White Chicken Chili

I adapted this recipe and this recipe to make a yummy pot of soup last night.  Everybody was happy so to remember what I did:

WHITE CHICKEN CHILI

Seasoning Mixture:

 - 1 tsp(ish) freshly ground pepper  (Kinda hard to measure when you're freshly grinding, isn't it?)

 - 1 tsp oregano

 - 1 tsp ground cumin

 - 1 tsp seasoned salt

 - 1 chicken bouillon cube, crushed into powder

Soup Recipe:

 - 1 large onion, chopped

 - 2 cloves garlic, minced

 - 4 cups(ish) shredded cooked chicken

 - 6 cups(ish) of water + 2 more bouillon cubes (because we can't buy chicken broth here and I forgot to save some when I was cooking the chicken)

 - 1 can of Rotel (Both recipes call for green chiles.  You can't buy that or Rotel here but someone graciously schlepped a case of Rotel down for me so that's what I used.  It gave the perfect kick for me, a little spicy for some of the kids.)

 - 1 bag of whatever white beans you like, cooked (Oh how I miss canned beans:(  If you're in the spanish-speaking world, I used frijoles panamitos.)

 - toppings: mozzarella cheese, avocado, lime juice (I actually cleaned and cut up cilantro but forgot to put it on.  Annoying.  Sour cream would be awesome.  Why don't they make that here???  I was going to try plain yogurt but the store was out.  Maybe next time.  Also, one of those links above suggests Avocado-Mango Salsa which I think would be awesome.  We just had mango and kiwi on the side.)

Mix all the seasoning mixture stuff and set aside.  Saute onion and garlic, then add chicken, water/broth, rotel, seasoning mixture stuff.  I added about 4 cups of the cooked beans, then scooped up another cup or so and mashed them before adding.  Bring to a boil, let simmer - mine did for maybe 30min.  Would be yum with cornbread but that didn't happen last night so I made garlic toast.  I had maybe 2 cups of beans left over - I think I'll add it to the leftover soup today with some more water, might need to add more of the seasonings?  

Love is patient and kind; 

love does not envy or boast; 

it is not arrogant or rude.  

It does not insist on its own way; 

it is not irritable or resentful; 

it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 

Those words are a tall order and often a far cry from the way I love.  So thankful today for a Savior who loves me so perfectly and doesn't require my perfection.  We miss our loved ones in the States.  Here are some notes to the grandparents:

From the one who can't write or dictate...

 Thank you grandparents for loving us so well over the years!!!  And here's a little glimpse into our lives - a sweet display of sibling love:)

Control Freak?

I don't typically think of myself as having to control everything.  I'm generally pretty laid back - maybe lots of people would even say a little too laid back.  Mark jokes that on the Type A/Type B personality scale I'd be around a Type D.  But tonight finds me re-evaluating and reconsidering the depths of sin.  After a day of not-so-super-friendly side comments between the hubby and me, the evening culminated in a not-so-friendly-still-not-resolved argument (yes, I know I need to go resolve it but sometimes it's better if I process a little first).  I felt my insides boiling and the anger/disappointment/hurt steadily rising.  The house quieted down for the night and I sat down to contemplate a little.  Why???  Why does my heart still feel like it's hanging in the air?  Why does my mind still want to run through a few good comebacks just in case he comes back downstairs?  Is it really THAT big of an issue?  How did that happen?  Where did I go wrong?

I started praying - pretty candidly.  Things like, "Lord, you got to do something so that I don't kill him."  I opened up the computer, desperate to read a verse that will calm my pounding heart and welling tears.  And there's a blog up on the computer  - not sure how - don't think I've ever read anything on this blog before - but there are 5 kids in this house and sometimes things get clicked on.  Anywho, the post was about a guy, went camping, didn't like it because he was out of control, blah blah, skim, skim...until I got to this line:

"My guess is that Jesus isn't amazed by me trying to control and fix everything myself.  Could it be that Jesus is amazed when you and I lose control?"

Hrrrrrmmm.  There's something to ponder.  Because I know that's what I want - control of the situation, control of Mark's responses, control of my emotions.  And one big nice "fix."  Preferably initiated by him:)  Don't know what he'll pull out but I'm sure he can manage because it's all his fault anyway, right?  And then we can go on because let's face it, the kids will be up early and the day will be busy and who has time for squabbling anyway.  So to sum it up, a little space, a half-hearted apology from both of us because we know that we should, push it all behind us and charge on.  For the Gospel.  Because that's why we're here.  To apply the gospel.

HELLO DISCONNECT!  Are we forgetting something here?  Oh yes - applying the gospel to ourselves and each other.  So even though I'd rather sit here and think about how justified and right I am, here goes (remember I'm still processing so if you're still reading you're getting the raw deal).  The blogger went on to reference Matthew 8 and the centurion who came to Jesus because his servant was sick.  And this man of power, used to being in control, realized he wasn't.  He could have given up.  He could have fought to regain the control.  He could have ordered his other servants to "fix" it.  Instead, he humbled himself and laid himself before the only true Healer, Restorer, Fixer of all things.

So to apply:  Marriage is hard.  My parents I think have one of those rare relationships where they rarely disagree so this came as quite a shock to me 10+ years ago when we were fighting on our honeymoon.  Sometimes I want to despair.  Most always I want to regain the control and I fool myself into thinking that if I have yummies on the table and a clean house and a joyful attitude and come up with some great new thing to do with or teach the kids and can remember to affirm Mark and think ahead enough to really serve him...THEN all will run smoothly.  Dumb.  All good things that I enjoy doing and on paper should equal happy life.  Why doesn't it?  Because I can't restore.  And I can't fix it all.  Wise words from one of hubby's dear old friends that have stuck with us over the years - "There's only 1 Savior in this world and you ain't it."  So we recklessly and confidently abandon our control to the One who sees beyond the momentary and He heals and He restores.

Ok - done processing - off to full-heartedly apologize.

(link to blog post I mentioned above - haven't read anything else so I'm not vouching for the theological soundness of it's entirety)

Well, hats off to you people who can blog life and live it at the same time.  We're low on sleep around here but full of thankfulness for all the ways the Lord has provided.

Exciting things:

1. My parents came for an altogether too short visit in April.  Here's one of my favorite pictures:

You can call my mom if you want - she has LOTS more pictures to show you.

2. The equipment for the opthamology clinic arrived!!!  It was a long complicated process to get it all here and something we had been praying about for a long time.  If you know nothing about the opthamology clinic you can go to The Hensons in Cusco  to read more about it.  Nathan is in the process of unpacking everything now and should be up and running in about a month!  This is particularly exciting for our family as Mark is likely going to switch over to mostly working there - always something else to learn!

3. These two little boys had birthdays!  In the past I've blogged old pictures of the birthday child from baby til now - yeah - didn't happen this time.

4. We moved to a new house.  We are now closer to friends, the university and the grocery store!

5. Sickness - Everyone but Reide and I has now had their first round of parasites.  Reide had her own drama which she is finally starting to recover from.  I cannot tell you how encouraged we were by the number of people who have responded to our request for prayer.  I read through the emails  several times as I was up with her during the nights.  Your words were life giving to me when I was worn out. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for interceding for us.

6. Mark and Hannah are on the Amazon River!  You can read a little about the people running the ship at Amazon Medical Missions.  They are joining a group of dental students and professionals from Augusta - extra fun since some of our close friends will be there!  Mark is in charge of evangelism teams and Hannah is helping out with children's ministry.  I was hugely impacted by short-term mission trips growing up so am super excited for Hannah to have this opportunity - and a little jealous since I've never been on the Amazon!  Be praying for both of their hearts and the hearts of those they will come into contact with.

Oh, and Reide learned to walk - definitely my earliest walker by far!  This is before she got sickly - she's still not quite back up to par... 

Five short months ago we dove into homeschooling a 3rd grader, a 1st grader, a Kindergartner, and a few other tag alongs.  Last week I sent them out into the world.

Inside the gates of Ausangate

   

Ausangate is a bilingual school with a little over half of their day being taught in Spanish.  It's going well so far although Eli's teacher did say that after the first few hours on the first day he just covered his ears with his hands and put his head down on his desk.  I can relate!!!

It's hard to let them go for a season but I'm glad to come home to this:

Pray for Hannah, Eli and Hank (and Abe - he's going to a neighborhood preschool several times a week) as they enter into the Peruvian school system.  Pray that Mark and I will disciple them well as they learn to share the gospel in a different context than anything they've encountered before.  There are precious few other believers in the school - no christian teachers or administrators that we are aware of.  Pray that they would gain fluency quickly and be patient with themselves and their limitations as they do (imagine having to write/do projects in a language you don't really know).  Pray that they would make friends and that their relationships (with friends, teachers, each other) would be winsome for Christ.  Pray that their relationships with each other would strengthen through these shared experiences and that God would keep their little hearts steadfast in Him.  Thanks for walking through these things with us. 

Homeschooling Days

I read homeschool blogs/sites (rather obsessively) so that makes me want to blog about it.  Plus I'm a little nostalgic (that's not the right word but my vocabulary has gone to pot since I started learning another language) because we're praying about starting the kids in school in March (which is when the Peruvian school year begins).  I love love love homeschooling so it's a struggle for me to let that go for a season but we really want the kids to feel at home here and school is our best option to help them learn the culture and gain fluency with Spanish.  Sometimes I read other blogs and envision a superwoman on the other side.  Have none of those illusions here - I truly do love it but there are those moments when I kick everyone out the door with a granola bar and a soccer ball.  There are days when Daddy comes home and everyone's filling out minibooks for our lapbook, drinking tea and listening to classical music (that actually happened once) and then there are days that are just so stinking loud!  Last Friday Mark came in to books scattered everywhere, crying baby, whiny attitudes (mine included) - I told him that Reide and I had had enough - dinner was on the stove and if he had any other questions he would have to figure it out for himself because I was going to be in our room with the door closed and the fan on for the next 45 minutes.  But such is the life of homeschooling and really the life of most any mom unless you really are superwoman.  I wouldn't trade these days and don't want to forget them so here I journal:

This is our "first day of school" picture which my sister will be proud of me for actually taking.  Abe's not really starting PreK but everybody needed a sign:)  This year was a little crazy since we had just moved here and each day held lots of "adventures."  I didn't know what day we would start until the night before we actually started.  Of course Hannah had her outfit picked out at least a week in advance:)  I wanted to have a fun breakfast but that didn't happen.  Mark and I are tutoring 3 mornings a week so mornings are pretty busy - family worship at 6:15, then (Reide and) I tutor at 6:50 while he feeds/dresses/brushes teeth.  He starts class at 7:40 and I start school with whoever is the most ready while prodding along those who are still making beds/putting laundry away/getting sunscreen.  Hopefully I'm on my 2nd cup of coffee by now:)

Language arts takes up the vast majority of our day since it encompasses several subjects and everyone is pretty much on different levels.  We use First Language Lessons, Writing With Ease, and The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading all from The Well Trained Mind.  These all follow a Charlotte Mason approach - short lessons with lots of narration, dictation and copywork plus some poetry memorization.

Here's Hannah taking a break from spelling (in the background) to play with Reide and Frasier.  Did we mention we got a dog?  Here he is and he's pretty much awesome.  A 10 year old lab who's totally chill with the kids, never comes inside, barks at strangers but never inappropriately - really the perfect dog.  We inherited him from a family who was leaving and couldn't take him.

We use this for manuscript and these (free!) for cursive.  For fun we add in wikki stix and some catchy youtube tunes that my sister-in-law found to reinforce letter sounds.  The picture to the right is of the kids singing along to those.  I couldn't get them to link but you can search for Letter A Song on youtube and it should be the first one although I hesitate to recommend anything on youtube because you never quite know what will pop up on your screen - so annoying!

Twice a week we throw in science.  Right now we're lapbooking our way through Apologia Astronomy.  I haven't taken pictures of the actual lapbook yet but here's Eli's mnemonic for the planets (almost makes sense!)  And a picture of the kids using balloons and paperclips to map out the relative distances between the planets.  Below is Eli setting fires with a magnifying glass after we learned about the sun - turned out to be hours of entertainment!

The other three days of the week we spend that time on history, mostly following Sonlight.  This is probably my favorite subject, I think a gene inherited from my dad:)  We're into medieval history now.

Praise the Lord for providing an awesome Spanish tutor so that the kids don't have to rely on me for that:)  Elvira (below) comes 3 times a week and we can really tell a difference in their confidence levels now.  We've also been learning worship songs in Spanish during family worship - sweet to hear the kids singing those throughout the day.  

We've slacked a little on formal geography lately but the kids tend to do it spontaneously when we read about a new country thanks to our awesome wall map.  And I do love Geography Songs because now the 2 oldest really can tell you how many countries are in the Middle East and sing all the countries and capitals of Scandinavia (although we did have to convince Eli that it is Helsinki, Finland and not Stinky, Finland).  

Then of course there are the lessons of life: how to get along, how to fix lunch, how to refocus on Jesus when we're struggling, how to wash the dishes, how to make up games (Hide the Apples is the latest - kind of like Capture the Flag but more fun because Hannah gets to practice chopping fruit and Abe gets to eat), how to be patient, how to convince Mom that the game you want to play on the iPod is educational.

And of course Reide just hangs out and soaks it all in:)

A few other resources that we like (I've run out of time to link them all so happy googling/amazoning):

Dance Mat Typing (website)
SpellingCity (website)
Starfall (website)
Fit Deck Superman cards
Pairs in Pears (game)
The Scrambled States of America (game)
Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series
Artistic Pursuits
The Story of the Orchestra
Then Sings My Soul
WDAV 89.9 (online classical station)
Tangrams
Math U See manipulative blocks
Rocket Math (iPod app)
Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia
Homeschool In The Woods timeline figures
True Tales and Story of the World audio cds
The Llama Who Had No Pajama
A Child's Introduction to Poetry

And oh so many more!!!  I did update pictures so click on the slideshow on the right if you want to see (you have to scroll throught the old pictures first)!

By now many of you have received our latest newsletter about all the drama going on here (if not and you would like to be on our newsletter list, let me know!).  The biggest thing that has happened was a major gas explosion in our house.  Mark did a good job summarizing it in the newsletter but I'll give you my take.  Pretty much everything we have here is gas - water tanks, heater (not central because they don't have that here, just one to heat a room), dryer, and of course the stove/oven.   So about a week and a half ago I put some potatoes in the oven to roast and then headed into the den to read to the kiddos.  We're not exactly sure what happened but we think that the oven was lit (most stoves here you have to do that manually) but that when I closed the oven door, the light went out.  Now in the States (I've learned) there's a safety mechanism for that - no heat = no gas.  But here (I've learned), not so much.  So Reide and I retuned about 15 minutes later to check the potatoes.  I was kneeling down in front of the stove and flipped the light on.  Next thing I knew I was 8ft back and facing the other way (still with Reide in my arms thankfully).  The explosion was strong - strong enough to knock locks off the upstairs windows - and glass was everywhere.  Writing this now it almost seems like a surreal experience.  We praise the Lord for His incredible protection.  All the other children were outside with Mark stacking firewood.  It scared them to see Mama and Reide but we had a sweet time rejoicing in God's goodness and treasuring each other as we sat outside waiting for the gas to clear.  Every now and then Abe still looks at my chin (as it got pretty busted up by something) and says, "Mama, I'm sorry you got hurted."  We praise the Lord again that Reide came away virtually unscathed minus a little singed hair.  My chin and mouth got pretty banged up so our prayer request now is that it will heal well and specifically that I won't have to have a root canal - doesn't sound fun for any reason but would be especially bad news because I would likely have to fly somewhere else to have it done.  Again, the Lord has been more than gracious to us so we trust Him with whatever comes to be.

And now for the emotional side of things:  I kept waiting that first night to have feelings of wanting to go home or questioning our decision to be here but they never came.  If anything this whole experience has increased our faith and has confirmed our call to be in Cusco.  This is not to say that this time has been carefree and easy.  Particularly at night for some reason I have struggled intensely with feelings of guilt (Did I do something wrong?  Why did I have Reide with me???) and the oh-so-famous what-ifs - What if I had waited longer to check on the food?  What if I had sent Hannah in the kitchen to check?  What if a burner on the stove had been on - the list could go on and on:(  But God is giving me victory and peace over this and I'm sleeping much better now.  Why does God allow such trials?  I don't pretend to understand all of His ways but I do know that we are never safer than when we are with our Father even if "bad" (in our limited perspective) things do happen.  I don't know who all reads this blog (other than grandparents who I have probably freaked out now) but I pray that you will know God in deeper and sweeter ways in the midst of whatever your trials are, whether it is real physical or emotional struggles or even just the desperate attempts to be content in the midst of changing diapers and getting dinner on the table.  










Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!”
                                                                                                              Revelation 5:13