A Bunch of Burts

Just before we left for our holiday adventure in the NE, Ema had her birthday too. We were able to find an afternoon for her to have her party in the midst of packing and preparing to leave.
Can you believe she is 11? Yikes!

She had a backwards theme for her party this year and it turned out to be lots of fun.

Of course, you eat cake first.

hmmm, there appears to be some sort of madman in the background. Better serve that cake quick and placate him!

And blow out your candles and then sing Happy Birthday, backwards, what else?. (That is not as easy as it sounds. )

We even came up with some backwards style games.

Silent Chairs : you sit when the music comes on

I am Who? : each child gets ‘tagged’ on the BACK with an animal and they must guess who they are by only asking yes or no questions. But here is the tricky part. The answers are backwards!
Yes= no and no=yes. Tricky and silly

Pencil in the bottle: This is a game of partners. The one with the pencil tied to a string around their waist is blindfolded, and they must try to dip down and get the pencil in the bottle by only using the verbal directions of their partner.
Of course the pencil is hanging down the BACK side.

You may be wondering why all the girls are dressed alike. They came home with Ema from school, and had all just had PE. Does make for some nice coordinated pictures though.

Happy Birthday Ema, we love you!

P.S.
We are always on the lookout for great and easy birthday ideas. Zach turns 10 in March, do you have any suggestions? As a girl myself, boys parties are always harder for me, and I could use some help.

I had hurriedly carefully prepared and uploaded a lovely, wonderful and heartwarming post about my oldest daughter and how much we are enjoying seeing her grow into a young woman. It had some great pictures from her birthday party and of course I said sweet things about her.

Imagine my surprise when we got back from Isaan and it ubruptly stopped mid-post, mid-sentence even! arrgh.

Not sure what happened, but surely was not user error. Of course not.

I wanted to make sure the rest of the pictures got posted, so here they are.

Isn’t she turning into quite the young lady?

Yes, the Golden Arches is here, encouraging bad eating habits, er, I mean serving tasty treats, all over the world. Every so often we will take the kids there, and sink into the taste of America. Well, sort of. I have not seen any McDonalds in America offering to tickle the taste buds of its patrons with corn or taro pies. Or pineapple. Nary an apple or lemon pie to be had.

For the more adventurous burger enthusiasts, you could also try the McRice. A ‘bun’ made of grilled sticky rice with a pork patty in some kind of soy sauce inside. Actually, I do not think it sounds so bad, but if we are going to pay the high prices of McDonalds, I am getting a beef burger!

One thing we miss about the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is the drive-thru. Oh for the convience of the drive-up window. But there are compromises. When we go to McDonalds here, we get waited on at our table, food brought to us (including the ketchup from the service pump), refills and clean up service.
So of course when we leave, we are polite, thank our servers and wai them. Well, at least most of us anyway.

Khap Khun kha Ronald!

As much as all the bugs here can be a source of anxiety, annoyance and yes, sometimes fear, we have been finding some very interesting things that make us sigh in awe and wonder at the detail and care God has designed in even these small creatures. That sigh comes right before we wipe that column of ants away with no mercy or smash a cockroach of course!

Driving home the other day, something smashed against my windshield hard enough to make me start.

It was a beetle with an irridescent shell. It hung onto the windshield wiper until I arrived at home, and then I summoned Zach to come and get it. Just because it was sort of pretty, I still did not want to touch it!

I know this one is a bit fuzzy, but you can see how big the creature is in Zach’s hand

We found that, upon impact, it had truly, busted its gut. No matter to this brave guy. Having been provided by the Creator with three sets of legs, it grabbed its broken belly with the middle pair, holding himself together and walked away with the other four.

One night this last week, Greg and I stayed up to watch a movie and had a treat, something like an otter pop, but with lovely tropical flavors like lychee and mango. Mmmm! Anyway, we oh so foolishly left one of the plastic skins on the coffee table and Leah found it swarming with ants in the morning.

True to her duty, she filled it water to drown them all before throwing it away. She found that most of the ants died almost instantly, however, one particularly resourceful ant quickly gathered the dead bodies of his comrades together as a raft and climbed on. She shook it up, breaking up his raft, and he did it again. Amazing!