After devotions and getting ready this morning, Alina and I headed to the Toddler House where we cut the vegetables and served breakfast.
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| Morning vegetable cutting to use in the afternoon meals |
Alina went with the children to the 'chosa' (multi-purpose room) and she showed Ana some drills to do with the basketball that she gave to her. Ana let me know later that she was very impressed with Alina's skills! I noticed that Jeremias was playing with the mini soccer ball that Alina had given to the Toddler House (one of the donations from her birthday party), so I took a picture of that as well.
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| Jeremias with the Mini 1 (that was the name on the soccer ball) |
While the children were away, I worked with Zelenes on her math. The big girls had missed 4 weeks of school due to the Toddler House being quarantined because of an illness that was running around. The girls have their big exams next week and since they haven't been in school the past 4 weeks, math has been the greatest challenge. Zelenes is in Bachillerato 1, which is the equivalent of 10th grade, but they are working on Algebra 2 material with quadratic functions (finding the vertex, intercepts, domain and range)...okay if you're not a math nerd like me, that probably didn't make any sense, but I truly got all geeked out about helping her! We spent all morning going through this part of the book, and there's more to go through before Monday, including logarithms and conics...so we'll be working a lot together over the next few days. Zelenes says that her favorite subject is math, so I'm hoping that what I teach her, she can practice and then teach the other girls. She catches on pretty quickly, and making up 4 weeks of material in 5 days is not going to be an easy task.
We served lunch and then headed back to our room so that I could get some money for the volunteers who were going in to town to stop and get me a few items. My internet USB modem came with a free week which expired today, so I needed to get a 'quincena' (1/2 month) put onto it, so that I would still have internet access to posts blogs for the rest of my stay here. And then there are 3 birthdays, 1 today and 2 tomorrow of special kids I know that I wanted to buy a cupcake for from town. When the volunteers were ready to head into town, we went to the school to watch the kids come back for the afternoon. Luis David came over and sat by us. Today is his birthday, and I've known him since the first year I was here - so one of the cupcakes was going to be for him. We chatted for a bit, and I joked how Alina is catching up to him in height, so they stood side-by-side and it looks like he's still an inch taller than her. By next year, she'll pass him. Alina also stood next to a girl who's 12, and she was about 20 inches taller than this girl!
When we got back to the Toddler House for the afternoon, the older girls were out in the dining area watching the end of X-Men 3. When the movie finished, we served supper to the kids, and got them showered up really quickly because there is church tonight. I had brought my smart phone along to show pictures of our 4 younger kids to Karla and the older toddler boys, and realized that I had a video of Olaf singing the Summer song on my phone from when we were at Disney. The boys absolutely loved watching that! They also watched a video of our daughter Kaylyn going through a basketball drill at this summer's basketball camp.
Church this evening was pretty short, but very worthwhile. Alina sat with Michell while I sat with the Alabama team. When we got back to our room, we had a bowl of cereal and then got ready for bed. When I went into the bathroom, I saw this little guy on the wall. It's a gecko. By the time I had gotten my camera, he fell off of the wall and was heading underneath the door. Like cockroaches, they are very quick, but I think they're a lot cuter. They eat the other bugs in the room so that we don't have to worry about too many bugs in here. They also make an odd sound each night...sort of like a mechanical laugh, which is easy to distinguish.
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