Ignore The Adults

My beloved son in the faith, Joshi, is leaving our ministry and going to a new life ministering among orphans and lepers in Delhi. I was putting together some pictures for him today and came across these two from last month. I had forgotten how we laughed when they were taken. Ignore the three adults in the picture and focus on E. and P.

In the first picture P. just jumped in at the last second. What a ham! I guess she learned it from older sis E.

HB Pictures from E.'s 10th (Late!)

The Happy Birthday girl (November 18th) . Face Painting courtesy of Natalie...
Tiger.

C. with her best friend, Angel.

P.'s face was painted by her sister. Sitting on the flower pot eating candy.

We had a "Fair" -like theme. Lots of various games. Even the adults partook.

Girls On Tour

We didn't take our three older girls with us for the first half of the Gospel Tour, but they were there for the second - in full force. They had a great time. Still has not grown into the ears...

E. & C. even performed two dances. Everybody works!

*More pictures of the gospel tours on my facebook page.

E. Who Loves The Water

I was looking over my Goa post and saw that E. was under represented. How could this be since she loves the water more than anyone else? (she gets it from her mother.) I needed to rectify it. (Plus, I like to have a picture on the top of my blog, esp. since I'll be away for a few days...)
Three of our four children LOVE the water and O. and I both do, but then there was G. who would get whiny and weepy just waking up to the beach - not even near the water. What is this? O. had serious doubts about G. being part of our family. What could this mean? OK, honestly, O. was totally disturbed by this.

While I went on a boat trip with everyone else, O. stayed back with G. on the beach and by the time we got back an hour later, he had her playing in the water! He took (read: forced) her down there to wash her feet or to wash her hands and after a few trips back and forth she was an old pro and all doubts about her being a member of our family or not, vanished. Whew!
(In the ocean)
(In the swimming pool)

To keep it real - this is what she looks like most of the time...

Chackalai

E. and C. in one of their Christmas Dance costumes from our program on December 22nd.

They posed themselves.

E.'s Reality

This picture is highly amusing to me and realistic. Once you get past looking at the cutie in the orange shirt giving bad eyes to the camera, shift your gaze over to the right of the photo where you will find G. crying and me - checking her diaper for poopoo. Yes, this is real life people. Thanks E.

But we still love each other.

This one should have gone in the previous post but was somehow deleted...

Pictures By E.

E. (my almost 9 year old) loves to take pictures, here is some of her work from our latest "tour."

I loves that she takes pictures of whatever and whoever she wants. I'm embarrased to take pictures of people I don't know, but E., E. just snaps away - and look at these great pictures!

More Shore Pictures - E.

E. at Cinderella at the shore. She had them all autograph her arm...

The Happiest Day Of The Year!

Today was the first day of school for E. and C. Yippy!

Photos pending.

Girl Pictures - E

I've been wanting to get some pictures of my girls up on the blog. Since I'm now at home with basically nothing to do (I've already colored the gray in my hair and washed all the clothes - you know the important stuff to do before you have a baby) I figured I may as well get the pictures up.

Poor E. She's 8 and just in that bad stage of large teeth coming in and other non-cute things and she doesn't get the photo press that her younger sisters are getting. Well, it happens to the best of us. However, here are a few E. pictures from last month.
In school uniform. (Hair needs work.)

She's very good at dance and performed all the action songs with the "big" girls during our VBSes.

E. 's 8th Birthday Party (In Pictures)

E. could not wait to cut (and eat) that cake.
Prayer for E.

E. finally gets to eat the cake.

Testimony Of My E.

Christians in India usually give a testimony when it is their birthday or a special occasion. It's a really nice thing to do for God's glory.

Today my E. is 8 years old. I'm having a small party at home with just family and a couple of friends. No mad kids parties this year.

MY E.
Things you probably don't know about my E. E. often gives her 20 month old sister a bath, puts her diaper on her and gets her dressed for me. The other night I saw E. carrying 5 year old sleeping C. out of the car, all the way down the street and into the house. She had to stop occasionally, put C. down and readjust her, but she made it all the way. When I am sick, E. brings me food and water. When I am sad, she comforts me. When we go out and people beg money from us, she insists I give. If I give her a coin for the poor she gives it back to me and says, "Mom, you don't give coins, you have to give notes." When she was a teeny tiny little girl I used to have to carry a separate change purse with me on the train because she would want to give to everyone who begged from us - which were a lot.

E. is generous and tender-hearted, she's kind and compassionate. I wouldn't change her for the world.

The Teeth Are Gone

The TEETH are out. Yes, 3 whole teeth got pulled out of E.'s mouth yesterday. E. had off from school and she went with me to get G.'s MMR shot and there was a dentist right around the corner and the mood was right, if you know what I mean.

E. started crying as soon as we walked in the office, so much so that all the other patients were trying to comfort her, including an old women who whipped her false teeth right on out of her mouth to amuse E. (E. refused to look, but I thought it was funny.)

Didn't work.

E. made it to the chair, the dentist talked to her a bit to calm her down, sprayed her mouth and then gave her the injections. This was, by far, the most amusing part for me. E. shouted the whole time. I never thought to explain to her about numbing... She kept saying - correction- Shouting, "What's happening?" (She wouldn't even look in the mirror when she came home, I think she was afraid her lips were gone.)

All in all she looks MUCH better now and it only cost me $5.

Hide And Seek

E. is almost 8
C. is 5
G. is 18 months

I like when E. & C. & G. play Hide and Seek together

I like when E. & C. make G. be "It"

I like when G. actually finds them

The Following Photos May Frighten You

E.'s Teeth

E. is 7 1/2 and her teeth are just now reluctantly coming out. She apparently, has no desire for the old to go and the new to come. You may remember an earlier post "Shark Shark Baby" where her 2 bottom teeth turned into 4 bottom teeth when her adult teeth came in and her baby teeth remained.

As you can see in the following frightening picture of E.'s mouth, her left front tooth remains and behind it her adult tooth has already come in. When E. was 1 1/2 years old she fell off a bike and landed on her mouth. That front baby tooth was knocked loose, shoved back inside by her mother and I think I may have cemented it in her gums for all eternity, 'cause it ain't comin' out.
I'm reluctant to take her to the dentist to have it pulled, seems kind of traumatic, but may be necessary. The tooth is actually loose, hence why I haven't taken the dentist step yet.
C., on the other hand, has gorgeous teeth; we just need to work on the hair in this picture...

E.'s front tooth on the right came out because she was drinking from a bottle of water in the car on the way to our Conference this month and we hit a bumb and the bottle hit the tooth and the tooth fell IN the water bottle...

Creepy

The other day Eve came into my room and said.

"Mom, something just came out of my ear."

<dramatic pause>

"It was walking."

Sleems

My E. is never ever sick.

Except when we travel. On those rare occasions when she does become sick, it generally starts with vomiting and diarrhea the morning we are scheduled to leave.

And as it was, after a week of eating every meal out, E. got the "throw-ups" and diarrhea the morning we were leaving Goa.

After throwing up numerous times E. and I had this conversation.

E: "I'm sick because you fed me those Sleems last night."

Me: "Sleems."

E: "Yeah, Sleems."

Me: "Sleems... Sleems... You mean Shrimp*?"

E: "Uh, yeah."

*We call them "Prawns" over here. And we ate lots and lots of them in Goa. G. even loved 'em and could chow down several fried sleems at one sitting. This was amazing to us since she only has 8 teeth. However, after two days of being bitten numerous times by my 14 month old, we discovered she has 2 new molars. This explained the three mysteries of vacation -1. Fantastic Sleem eating by Baby G. 2. G.'s vampirish tendencies on Saturday and Sunday 3. G.'s red raw bottom and miserable disposition during the middle of our vacation.

Update on E.: By God's grace she was fine by the time we got on the train Sunday morning and hasn't thrown up since. We're just continuing to avoid the sleems.

We'll See At the End

I'm not sure where this post is going to be perfectly honest.

We're at the end of the school year over here. E. and C. will finish this week. Then it is (the dreaded) summer vacation... I'm actually going to attempt to teach them to read over vacation. Ask me how this is going, maybe that will make me actually do it.

I'm kind of in a limbo these days. I'm blaming it on the end of the school year. I feel like I'm not deeply involved in anything. I've got stuff that I do, my time is full, but I guess it's just that I'm the kind of person who loves to be heart and soul involved in something. Having ten things going on that I'm partially involved in, is just not doing it for me.

E.'s 7th Birthday

Cutting the cake.
The little fam.
Dance E. Dance

Woh.
I love this picture because I appear to be scolding poor little Angel (It's OK to write the names of Other people's girl children on your blog. - That's for D and Matt who know what I'm talking about.) In actuality, I am just giving her a number for Red Rover. I think I must look like this in real life tho.

Shark Shark Baby

This is a scary picture of the inside of E.'s mouth. She is almost 7 years old and her two front bottom teeth are loose. Thank goodness.

However, I was somewhat dismayed to see that her 2nd teeth are coming in - NOT beneath the baby teeth pushing them out, but BEHIND the teeth. For a few days after she showed me I was imagining the horror of having to have E.'s baby teeth deliberately extracted by the dentist. I'm pretty sure none of us would have survived it. Thankfully, the front teeth are now wiggly but I'm not holding out hope that we may get through E.'s teenage years without orthodontic work.

Anyway, I did ask E. if she was related to sharks and when she denied it I kept at her telling her to admit the truth - that she was somehow related to the shark species - I'd have made a great homicide detective - E. continued to deny the accusations. This back and forth banter went on for a while until E. burst into tears, effectively ending the interrogation.

I asked her why she was crying and she replied that she's afraid of sharks.
I have no idea why, she's obviously related to them...

** Update: An hour after writing this post E. came home from school and one of the bottom front teeth is MISSING! Man, we can't help losing stuff over here...**