Last Weekend Here for 2009!

So yesterday was a recovering day of sorts. I was exhausted from planning all week for Coco's birthday and then traveling all day on Friday. I spent the morning catching up on my blog and resting in my room.

Before lunch, I worked with Domingo on his math. He has an exam tomorrow for math and had asked me earlier in the week to help him. He is in 5th grade and was learning exponentials, pattern recognition, square roots, division and multiplication. I made up some problems for him to answer and he did really well. He was so proud of himself, and kept saying write 100% on there! We worked for about an hour on math and Ariel, his older brother worked with us for a little while. He is 12 years old and Domingo is 10 years old but they are in the same grade. Ariel struggled a lot understanding pattern recognition such as 42, 44, 46, what follows. However, Domingo caught on so quickly. Ariel got frustrated easily and quit.

After lunch I hung out some with the kids and worked on uploading my pictures as well. At 2pm we met as a group because we got the approval from Pastor Ramon to have Noche Especial with the boys. This is a special night twice a year that they have and they get to play games, eat treats, watch movies, and have a sleepover in the education building. We helped the male volunteers plan for the boys fun night. I worked on wrapping a gift multiple times with layers for a game where they passed the gift until someone could get thru the layers.

After dinner, we started getting everything ready for the evening. We baked sugar cookies and I worked on coloring the icing and separating it into individual cups for the kids. We had the girls over to make bracelets, decorate and eat cookies, and watch a movie. We set mattresses out and laid on the ground watching the movie. They enjoyed eating the icing and cookies and we watched Beauty and the Beast's Christmas Movie. At the end, Nena was fast asleep so I picked her up to take her back to her bed. She told me to wait so I put her down and she was searching for something, however, was so out of it she was confused and looked like a drunk person. I picked her back up after a minute or two of aimless searching and carried her back over while she snored on my shoulder. Joanni was so out of it that she actually peed on Heather and she was carrying her back! :)

We made a fort out of sheets for the boys to play in later in their evening and then headed to bed. On the way up to my room, we had a great excitement. At the top of the stairs awaited a fun friend of nature. It was huge so Heather and I called Coco to come kill it. He crawled up a suitcase, we knocked the suitcase over, trapped it underneath and then lifted the suitcase and killed it with a cinder block. It was so nasty, black, and hairy! I'll leave the guessing up to you! :)

Caela stayed with us last night because her Dad and brother were sleeping over here. She stayed on the top bunk above Heather.

This morning was fun. The boys ended their special evening by having breakfast with us. We had pancakes and hard boiled eggs which they love. Some boys had 4-5 pancakes and a few eggs each. Luis Alberto was stabbing his pancake with his fork because he didn't know how to cut it to eat it! I sat between Domingo and Jaury and enjoyed spending breakfast with them!

We had a short orientation with the group, introducing ourselves and then had free time. I hung out with the kids for a little bit. I spent some time with Liry, one of the university girls, who is in PT school. We had a good conversation discussing what she is learning in school, her work here at the Rehab Center, and just how everything is going.

After lunch, I hung out with the kids and had some great fun! Heather and I went out for just a little bit but ended up staying until dinner. Arianni was jumping rope and was able to jump over it about 3-4 times in a row. It was so cute. She was super proud of herself. The other little girls jumped in and wanted to jump too. I showed them my skills as well! :)

After this, Nena the chief of the little girls came and took the jump rope away. Here is where the fun came in. We got put in jail again. They sat us down in chairs and tied Heather and I together with the jump rope. I started chanting a song in English to try to get them to sing along and that resulted in socks being tied around our mouths. It was hilarious! We broke free finally.

I tried to rock Arianni to sleep in my arms but she kind of came back to life and started playing with broken legos and jacks that she found on the ground. I tried to teach her English. I would say "What is your name?" and then tell her the answer and then ask again and she would answer. Then we worked on "How old are you?" and she would respond with 4. Well this turned into her not wanting to answer so she just made sounds with her tongue. So, I asked her if her name was bluh, bluh, bluh (sounds she made with her tongue) and she said yes. So, for the rest of the day I called her by that and she would respond. It was precious. Also, when I asked her her age she started responding with a loud grunting sound instead of four which was so funny! So now Arianni is bluh, bluh, bluh and she is a "loud grunting sound" years old.

We went to church with the older kids tonight and I rode back on the yellow school bus with them. When we pulled up to the orphanage all the little kids came running out so excited to see the older kids return after 3 hours away. They were surprised to see me and Heather in the bus but excited too. I'm sure going to miss these kids for 3 weeks!