We made a letter P penguin and then of course she had to take the scraps and make her own version of a penguin!

I drew out a penguin and then had her choose a magnetic number and feed him that many fish.  We also played this with a polar bear that I drew out.

We made a paper plate penguin.

We also read Polar Bear, Polar Bear several times and then I made out the animal cards for her to retell with.  We spent a lot of time playing games from our Letter W unit too, so not much new this week.  I haven’t decided yet what letter we will move onto next week.  I am thinking probably Letter H for hearts since Valentine’s Day is coming up!  I keep you posted.

And six months in, Ben is already prepping for his first trip back to the United States.  It will be mostly business, but he will get to see some family in Chicago so he is excited about that.  He will be gone March 5-24.  If you want more details on his trip just let us know.  We will miss him for sure, but will keep ourselves busy while he is away!

The puppies are growing each day and every once in awhile we will find them sneaking into our house to take a break from the heat.  Here is a shot from them the other day.

Mikayla got a couple of Signing Time DVD’s from her grandparents for Christmas and has really been loving them lately.  She is getting really good at signing along and really focuses on getting her hands in the right positioning to make the signs.  The other day I was watching her while she was watching a Signing Time and she was signing right along to the video and songs and was even signing words that hadn’t been taught, just shown.  So precious!

On Saturday night Joe (the new volunteer) came over and cooked a fabulous dinner for us.  He made braised rabbit, mashed potatoes and gravy.  We paired it with focaccia bread I had made Friday and some butternut squash chocolate chip cookies.  The rabbit actually tasted a lot like chicken and Mikayla ate it up.  Delicious!

On Sunday we had folks over for lunch to complete our mango chili pepper challenge.  I made crepes with a mango pepper marmalade and homemade whipped cream (super easy by the way).  Ben made grilled chicken breast strips marinated with a ginger infused mango heat glaze.  And Joe made a mango/pepper cocktail with Rum.  The sisters contributed a chili dish.  It was a tasty meal and we had a lot of fun experimenting with different flavors.  I love that I have more time to do stuff like that now!

Tonight, as most of you in the states know, is the Super Bowl.  Our satellite is actually broadcasting it live, so we decided to watch it.  The only downside is that live means 1:00am.  I guess we will just be tired tomorrow.  I told the guys I would be willing to watch it if we had appetizers, so appetizers it is at 1:00am!  I will contributing a homemade ranch dip with veggies and potato skins.  Can’t wait!

On a downside, my driver’s license is set to expire at the end of the month.  We tried to get this taken care of before we left but the courthouse wouldn’t let us renew it because it was too far out and hadn’t expired yet.  There is no way to renew overseas, so I have to get a Swazi driver’s license.  Unless we can figure something else out I will have to go through the whole shebang…written test and driving test.  Should be fun!  To say the least I am not looking forward to it at all.

That’s about it in news from the Kickert’s for this week.  Hope everyone had a good week.

Mikayla enjoying some toasted pumpkin seeds!

The best part was during our conversation Mikayla looks at me and says, "Aunt Chelsea is having Baby Jesus"!  I didn’t realize Chelsea was that special, but apparently in Mikayla’s eyes she is.  Then today Mikayla asked if she could play with "that baby Aunt Chelsea was talking about".  I don’t think she quite understands what it means to be pregnant yet!  Even if she doesn’t fully understand she is really excited for her Uncle Tim and Aunt Chelsea and a new baby to play with!  And of course so are we!

We also had another special arrival of Joe, Sister Diane’s nephew.  He will be at Cabrini for the next year (maybe two years) helping out with the agriculture programming, assisting in the office some and a little bit of everything else!  We had the opportunity to hang out with him some on Saturday on a day trip to Mbabane.  While there we did some shopping and even found a really nice park for Mikayla to play in.  Joe likes to cook, so we are going to work out an exchange where he cooks and I bake!

The kids also returned to the hostel this week after their summer holiday.  Mikayla and I took daily walks to the hostel to see all her friends and the puppies even joined us one day.  The after school program will resume soon so we will be once again helping out with that. 

Today we will be having a big lunch with Sister Diane, Sister Barbara, Joe and Janet.  I made my first angel food cake and it seems to have turned out okay; hopefully it tastes as good as it looks!  In the upcoming week we will be preparing for a mango/chili competition that Ben challenged us to.  Both are in season at the mission, so it should be interesting.  I am going to try and come up with some sort of baked item if you have any suggestions.

Just hanging around in the mango tree, taking a break from all the puppy play!

She’s in love!

Mikayla and Lady

Mikayla and Tramp

We began with a breakfast of snowman pancakes and bacon.  Mikayla had a blast using the sprinkles my grandma sent her for Christmas to decorate her snowman.  And if you look really closely, you will be able to see that she made two eyes and a mouth all by herself!  She had a blast and proceeded to make and eat three snowmen pancakes when she usually only eats one!  (Apology for the lack of shirt, but it is hot here so she only sleeps in underwear most nights.  We hadn’t gotten dressed yet!)

We laid low for the rest of the morning and then while she was napping I hung up snowflakes all around the hallway and living room.  I have been secretly making these when Mikayla is cutting in her cutting box.  When Mikayla woke up we told her there was a surprise, but that it had gotten really cold in the house so she needed to put on a scarf and hat.  Her reaction was priceless.

After she explored the "snow" we had a family snowball fight using marshmallows.  She thought it was hilarious to throw snow at mommy and daddy.  After our snowball fight, we built a couple of snow forts by stacking the marshmallows.

Trying to catch the snowflake.  She actually got a little frustrated that they weren’t falling down for her.

It took her a few minutes to catch on to the snowball fight, but in the end she understood to throw them and not hand them to you!

Building a snow fort with daddy.

When we were tired of throwing snow, we moved on to building a snowman.  We took empty plastic grocery bags and stuffed them with other grocery bags to complete our snowman.  She lost interest pretty quick, so we didn’t actually decorate him. However, she was able to make the connection that she was dressed like her snowman we made last week all on her own.  She just looked up at her footprint snowman and said that she looked like him. 

Our wimpy snowman – it is no Grandma and Grandpa Kickert snowman!

After all the snowball fun, we made some snow to play in.  We mixed 4 cups of flour with 1/2 cup of baby oil and mixed with our hands.  When we were finished we had a mixture that was a snowy consistency and could be molded fairly easily into snowballs.  Mikayla had fun using her Goofy and Donald Duck characters in the snow!

Our final winter activity for the day was driving through a snowy scene on our Wii Mario Cart game.  She was not the best driver, but she still had fun!

We had a fun winter day, even if it was 90 degrees outside!  She actually kept saying, "I am going to go play in winter now".  So sweet!

Garlic and onion are on the left and apple, cinnamon and raisin on the right

We also tried our hand at making hummus with our tahini paste we found over Christmas.  Delicious as well (even if it was a little lumpy since we don’t have a food process or blender)!  In the states we always bought hummus because it was relatively cheap and convenient.  However, making your own is just as cheap and probably healthier.  Plus, you can season it to your own personal taste buds…an added bonus!  We also made a maple bacon biscuit that was pretty tasty.  This one was definitely not healthy, but we love all things bacon!

It rained a lot on Monday so Mikayla got a chance to play in the rain.  Please excuse her lack of clothes, this was a spur of the moment decision.  In hind sight, we would have put her in her bathing suit, but oh well!  I think she loved it!  Turns out the rain was actually the remnants of a tropical cyclone (hurricane) in the Indian Ocean, no wonder it rained so much.  It ended up being cloudy and raining off and on for the rest of the week.  Not complaining though because it kept the temperatures lower.  I actually slept covered up with the comforter most nights!

We also spotted a couple of new birds this week.  Anyone care to venture a guess as to what they are?

This is the same bird as the first one, just a little cloudier of a picture and of course one is a male and the other a female.

This guy was extremely hard to capture, but if you look closely you will be able to tell what it is.

On Saturday we headed to Matsapha (where the airport is in Swaziland) to pick up a long term volunteer, Janet.  By a strange twist of fate, she also happens to be from Kentucky.  We met her briefly during our first trip to Swaziland. She will mostly be helping at healthcare with the pharmacy, but I am sure you will be hearing a lot about her in the upcoming weeks.  Next week, Sister Diane’s nephew, Joe, will be arriving.  He will be here for at least a year, but probably two years.  I hear he is a bit of a computer guy, so now Ben will have someone to talk tech stuff with and I won’t have to fake acting interested.  I don’t really care that he set up a Linux box with an IMAP/SMTP server running over an 802.11g wireless network with WDS capabilities.

Sometimes daddy likes to play blocks with Mikayla, but we decided that he is not very good at sharing.  Every time Mikayla would take a block or knock his tower over he would get very upset.  Especially when he was trying to make the largest possible tower using all her blocks.

Pushing Mikayla out of the way while building his tower.

Look at that tower!  And don’t you just love the "capris" Ben is sporting?  In his defense, it was muddy and he was trying to stay clean.

Mikayla sported a couple of new dresses this week.  Some were hand-me-downs from very special friends and others were remakes of items in the house.  Check her out:

This dress belonged to a very sweet young lady who lost her battle with cancer in March.  Her mother, Jennifer, gave us this dress just before we were leaving.  We spent a lot of time talking about sweet Bella on the day that Mikayla wore this dress.

One morning I asked Ben to put a skirt on Mikayla and this is what he came up with.  He was in the kitchen and was feeling lazy so he just grabbed the Dr. Seuss apron that my friend Lara gave me for my birthday last year.  I think it works pretty good as a skirt too!

Last, but certainly not least, is this fabulous hand crafted dress courtesy of Dacia and Callie!  It is actually the dress I used as a model for Mikayla’s two year old birthday dress (also made by Dacia). Callie has outgrown it, so in an awesome care package from our friends (thanks again everyone) Dacia sent it on to Mikayla.  It is still big, but we love it anyway!  Lots of years of wearing for this dress!

To end the week – who doesn’t love a spoon covered in chocolate icing to lick clean?

We first took snowballs and practiced spelling her name…

…then we took those same snowballs and made a really large name snowman!

Thanks to the Cate’s for their wonderful shape button donation I made this game for Mikayla.  At the top of each pipe cleaner (or ski poles as Mikayla called them) I attached a picture of a different shape. She then "laced" the buttons onto the correct one.  She worked really hard at this game.

When she was finished she took the "ski poles" and went skiing…just like Grandma and Grandpa Kickert!

To make this game I took empty toilet paper rolls and wrapped construction paper around them. Then labeled with a number and a corresponding number of stickers.  For this game she would look at the numbers (or count the stickers) and place that many snowballs inside (pom poms).  I know snowballs are traditionally white, but I didn’t have enough so we went with colored snow…who doesn’t love that?!

This game is not winter related at all, but I have had it in my head for a long time now…I just needed enough empty match boxes to make it.  I wrapped empty match boxes in construction paper and then labeled the outside with capital letters.  The inside is filled with lowercase letters.  Her job was to match the two and complete the match box.  You could also use magnetic letters for the inside (matching capital to capital as well).  Eventually I would like to make a number set and as she gets older a spelling game with the whole word on the outside and letters on inside to form the word…but that is way in the future!

Button snowman game.  She rolled a dice and placed that many buttons on the snowman.

We went on a white scavenger hunt around the house and found white items to make a collage with.

On this particular day she wanted to color, so I quickly drew a family of snowmen for her to color.

Shape snowman – I gave her direction on where to put certain shapes to complete a snowman.

Thanks to JDR and Brittany we had some winter gummies I was able to use this week.  She sorted the shapes and then of course ate a few!

W is for winter – she made a winter scene using her finger and paint as snowflakes.

A very odd looking footprint snowman.  She picked out the colors and items for his accessories!

I have a special winter activity planned for the whole family that I think will take place on Sunday. I will be sure to blog about it next week!

**Special thanks to Melissa and Maggie Jolly for the Chaco loaners for Mikayla!

**And also a special thanks to Chacos for hooking us each up with a backup pair!  And of course for making some fantastic shoes!