Bob and Jerry

Jerry and Zar

Before I start this blog post, I'd like to make sure it's clear that the names Bob and Jerry are perfectly fine names and I know some great people with those names.

As I think I've mentioned before on here, Andrew goes by Baba, the Swahili word for father, with our kids. Of course we lived in Tanzania when he decided to be Baba instead of Dad or Father (does anyone actually call their father Father?), where it was a bit more common than it is here in Western PA, but I think he'd have chosen it anyway. We like being a little unique. I'm Mama, which is both Swahili and English, so that was a straightforward choice.

Sometimes Zarya calls me Mom instead of Mama, usually after being around other kids and hearing them call their mothers by that. Although it's not my preference, it's not a big deal, and sometimes I don't really notice, because the two sound pretty similar.

What we do notice, however, is when Baba becomes Bob. I guess Zarya figured out the Mama/Mom connection, heard other kids call their fathers Dad or Daddy, and so created Bob out of Baba. It was just occasional at first, but it's like she thinks it's just too much effort to get out two syllables of Baba and now prefers to keep it short and sweet, Bob. A few times I've even heard her call him Bobby... We're going to be out in public someday and she's going to yell across the room, "Hey Bob!" just like she does at home. Eventually this Bob business will get to the point when other adults assume his name is Bob and that he's her step-dad and she calls him by his first name.

He tries to call her Zar every time she calls him Bob, as in, "Hey Bob!" followed by, "Yes, Zar?" She gets mad and insists that her name is Zarya, and seems to miss the point as he explains that his is Baba.

And if having Bob around weren't enough, Jerod has become Jerry recently, too. Andrew and I never, ever call him Jerry. Nothing against the name Jerry, but that's not what I'd like to call my baby boy. I'm hoping that he sticks with Jerod. If he wants to be cooler and go by Jer at some point in his future, fine. But not Jerry. Zarya, however, seems to think Jerry is a great name and calls him that quite regularly, and she never consulted me on the matter of his nickname. Crazy toddler!

Popcorn and smoothies

First of all, I will not apologize for my recent lack of blog posts. I am sorry that I have not been able to write any for a while, but I'm not sorry for having chosen spending time working on Bible translation, making dinners/cleaning the house/etc., hanging out with my husband, or taking care of my children instead of being at my computer.

But, it's Saturday afternoon and the kids are both asleep and the baby food is cooking away on the stove, so I've got a few minutes.

I had a revelation a few weeks ago. It was the same one I'd had a few years ago, so you think I'd have remembered it and wouldn't have had to figure out the same thing twice, but I guess I'm a little slow sometimes. I realized that the same meal every week was stressful for me. It occurred to me that if we just had popcorn and smoothies, which we all love, is pretty quick to make, and not too bad for you healthwise (I'm not saying it's amazing, but it's not awful), for that meal every week, life would be a whole lot better on those days.

It used to be Tuesday dinners that worked me up. Back in Musoma, I had Bible study late in the afternoon on Tuesdays. By the time I got home at nearly 7:00pm, Andrew had been taking care of Zarya on his own for almost three hours, he and I were both hungry, Zarya needed her bath and to be put to bed, and making dinner (or trying to make sure we always had leftovers on hand) was just stressful. I loved Bible study, but on the way home every week I could feel myself tensing up and bracing for this low-blood-sugar racing around trying to do everything at once stressful evening.

Then I discovered the relief of a planned popcorn and smoothies night. We had that combo for lunch or dinner sometimes, but not on any sort of schedule. But as soon I figured out that if we had popcorn and smoothies every Tuesday evening, all of that dinner stress disappeared. Okay, so we were still in Musoma where nothing is really stress-free, because sometimes there was no electricity for running the blender to make the smoothies and the stores periodically ran out of our preferred kind of popcorn, but most of the time the plan worked well.

Skip ahead a year: we're now in Pennsylvania and have two kids. What's stressful about life here, you might wonder. Well, let me tell you, and you might agree with me - Sunday lunch! Seriously, we get home from church and we're all hungry and want lunch NOW, and naptime is the looming deadline, so we really do need to eat lunch soon so we can get the kids down for their naps on time so we don't all dissolve into puddles of hungry exhaustion after having all of that fun at Sunday school/church. Andrew tends to prefer different kinds of lunch foods than what Zarya and I eat Monday through Friday, so figuring out something we could all eat and get it together quickly stressed me out.

Voila - popcorn and smoothies! We had been having popcorn and smoothies for Sunday dinners in PA, but when I figured out a few weeks ago that moving my emergency meal to being Sunday lunch, well, life got a whole lot better. We now come home from church and Zarya and I make the smoothies and Andrew makes the popcorn (for the world's best popcorn, please see the Whirley Pop - http://www.amazon.com/Wabash-Valley-Farms-25008-Whirley-Pop/dp/B00004SU35/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1434824414&sr=1-1&keywords=whirley+pop) and then we sit on the couch and enjoy ourselves.

So, maybe popcorn and smoothies isn't your family's thing, but I bet you know some meal that is your well-liked, quick go-to meal. Should you find yourself getting stressed out regularly by some meal each week, do yourself a favor and plan your easy meal in advance!

Titular humor

Warning: immature humor that some might consider in poor taste to follow.

While washing dishes this evening, I had a flashback to something my sister Alyssa and I found hilarious back in the day. Way back in the day, to be clear.

Our family used to listen to Garrison Keilor tapes (see, told you it was back in the day - we had tapes!) when on long trips, One of his stories was about how he and his brothers (or were they cousins?) used to play a game with book and song titles, substituting the word "buggers" (or if you prefer a different spelling, "boogers") for one word in the title. We included movie titles when we played, being a bit more modern than Garrison.

Our house was packed with bookshelves, because this was pre-Kindle. Alyssa and I would slowly walk along the shelves, trying out "buggers" in the titles until we found a good one, then call it out to the other person. It was hilarious stuff to middle schoolers. Dad's theology books were the best - titles like "Transformational Christianity" lent themselves well to becoming "Transformational Buggers." Even mature readers like yourselves might find a little humor in it if you're lame enough. Try a few classics:

The Old Man and the Sea
The Sound of Music
Little Orphan Annie
The Scarlet Letter
A Tale of Two Cities
100 Years of Solitude
A Room of One's Own
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
As I Lay Dying

See - simply irresistable.

As an adult, I found out about a similar game that a friend had played as a kid, one that would have sent Alyssa and me into eruptions of laughter if we'd known about it back in the day. That being said, I confess that as a mature missionary singing hymns with friends, occasionally it still popped into my mind and made me make a muffled snort at times. This friend's version (which, she told me, most of the kids at her Christian high school and Bible college also knew, so apparently it's popular in some circles) was to add the words "in the toilet" after the title of a hymn, as in, "Jesus Paid It All in the Toilet." See, I told you this post was ridiculously immature.

So, want to give that idea a go? (No pun intended...)

For the Beauty of the Earth
All Things Bright and Beautiful
Abide With Me
Fight the Good Fight
Jesus Christ is Risen Today
Nearer My God to Thee
There is a Fountain
Are You Washed in the Blood

Okay, so you may now forever think less of me. I have probably knocked whatever missionary pedestal you had right over, but that might be a good thing and high time it happened. But whatever the case, I hope you laughed at least once as you let your inner child out to enjoy some bodily function humor.

Interested in teaching missionary kids?

Did you know that one of the biggest needs on the missions field is for teachers for missionary kids? That's right - doing a job that involves you speaking your own language and doing the job you're already trained to do (I'm writing to teachers... of course there are plenty of you who are not teachers!). So, should you be interested in doing missions overseas but aren't sure how your skills as a teacher would fit into a Bible translation or church planting or medical missions organization, let me tell you, they would fit perfectly!

Should you be interested in living in Musoma, Tanzania (see hundreds of my previous blog posts for what living there is like... it's the town we used to be in!), there is a little school there, Lake Victoria Learning Center, which is in desperate need of an elementary school teacher. To learn more about this position, go here: http://www.teachers-in-service.org/lvlc_tanzania.php. To visit the blog of the teacher pictured above (my friend Lyndy), go here: http://mkteacher.blogspot.com/.

And if you're more of a big city person who'd rather be at a bigger school, teaching not only missionary kids, but children from a great variety of cultural and religious backgrounds, there is a great school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, called Haven of Peace Academy (see picture above). It currently needs quite a few teachers, in elementary, middle, and high school levels. To learn more, go here: http://www.teachers-in-service.org/hopac_36_2.php.

I hope some of you out there might be interested! There are links to some interesting blogs and other articles at the bottom of those two websites, too, if you want to read more about teaching missionary kids.

First haircuts

At almost five months old and almost two and a half years old, our children both received their first-ever haircuts today. It's not that Jerod is all that hairy, but he had a stringy forelock thing going on that wasn't his best look. And as for Zarya, she's always had plenty of hair, but since it's curly, it's never gotten very long. The lower back part was starting to look a little droopy, however, so it was finally time for a trim.

I neglected to take a before picture of the back of Zarya's head, but here's what I do have for you:

See what I meant about the comb-over look on Jerod?

And here's the little guy all cleaned up:

And you probably can't tell from this angle that Zarya got a haircut, but she wanted her picture taken after she saw me taking Jerod's:

:

Coincidentally, I happened to get my hair cut this week, too. It doesn't look any different - my ponytail is a little shorter, though. Someday when I actually bother to have a hairstyle and style it, before and after pictures might be in order.

Holidays, or lack thereof

Yesterday we had beef-barley soup for dinner (homemade by Andrew, and it was excellent), during the course of the day I cleaned the bathroom and did laundry, and our kids wore nice, but normal and not brand-new or particularly fancy, clothes to church. Oh, did I mention that yesterday was Easter Sunday? We're not traditionalists. Thanks to the fact Andrew's mom was visiting, Zarya did eat a chocolate rabbit and searched the living room for plastic eggs. And of course church was very resurrection-ish, which kind of saved the holiday for us.

At the end of the day, I commented to Andrew that I thought we should make a point of celebrating some holidays in addition to Christmas as our kids get older. He looked at me in surprise, saying, "But you're the one who always says we can just skip them!"

I said, "I know, I know, but I don't want our kids to grow up and feel like they needs to have a crazy celebration for things like St. Patrick's Day and Flag Day in over-reaction from our lack of noting holidays."

Andrew said, "Okay, which ones should we choose?"

After some consideration, I said, "Well, how about Easter, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving?"

Andrew said, "All of those? Are you sure? And both kids' birthdays? You have a history of skipping Thanksgiving, and now you want to add it and two others on top of it?"

I added, "Yes, and our birthdays, and anniversary, but we can combine those three if need be, since they are all in the summer. Oh, and Mother's Day."

To which he said, "And Father's Day."

"No, Mother's Day is enough. We can skip Father's Day. That's just too much."

"We'll see."

We're awful, I know. At least Jerod's birthday is close to Thanksgiving, so I can combine those and get a two-for-one holiday. I hope he likes pumpkin pie! But if he doesn't like turkey, then that means I'm off the hook for having to roast one, which could be handy.

At least we do Christmas well!

Puzzle blocks and bedhead

Zarya got a Melissa and Doug 16-block 6-sided puzzle for Christmas, and it's a good challenge! She hasn't mastered it yet, and it's great to have a toy that she likes playing with, but that is still hard brain work for her. She needs something to make her think a bit and keep her interested even after three months.

And yes, this really is what her hair looks like every morning. Fortunately, all it takes is little water from a spritzer bottle and some finger curls, and this wild child turns into a cute girl again.