I'm sure you noticed by the title of this blog that a new hairdo was in store for someone - that someone turned out to be Sydney a little over 3 1/2 weeks ago, on a Sunday morning. It was on that fateful Sunday morning that we battled our first case of lice since arriving in Guatemala. I was combing her hair, getting ready for Sunday church, and I found a culprit. She'd been itching her head for about a week (in fact, when my mom was here for Christmas, she mentioned something about maybe it being lice), but I had checked and never found anything. So I went downstairs and told Scott that Sydney and I would NOT be going to church that morning, and that he needed to go buy some lice shampoo. The instant that I told him that, he started itching his head - it's amazing the psychological nature of lice! I spent the morning combing through Sydney's hair, and just could not get rid of all the eggs, so a hair cut was necessary. Sufficed to say, I went through the "I'm such a bad mother" phase for about 4 or 5 days, when I figured that she'd probably had it for about 10 - 14 days before we found it. After battling for another few days, we decided that we REALLY needed to cut her hair, because we kept finding more eggs that we were missing. So, the day before our Argentina trip, I cut her hair with a razor, and left some hair up front, so we could at least pull it back in a barrette. Amazingly enough, I got TONS of compliments on her cute hair cut while we were in Argentina - if they only knew... :) So, for now the saga of lice in our home is over, and we hope to not to to battle again for quite a few years, if ever. (By the way, we have gotten her hair cut by a professional since we got back home, so it does look better now! All of these pictures are from our time in Argentina, when she had the "mom cut")Our trip to Argentina was great, but we are exhausted. The schedule that we were keeping with the kids was ridiculous - they were going to bed around 10:30 PM and getting up in the morning at 8AM (and this was sleeping in - we would have had to wake them at 6:30AM, if we had gotten them to breakfast). The kids really enjoyed going out to ministry sites, and they got to help us with doing the Vacation Bible School - the material they used for the VBS is material that we produced here in our Region, so the kids already knew all the songs and motions. They really enjoyed being with the other kids. Elijah also helped up run sound - he loved pushing the buttons on the CD player. Maybe we have a future sound man in the family? Scott and I were used heavily for our ability to translate - highlights of translating for Scott would be translating for Steven Manley in a prayer breakfast, and highlights for me would be translating 3 times for Lona Vonpat, former Mrs. Idaho with a powerful testimony of how God saved her from abuse, alcohol and drugs. We were really glad to be a part of this trip with 6 other people from our region - many of whom said that they felt the Lord continuing to call them into mission service. It was such a unique opportunity to serve alongside our people in missions - we don't regret doing it for one minute.
Finally, it's back to school time. On Monday of this week, Elijah started Kindergarten at Soñadores and Sydney is in the 3 year old nursery class. Elijah had a rough first day, because he didn't know his teacher, but since then he's been doing great. Sydney has continued to cry when left, but we had victory this morning - she walked in and said goodbye without a tear in her eyes. It makes me feel good to know that they are making the transition yet again.
Well, this is quite a long post. Hope you enjoyed the information and some details of what going on in our family life. We are looking forward to Sydney's birthday in 2 weeks - I'm sure I'll post something again when that comes around. Have a great week.
PS - I added a video bar to our blogspot - if you need a quick pick-me-up laugh, click on the first YouTube video, and watch one of our favorite, guaranteed-to-laugh, videos.
