I'm not a crafty person

Yet, both of my kids are. In their own ways.

 Elsa eats up anything that has to do with paper, glue, scissors and crayons.
 The girl is seriously creative. Thankfully, she doesn't seem to hold it
 against me (not yet, at least) that I don't share her aptitude for taking an
 old sock and turning it into an elephant. But today I decided I should throw
 her a bone and dig out The Collosal Craft Kit. That's its name. Which seemed
 entirely promising to me, surely I could pull together some beautiful and
 interesting craft project from The Collosal Craft Kit. (On a side note, I
 did not purchase The Collosal Craft Kit. My non-crafty eyes would have slid
 right over that particular object in Target. My mother did, and I wouldn't
 be at all surprised if one of her 5 love languages is actually crafts.) It's
 all there...pipe cleaners, stickers, foam sheets, scissors, a tiny tube of
 glue (don't they know that preschoolers love glue?), balls of fluff, googly
eyes, sequins. I pulled all of the items out and was sitting in my own
 little personal craft hell. But I straightened my shoulders, certainly a
 little butterfly wouldn't get the best of me, right?

Oh, no. The little eyes don't stick, the balls of fluff meant to be its body
 only want to stick to MY body, because I'm half covered in glue, and there
are sequins stuck all over my table and pink fluff adhered to my fingertips
and the antenna won't stick on its darn head (which looks like it went
 through some ill-advised genetic mutation). I thought I was nearly
 done...Elsa was happy with her butterfly and was contemplating a whole
 butterfly family (Lord, help), when Ezra comes inside and sees all the
 hullabaloo and decides he, too, wants to make a craft. So we whip out a
 little dragonfly meant to be a magnet, but really it looks more like
 what's-that-little-green-guy's-name?--GUMBY. And the magnet curls up and
 Ezra doesn't care a bit because he actually doesn't care a wit about crafts.
Thankfully.

 I'm saved because it starts raining. (Raining!) Big drops, each spaced about
 1 foot and a half apart, but enough for Elsa and Ezra to grab their umbrella
 and go gallavanting off into the rain. They like the rain. So I get to sit
 at the table and pick glue off of my fingers (the best part of the whole
 project) and contemplate never ever doing another craft in my entire life.
 I'll ask Grandma to do craft time when it comes time to homeschool.

 Elsa comes home to begin work on her butterfly family...the auntie and the
daddy and the baby to go with the already-finished mama...and I realize Ezra
is quiet and I don't know where he is. Daisy and I set out toward Grandma's
 house when I discover my other crafty child. HIS idea of crafty is holing up
 under the umbrella with toes sticking out, chugging syrup straight from the
 bottle that he swiped from Grandma's pantry.

What on earth, child?

It is a Sixth Sense

A few nights ago Elsa was sent to bed early for some infraction that I no longer remember the details of. I'd given her a choice of consequences--either she could 'pay' me with her dessert at dinnertime, or she could choose an early bed time. Smart girl that she is, she decided on the early bedtime. Although once bedtime rolled around and the consequence came to call, she conveniently forgot that she had been given a choice and became very upset at the injustice of going to bed without a bedtime story while Ezra was allowed to stay up and hear a story. When Caleb went upstairs to give her an extra hug and tell her goodnight, he asked her why she was so upset. Elsa's response made me realize I am fully a mother in every sense of the word:

 "Because everytime I do something bad, Mama always finds me!

Good girl. Now if only she'd remember that BEFORE the next time she decides to shove her brother in the dirt and sit on his head.

Do You Know What Your Kids are Doing?

It's an ominous question. The resulting answer can never be anything good.
Three examples:
 A few days ago I made a lemon meringue pie because we had guests coming and the lemons are exploding off of the trees and there is no better dessert at Omo than a lemon pie. It was a gorgeous pie. The meringue was perfect--light golden peaks, white valleys, the meringue thick but light. It was chilling in the refrigerator for the afternoon, I was sitting on the floor with Daisy in the living room. I noticed that the refrigerator door was swinging open, and got up to go close it. When I reached the door, I realized the reason that the door was open was because a certain three year old was standing in the fridge. Eating the meringue off of my pie by fingerfuls. I looked over at Caleb's mom, sitting in the living room, "Do you know what this child is doing?

We've recently acquired my kind of pet: Yertle the Turtle. He's tiny. He comes out once every morning to munch on a lettuce leaf, leave a tiny pile of poo for me to clean up, and then disappears for the rest of the day. I love him. His morning excursion is right at breakfast time. So a couple of mornings ago, I had placed Daisy on the kitchen floor to wait for me to finish getting her breakfast together and then went into the bathroom for a minute. Caleb comes in from letting out the chickens and calls me from thekitchen, "Joanna. Do you know what Daisy is doing in here?" I enter the kitchen to see Daisy, Yertle in hand, gnawing on his shell. Quite likely, she is the only child to ever have done her teething on a live turtle.

  I had a bad night last night. Daisy was up for hours and I didn't sleep much. So this morning, when Elsa and Ezra were out of the house for a long period of time, I really didn't pay much attention to it, I was more focused on enjoying the quiet house than peering through my hazy fog of tiredness to really wonder what they were up to for so long. Close to lunchtime, Caleb yelled over from near the workshop, "Joanna! Do you know what the kids are doing?" Uh oh. I walked over toward the shop and down to the water's edge. The Omo has flooded in the past two weeks and we have floodwater much closer to our house right now than the usual river's edge that is down a strip of grass and outside our fence. Elsa and Ezra were sitting in the canoe that we use to pole across the floodwater, fishing. Somehow they had gathered everything necessary--my broom to make a fishing pole, a long string for line, one of Caleb's major hooks that he uses for his perch line, and a frog. Which Elsa had baited on the hook by herself. (The child is fearless) Resourceful, aren't they? I meant to get a picture of the two of them with their makeshift fishing pole, but Caleb swiped their hooks before someone lost an eye.

Sick Baby

Let's start with the good news first: Daisy is fine. On the mend, getting better, looking good, fine. But we had some scares over the last week. We returned home from Addis last Friday. On Sunday night, Daisy woke up about an hour after putting her to bed and when I went to put her pacifier back in her mouth, I felt her head and she was hot. Her fever was 104.2. I got her up, we draped her with cold wash clothes, dosed her with Tylenol, and put her back to bed. I was pretty sure this was the start of malaria--she was 10 days post-exposure to being bitten in a high-malaria area where we stay the night on our travels in and out of Addis, and although she sleeps under a net, I don't have her on an anti-malarial. I started her on a treatment dose of malarone and she was basically fever-free all day Monday, until late Monday evening when her fever started to go back up. I was sitting by her on the couch as she slept, feeling the heat radiating off of her small head, when she went into a seizure. I yelled for Caleb and he came running from the workshop, Caleb's mom came running from her house, and none of us knew what to do. Any kind of head knowledge goes out the window when it's your own kid lying there. She stopped seizing after about 2 1/2 mintues and Caleb scooped her up, completely non-responsive. I know the term 'post-ictal non-responsiveness', but that does nothing to describe how it feels to look at your child and see all the life drained out of her. Come back. Come back to me. She revived after about 90 seconds, and Caleb took her to the bath tub and soaked her with cold water. At that point, it was about 6:15 pm, and we had to decide what to do. All I knew is that I could not be at home again if she had another seizure.

We decided to take her to the hospital. That is like deciding, if you live in Seattle, to take your kid to Northern California to get to a doctor. We left our house, got in our boat, drove upriver 25 minutes to where our car is parked, loaded our car, and started to drive through the night to get to the hospital. We arrived in the town where we usually spend the night around 2:30 am, and since Daisy was keeping her fevers down, we decided to rest for a couple of hours. We woke up at 5 am and continued on to the hospital, another 3 hours away. We got to the hospital in Soddo, a private hospital that has a number of foreign doctors and is home to friends of ours that we could crash with. We took Daisy to get lab work done, came back with a negative malaria smear and her CBC all over the place. In consulting with our organization's doctor in Addis, she becomes most concerned about Daisy's bloodwork being all out of whack, and suggests getting a repeat CBC done. It is common for malaria smears to be negative, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she didn't have malaria. We find out that the lab at the hospital is actually not all that trustworthy because of under-trained lab technicians, and so decide to leave the next day to drive a further 4 hours to Awassa, a town where hopefully we'll be able to get some accurate labs drawn. We both found it impossible to return home with the question hanging that something else might be going on with Daisy.

Wednesday afternoon we had a repeat CBC done on Daisy and it came back all clear. Her fevers were abating after finishing her malarone treatment and we decided to head home on Thursday, another 11 hour day to reach our house from Awassa. So this is how we take care of our sick children--when they are at their worst, we pack them in the car to endure 30 hours over bumpy roads. Good.

Despite the bloodwork scare, we are quite certain that Daisy just has malaria. The malarone treatment hasn't quite taken care of the malaria completely, and so two days ago her fevers returned and we started her on coartem. Her fevers have been lower though--running only 100 to 101 rather than the panic-inducing 104.

We're thankful for a lot of things in the midst of this scare. We're thankful that we could leave Elsa and Ezra with Caleb's parents. We're thankful for the NUMEROUS concerned doctors who gave us advice and help. We're so thankful for the friends who let us stay with them, in Soddo and in Awassa. And we are SO thankful for all of the prayers offered up on our behalf. We are incredibly blessed.

I have hated this experience. It has accentuated the extreme hopelessness I feel in the midst of one of the kids being sick, and how much I dislike being the one responsible for making the right call when it comes to their health. But here is what I hold to. On Monday night, when we were getting our car out of the shipping container where we park it, I walked over to wait at the house of the Icealandic couple who live on that compound. I told them what had happened, trying not to lose it, and Kalli walked over to a little box and pulled out a little index card. The card had written on it a verse in Icealandic, and Kalli read it to me and then got his English Bible and read it to me in English. It said, "The Lord is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on him sincerely." Psalm 145:18.

I tucked it in my pocket and carried that verse I could not read but knew in my heart for the rest of the journey.

School

Much like a lot of things I do in this life I lead, I never thought I'd be a homeschooling mom. And let's throw a disclaimer out right from the start: I'm not a homeschooling mom. Not yet at least. I'm claiming 'play' as the goal of the day for as long as possible. But this week Elsa and I have the chance to take a stab at being grown-ups--Elsa gets to go to school for three days, and I get to attend a homeschooling conference. Bingham Academy in Addis has a great homeschooling program, with homeschooling resources, access to the school library, and the invitation for homeschool students to attend school for 10 days each semester. At the beginning of the school year, they hold a three day homeschooling conference and invite the kids to take part in the first week of school.

Big day for us, people. My first born is picking out her clothes, she's loading up her backpack with a snack and a water bottle, she's slinging the near-empty pack on her little shoulders. She's posing for a picture, she's asking when the bus is going to come get her. (Sorry, baby, no big yellow school bus here.) She's walking into the classroom, saying hello to her teacher, slipping off her shoes and taking her place among the seemingly million other little four year-olds claiming space in the preschool classroom. She's turning to look at me, only after I call her name, she's waving bravely to me and looking with a little dismay at the child in hysterics standing next to her. I huddle with the other mothers crowding the door for a moment, and then turn to go. Did I really just put Elsa in school?

Now it is my turn. To face my own new beginnings and take my place in the cramped homeschooling room and declare myself...a HOMESCHOOLER.

I know, I'm lending myself to the dramatics. But the idea of taking on my kids' schooling IS dramatic to me. I'm not the one suited for this. Seriously, I'm not. You should see me trying to explain Candy Land. (No you CAN'T just jump to all the candy spaces!) I mean, really. My greatest defining characteristic is a propensity to procrastinate. Surely that can't be good when trying to set up a school room. I spent some time while in the states on different homeschooling websites and blogs. At times, it scared me to death, to be confronted with the level of organization and creativity that was demonstrated. Other times, I'd read something and think, 'yeah, I can do that. That seems doable.' And it was the same way in the homeschooling conference. I'd sit and listen to parents who have homeschooled for years and sink a little lower in my seat. And nod gratefully when others would admit that if it weren't for the life situation they were in, they wouldn't be homeschooling their children at all. There were a lot of us who have fallen into homeschooling by default--there's simply just no other option. So it was good to hear that and have my own feelings of inadequacy in being responsible for my children's education validated. Thankfully, I'm not feeling any great push (hmm, thanks, procrastination) to start anything formal yet. Elsa is only four. And very smart. We mostly wanted to enroll in the homeschooling program at this stage so that she could get into the classroom whenever we were in town.

Ah. The classroom. I thought that Elsa would adore school. It wasn't really the case. At the end of the first day, it took a lot of convincing for her to be willing to back for the second day. I would check in on her at tea time and watch her for awhile, playing outside. She was mostly just wandering around by herself, wearing too-big rubber boots. Very un-Elsa like. And heartbreaking. I still haven't really figured out what it is...maybe just the sheer number of other unfamiliar kids. She told me at night, 'I don't want to be lonely because I don't know anybody's name. I know they are all my friends, but I just don't know their names.' But I suppose this is growing up. Facing fears and uncertainties and coming back for more.

Even if we don't know what we are doing.

Smile

Today, in honor of her 6 month birthday, Daisy decided to try out a new

smile for herself.

I think she's happy with it.

Today

 Today there were two beginnings. Today there was one end.

 Frantic, Caleb says, the father was when he showed up at the workshop. Frantic and hard to understand. Only pleadings to come out to the road because his wife was delivering his child out there, out there in the midday sun on our windy airstrip. Difficult to comprehend why they were bringing her to us in the first place, rather than calling for Donna as they usually do. Enough words traded in time to find out that she was only 7 months along, sent over by the local midwife across the river, perhaps in hopesthat Donna could stop labor. Too late for stopping, life is in motion. Donna reaches her as one baby slides out, the mother crouching in the dirt, shaded with a cloth held over her. But that isn't the end. Her belly held not onlythe girl, but her brother as well. Dick is sent back to the house to get thestretcher and to pick me up, telling me on the way, "It's twins, if there's time enough, we'll bring her back to the house before the second one comes."

We hit the end of the airstrip and Donna is holding an impossibly small bundle. She hands the girl to me and they move the mother onto the stretcherand into the back of the truck. I cradle three pounds of life in my hands and don't know what to do, except tell her over and over that she can, in fact, do this. Come into this world with the sun blazing down and live to walk in it. She can't quit on me because I know in my heart that I cannot be the one to be holding her if she decides that sticking around isn't something she's willing to do.

We get back and within 10 minutes her smaller brother makes his debut with his feet first. I fumble with the bulb syringe, knowing that this is the only thing I can offer him--to suction out his too small, too early mouth.There's no warm bed to place him in, there's no tube to slide down his throat to help him breathe, there's no artificial surfactant to coat his underdeveloped lungs. I hold him gently and watch his intercostal spaces retracting with each breath, hear his grunts with each rise and fall of his chest. This one. This one will not make it.

 And I cannot hold him either. I curl him up next to his sister and will someof her strength into his body. What little we can do is not enough. Not for one too small and too early.

 Caleb's mom is amazing. Her ability to think and act when all I can do is stare at the little faces and think of all I cannot do.

What is it like? To be un-twinned at the same moment you are born a twin?Will she carry him with her throughout her life? Will her mom tell her that she shared her space and traded her first kicks with a tiny boy? What is it like? To have two brought forth from your body and take only one home withyou? These questions, I don't know. I never will know.

They went home at 5 this evening, carrying their tiny daughter and a bag with a medicine dropper and formula. Hopefully this--this small thing--isenough. Enough to see her through so that she can walk upright in the sun that burned heavy on the day she was born.