Let the Adventures Begin!

Finally, the time has come and it's time for me to head off to Thailand!! This trip has been in the planning stages for so many months and at last, here I am, sitting in the Starbucks in the Lima airport waiting for my plane to depart.

Did I really just say goodbye to the boys this morning? It seems like ages ago. Jeff took me to Cusco to the airport, it's about 4 hours from our house in Abancay. Nathan came with us while the other 2 boys were "forced" to attend school for the day. It was a two-fold mission in getting to Cusco, not only to drop me off, but to pick up Bryce & Pat (Jeff's parents) who flew into Cusco this morning. My family will be getting pampered by the Grandparents while I'm gone and I've got to say, I feel such a relief leaving (er, um...abandoning) my family knowing that Jeff's parents are there to help out!! Thanks "Papa & Ama Krohn"!!!

So you're wondering why I'm flying all the way to the other side of the world, leaving my family behind, missing both Jonathon & Brandon's birthdays, and basically going as far away from Abancay as I can possibly get?? Well, I am going to be attending an SIM workshop on Multi-Cultural Training. It's a workshop designed to help us work together better as an SIM "entity" within the many cultures that we represent. It's going to be fascinating and I'm really looking forward to hearing great insight from the other women who will be there. We were asked to prepare presentations, in light of a certain topic. I was also asked to give the devotional on Monday morning (others will cover the rest of the week)--I can't believe I said I would do it...I mean really, give the devotional the FIRST day of our workshop???? UGH.

So I got up at 5am to leave Abancay at 7am. I arrived in Lima at 3:30pm and have been spending the afternoon/evening with a good friend and now find myself sitting under the full blast of the air conditioning in Starbucks in the Lima airport. My flight to LA leaves at 1:05am, it's now 11:15pm...just 2 more hours to wait. I will wake up on U.S. soil without my family...which is just weird. I get into LA around 7:30am tomorrow morning and a friend will pick me up and we'll spend the day together. Then tomorrow night (Thurs the 16th) I will leave for Bangkok!!! How weird to think I leave LA on the 16th and arrive in Bangkok on the 18th!! What happens to the 17th??? While everyone else is experiencing a Friday, I'll miss it completely. Strange.

I hope to keep you updated as I'm in Thailand, as much as I can. Meanwhile, be praying for safe travels, for my family back in Peru, and for this little baby who gets a free ride to ASIA--in utero!!

Putting on our homework hats

One thing I've loved about this school year is that all the boys are in the same school. It's a small, private Peruvian school where all of their instruction is in Spanish...well, all except for the English classes I teach twice a week. If you don't know about life in the Southern Hemisphere, our school year goes from March through December. March is our fall (though sadly enough we've never seen any leaves changing colors and we miss that), and December is the beginning of the summer. So now that we are into October, our boys only have a couple months left of school, and yes, they are counting down the weeks! Brandon is finishing 2nd grade, Jonathon will finish Kindergarten, and Nathan will finish preschool.

Homework is part of any student's life, and we are not exempt here. When the boys get home from school we eat lunch (at 2pm which is quite late and we are quite hungry by that point), and then we sit down at the table and do homework. They have at least one page of homework every afternoon, sometimes up to 3 pages. Nathan's homework mostly consists of coloring something, gluing something, or tracing something. Jonathon is learning to write in cursive, yes, you read that right, cursive! Here in Peru, they introduce cursive in Kindergarten, so he's learning the strokes and how to move his hand in more of a circular motion. He also gets pages to color or glue or draw. Brandon usually has either math (he's learning multiplication through the 12's) or writing, in which he's given a long sentence in cursive and has to write it over and over until he gets to the end of the page.

It's so cute to see them concentrating on getting their work done, and one thing I've loved watching is Nathan's tongue!! He concentrates so much that his tongue slowly creeps out of his mouth while he's doing his work--I've seen it at home and also at school when I teach English. I didn't capture Jonathon doing his homework the day I took some pictures, he was too quick to get his work done by the time I had decided to take pictures. Enjoy!