Monday, July 8, 2013

Family Traditions #20: July the 4th 2013

"Family traditions give identity and belonging to each member." - James Dobson

This was our first holiday in our new house. Jimmy hung some hooks on the wall behind our dining room table. These will be great to hang decorations from on special days, but during regular days we will be choosing a family verse to go on the wall.

The boys were excited to wake up one morning and see their country's flag. It gets confusing sometimes for them, I'm sure. We try to teach them about both Guatemala and the States. I hope somehow both can feel like home to them. Here Jimmy was teaching them about the Pledge of Allegiance:
Leading up to the 4th we did some activities to celebrate our country's birthday! We made some firework hats:
The process was more exciting than the actual hats, but that's good.

I had already made a hat with Eden while the boys were napping, but she still wanted to be in the middle of everything. She is so mischievous right now!

She looks for naughty things to do to get big reactions out of us. Hmm... kind of like a little boy named Silas! We love her personality!

We also made some star cookies:
I LOVE my countertop. We just rolled the cookies out on the concrete. Lico made the beautiful bench that the boys are standing on for us from wood off of the institute land. It is for our porch, but eventually we will make some stools for our counter. Anyway, the boys often pull chairs up to stand there and talk to me while I'm cooking. I enjoy all of our little conversations! 

We tried a new icing recipe that you paint onto the cookie. 
The boys liked it and it turned out ok, but for some reason anything with food coloring in it never really dries in Petén. The white icing hardened nicely, but the blue and red ones never dried enough to stack the cookies. I will have to mess with the recipe some more. 
 
For the first time since we have lived here, I found blueish fruit at the grocery store close to July the 4th! I haven't ever seen blueberries here, but blackberries are just as good. What a gift I had been given, haha! So what to do with them? Thanks to Pinterest I found something super easy... fruit on a stick! It's pretty funny too because this 5 minute flag was a HUGE hit with my boys. 
Except they want their strawberries on a stick every time now! 

We invited Juan, Nick, and Norma over for lunch. Nick and Norma just got married and moved to Petén less than a month ago. I will share more about them later. July the 4th happens to be Norma's birthday, so we celebrated that too! We had hamburgers, potato salad and baked beans for our American meal!
We have our midweek service on Thursdays. After church they all came back over for fireworks and apple pie! For the 4th we like to have little fireworks like they would have in the States along with the big ones you can get here. Jonah and Silas liked the sparklers, tanks, and flowers. 
They like the big fireworks too though!
They are both brave about different things. Jonah likes big slides and Silas likes loud fireworks!
Roman candles were a hit!
But do you notice anything particularly dumb about this photo?:
We hand our kid a roman candle and then point him in the direction of their blow up pool! Thankfully it survived! 

Of course Eden wanted in on the action!
I borrowed one of her bows for my hair so that I would have some red in my outfit. When she saw it that morning she smiled real big and pointed at my hair and said, "Bow!"
During our apple pie we played some games. 
Jonah and Silas really like games right now. They are constantly asking me to play a game with them. 
Somehow we all ended the day in their room playing Hungry Hippo!
Juan, Nick, and Norma were nice to participate!
We are so thankful for our country. With the resources that God has blessed our nation with it makes it possible for us to be missionaries sent from there. That is one thing that we celebrated that day, our gratefulness to God for the opportunity to be missionaries and for our Christian heritage. 
We hope that all of you had a Happy 4th of July! Our family sure did!

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