falls at the end of August. He requests to go to Mr. Joy, a big indoor play zone in Quito, so we head there on his actual birthday. The next day, we finish celebrating with cake and presents. The end of August also means it's back-to-school time. I start doing lessons with the boys again and sign them up to play baseball with the Quito Youth Baseball League this fall, and we also fill out all the paperwork to enroll Elizabeth in the preschool class at the Hacienda of Hope Christian Academy.

Summer is over -- now we can breathe again!

August moments (clockwise from top left):

1. Kitchen staff for Youth Camp week -- a great team!
2. Happy 7th birthday, Benji!
3. Basketball Camp
4. Kids Camp firepit devo
5. Kids Camp blanket-making service project

A Year in the Life: April, 2018

April begins with my birthday, which also happens to be Easter Sunday this year! We go to church at Pisulí, then have lunch at an Indian restaurant in Quito. In the evening, we celebrate Easter with a special "brinner," complete with resurrection rolls, an Easter object lesson and treat that the kids like to help make.

I share my birthday with my sister, and we enjoy celebrating together. This year, we plan a spa date in mid-April. This was actually her Christmas present to me, but we have waited so long to actually plan it that it feels like a birthday gift, too! We enjoy a hot tub, massages, and facials at a spa in Quito, followed by lunch out, and then manicures and pedicures. It is fun to pamper ourselves occasionally!

Representatives from the Shawnee Trail Church of Christ in Frisco, which has recently begun supporting our family, as well as the Bible college in Quito, come to Ecuador the first week in April. We drive into Quito to have dinner with them and the Marcum family at Pim's, a nice restaurant with views over the city. The following day, they come out to see the camp and have lunch at our home. Then, they leave with Rusty and Josh for a one-night trip to Loja to visit the church planting team there.

Stephen turns nine on April 6th. He is sick on his actual birthday, so we postpone our plans for an outing with his cousins. By the next day, he is feeling better, so I make his requested birthday dessert -- Oreo Cheesecake Brownie Trifle, and we celebrate at home. Later, we reschedule a visit to the arcade with his cousins.

Syndi has her baby (born on Stephen's birthday!), so after church the following Sunday, we pay them a visit at the hospital. Baby Isabella is super cute!

Our fridge is still not working properly, so while we wait for the technician to figure out what the problem is, Rusty has a small fridge that belongs to the camp brought up to the house. We squeeze it into our laundry room. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing. And waiting a few weeks for a repair is certainly better than buying another fridge! Meanwhile, the closets for the boys' new bedroom are finally finished, so I spend several days unpacking, sorting and organizing their clothes into their new space.

A small group from the Sunset Church of Christ in Springfield, MO visits Ecuador in mid-April. They are visiting the church-planting team in Manta, which is sponsored by Sunset. Rusty travels with the group to Manta to help as a translator and is gone for several days. On the way back from Manta, the group misses their connecting flight in Quito, so Rusty brings them out to the camp for the night. They are re-booked on a flight leaving the next evening, so we get to enjoy a day with them at the camp. We take them to town, to the Equator monument just south of Cayambe, and to have lunch at the Vaca Loca. We have dinner at our house that evening before Rusty takes them back to the airport.

The third weekend in April, we have a group at the camp. It is a girls' retreat, at the camp for two nights. I stay busy in the kitchen all weekend. Rusty takes the kids to Enoch's birthday party on Saturday and to church on Sunday.

The end of April finds me planning, shopping for, and prepping another big batch of crock-pot freezer meals, this time for Syndi, who has been staying in Quito with her mom, but will be coming back home to the camp soon with her new baby. We have a 4-day holiday weekend at the end of April / first of May, perfect for this project and also beginning work on getting everything ready to file our taxes.

April moments (clockwise from top left):

1. Birthday girls!
2. Stephen is 9!
3. The kids are enjoying listening to Joe Bright, from the Sunset Church, tell a story.
4. School is in session

A Year in the Life: February, 2018

During the very end of January and the first part of February, I help run the "School Store" for the kids in the after-school program. Two times per year, we offer a chance for the kids to redeem the points they have accumulated (for attendance, good behavior, and learning their weekly memory verse) for toys, snacks and candy in the "School Store."

A fun family tradition we try to do on a weekly basis during the school year is "Pizza and a Movie Night." I make homemade pizza and we pick a movie to watch together as a family. Since none of the kids are enrolled in traditional school this year, we can really do this any night we want, but we usually try for either Thursday or Friday evenings, depending on if we have a weekend group at the camp or not.

On Sunday, February 4th, we host a Superbowl Party in the evening at our house. One of the reasons we wanted to enlarge our house was so that we could host large groups of people more comfortably. It is nice to be able to open up our home for fellowship, fun, and community. Lots of our "gringo" friends come to hang out and watch the Eagles soar to victory over the Patriots. Everyone brings appetizers and finger-foods to share, and we enjoy yummy treats like Tanya's queso dip made with Velveeta and Ro-tel brought from the States!

Just before the Carnaval holiday (a 2-day public holiday here in Ecuador just before the beginning of Lent), we plan a day of water games and activities for the kids in the after-school program. They have a shaving cream and water balloon fight, and we set up a giant slip-and-slide on the hill just below our house. Some years, the weather is cold and rainy and not really conducive to this kind of outdoor fun. This year, however, we have a warm and sunny afternoon -- perfect for getting wet!

Elizabeth celebrates her fourth birthday on February 8th. We celebrate at home with a ballet slipper cake, the new "Beauty and the Beast," and presents. We also plan an outing with the cousins to Mr. Joy (a huge indoor play arena in Quito), followed by a sleepover at their house. The cousins love spending time together, and we try to plan an outing or a sleepover at least once every month or two. It is easier to arrange our schedules this year since Julie started homeschooling her kids.

Rusty does some marriage counseling using Prepare/Enrich with a couple from the Pisulí Church. Since they live so far away and it's difficult to plan a weekly meeting, we have them out to the camp to spend the night and do some intensive counseling. Then, later on the next week, over the Carnaval holiday, Rusty meets them at their home in Quito to do another day-long session.

The Carnaval holiday coincides this year with the school semester break. Schools are out for an entire week, which means the after-school program is also cancelled. Most of our staff take some vacation days, so it is pretty quiet at the camp. It's still a school week for my kids since we homeschool, but we also plan a field trip with the Marcum family to the Condor Park (a bird-of-prey sanctuary) in Otavalo. I do some organizing and straightening in the camp store-rooms. We celebrate Valentine's Day with a fondue dinner (cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue), and we watch a lot of the Winter Olympics. The kids play outside with the slip-and-slide nearly every day until I dry it off and store it. They love to get wet!

The break was nice and over too quickly. The week after Carnaval is super busy. I work on updating the bulletin boards that hang in the camp dining hall and teach my English classes. Some friends and I host a baby shower for Syndi, who is due in April, and I make three sheet-cakes for one of our employees to share with friends and family at the special mass being held for his sister who recently passed away.

We have been planning a team retreat for the leadership team at Camp Bellevue (Rusty and I, Guillermo and Syndi, and Seyber), and our families. However, we have to cancel due to an unforeseen circumstance. We are pretty disappointed because there is literally not a single other weekend between now and the end of the summer that is available for us to reschedule. However, we decide to meet together at the camp on Friday afternoon for a "mini-retreat," and then we all go to dinner in Cayambe with our families.

A computer store in Quito where we have a contact has agreed to donate four refurbished computers to the after-school program's library. They send a couple of techs out one Saturday at the end of February to deliver the computers and set them up for us. We are pretty excited about this as the computers we have been using are very old and very slow. The computers in the library get used a lot, especially by the older kids when they have homework that requires the use of Internet, and we are thankful they will have some more modern equipment to use.

The final few days of February find me doing some planning for our spring break groups (menus, bills, etc.), which begin arriving in early March. We also celebrate Alex's 12th birthday! He asks for a 12-layer cake. I try to oblige, but it is pretty much a disaster. At least it tastes okay. My kids entirely overestimate my abilities as a baker and decorator!

February moments (clockwise from top left:)

1. Carnaval fun on the slip-and-slide
2. Dinner at the Vaca Loca with the camp leadership team and our families
3. Superbowl party -- friends, food, and football!
4. Alex is 12! Wait, when did that happen?
5. Baby shower for Syndi
6. At Mr. Joy with the cousins -- It's fun to dress up like a princess (unless you're a boy, of course)!

Birthdays and Birthday Parties

Our family celebrates two birthdays in April -- mine on the 1st and Stephen's on the 6th.

These are some pictures of my birthday lunch at the Café de Vaca, one of my favorite restaurants in Cayambe:

And here is Stephen at his family party. He requested chocolate cake with vanilla frosting.

In 2013, I did a joint birthday party for Alex and Stephen, and it worked so well that I did one again in 2014. We planned it on a Saturday in mid-April. Since we live at a camp now, and because our house is small, I decided to plan an outdoor party. We rented a couple of bounce houses, and I set up a couple of other carnival-type games, plus put out things like sidewalk chalk and bubbles and just let the kids play and have fun. For lunch, we roasted hot dogs around the camp fire pit and then finished things off with a S'mores Ice Cream Cake -- a big hit! It was a fairly low-key and stress-free party for me, which I needed with a 2-month old baby in the house.

Nyanya and Babu’s Visit

At the end of February, my parents came to Ecuador for a two-week visit. They came to meet their newest granddaughter (and of course to spend time with their other grandkids – Julie and I and our husbands were an added bonus!). And incidentally, I find it very special that my parents have managed to make a trip like this right after the births of 3 out of my 4 kids (they didn’t need to make a trip when Stephen was born because that happened while we were living with them). Considering the fact that all 3 of those kids were born on a different continent, that is no small feat!

Nyanya and Babu spent the first few days with us out at the camp. Then, we all went to the zoo together with the Marcums and they went home with the Marcums to Quito to spend some time with them. At the end of their time in Ecuador, we spent a weekend all together enjoying the hot springs at Papallacta, and then they spent the last few days with our family before flying back. It was lovely to have them here, to show them where we live and what we do now. They even got to be at the camp when we had a U.S. group here, so they got to experience what hosting and feeding a group of people looks like. They also got to see the beginnings of our “enclosed porch” house project. (We plan to use this area as a homeschool room when it is complete.) Of course, the kids soaked up all the love and attention that was showered on them by their grandparents. We are blessed to live in a country that people can travel to relatively easily, and that Nyanya and Babu are in good health and can make such a trip without any problems.

Here are a few (okay, a lot of) pictures of their time with us.

We celebrated Alex's 8th birthday.

Alex is the proud owner of the game Risk. Be warned -- if you come visit, he'll ask you to play!

Babu and Ben

Nyanya and Babu brought lots of fun treats. Ben was especially excited about the "Yucky" Charms!

Nyanya and Elizabeth

Nyanya got to join in one of our homeschooling days.

And she gave Alex his first piano lesson!

Babu was always ready for a game of Mousetrap...

...or Star Wars Chess

We went to the park one day.

See-saw fun

3 generations!

A day at the zoo with the cousins

Enoch and Ben -- 2 peas in a pod.

Oldest and youngest cousins

Papallacta hot springs

Enjoying the hot tub at our house in Papallacta

Game night -- Risk for Babu, the dads, and the older kids...

...Jr. Monopoly for Nyanya and the younger ones

Elizabeth never lacked for eager cousins to hold her.

Nyanya and Babu and their 8 -- count 'em, 8! -- grandkids!

Sunday morning at the Tabacundo Church of Christ

Nyanya playing trains

Family picture at Lake Cuycocha

Lake Cuycocha Visitors' Center

Cascadas de Peguche

Stephen got some birthday presents, too -- a couple of new games for his MobiGo

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Catching Up: August

We kicked off August by taking a two-night camping trip with the Marcum family to a lovely national forest about an hour south of Quito called Pasachoa. The kids enjoyed sleeping in their very own "kids tent," going on hikes, roasting marshmallows and making s'mores around the campfire, climbing trees, and building a little raft that they put in the creek near our campsite and then followed as it floated downstream.

A hike through the forest

Mmmmm, s'mores!

To roast the marshmallows, we used these awesome skewers that we purchased from the Bormans, a family in our homeschool group.

The view from near our campsite

Showing off the raft they made (with help from Josh).

Alex found lots of fun trees to climb!

We also took a trip to the zoo with the Marcums and the Brewingtons. That was a fun day, and it was our family's first time to visit the Quito Zoo, and our first zoo visit since we lived in Lisbon! The Quito Zoo is certainly not as big or as nice as the Lisbon Zoo, but it is home to several animals unique to this part of the world, like...

Galapagos turtles!

And Andean bears (also called masked bears because of the markings around their eyes).

The kids enjoyed the petting zoo...

And posing on various animal statues. Here are Michaela and Alex with the saber-tooth tiger.

Group picture in front of the entrance to the zoo.

Benjamin turned two at the end of August. We took the whole family to a free outdoor dinosaur and prehistoric animal exhibit at the Carolina Park, then followed that with lunch at Burger King and lots of time to play in the play place. That evening, we celebrated at home with strawberry shortcake in the birthday boy's honor!

I can't believe he's two!

I finished out the homeschool year with Alex at the very end of August. So, just about the time other kids were gearing up to go back to school, he was finally getting his "summer vacation!" I let him have the month of September off so I could plan and get organized for the next year, and we started back up in October. I will do a post later reviewing the curriculum we used and what I will do differently the next time around.

School around the dining room table. I wish I could say we looked like this all the time, but in all honesty, scenes like this are pretty rare!

Also in August, we started working with a group of Christians who wanted to start a new church in Pisulí, one of the poorer neighborhoods in north Quito. We began by meeting in one another's homes for Sunday worship and Bible study, followed by a meal. Over the course of several months, we were able to coach the church-planting team and equip them with tools to help them as they launched this new work. It was such a privilege to watch them come together as a team, articulate their dreams and visions for the work, pray over their dreams, and then work to make them a reality.

First Sunday with the church-planting team. We met in our home for worship and lunch. The Brewington family, who were still in Ecuador following the July medical campaign, were our special guests, and Jason gave the message.

About the same time that we began officially working with the Pisulí team, we became aware of another ministry opportunity. The Reeger family, who had been the administrators at Camp Bellevue in Tabacundo (about an hour north of Quito) for the past seven years, were taking on the administration of the Hacienda of Hope, a children's home on the property adjacent to the camp, and they encouraged us to submit our names for consideration as their replacements. We had known they were leaving and that the Bellevue Church of Christ in WA, which overseas the camp, was looking for a new couple, but had decided against applying for the position, believing the timing was not quite right for our family. However, following several conversations with the Reegers, and in light of some of the difficulties and frustrations that Rusty especially was experiencing with the Kumanii ministry, we decided to prayerfully proceed and see what would happen. The month of August was spent in conversation with both Hillsboro (our sponsoring church) and Bellevue. Bellevue decided they wanted to fly our family up to WA in September for an interview. We worked up a formal proposal for Hillsboro and tentatively approached several of our other major sponsors to inform them of a possible shift in our ministry focus. The response from everyone was supportive and positive, so we decided that if Hillsboro gave us the green light and Bellevue offered us the position, we would move forward.