on foot, large families, and other randomness

~ Today is Pedestrian Day in Bolivia. Even though it's my 6th or 7th here, it's still a bit surprising to wake up and see no cars or buses in the streets. In their place families and children flock to the streets with their bikes, strollers, scooters, skates, the odd motorcycle, or just on foot to enjoy a clean(er) air day. It's rather delightful! Makes me miss my family lots though - we had fun together on these days in the past.

But when I'm at the Baby Home on "Dia de Peaton", I like heading up an excursion to enjoy the safer streets. Here we are this morning, striking out with 13 kiddos. As I watched them eat their ice cream all lined up on the median of Blanco Galindo (closest thing to a highway here), all in one very long row, I marveled how we've grown. I remember the days when taking out 13 was all of our kids! Or at least all of the kids in the Baby Home. But today, we left a houseful behind napping and two caregivers preparing lunch.

When I think of the kids and pedestrian day, I often remember this picture from September 2006. All the kids in this picture have either been adopted (4) or live at my other houses now, MUCH bigger!

Today Tia Sarin shared with me on our walk: "Tia Jenny, you're going to be a tia again and I'm going to be a MOTHER again!" Yep, she's due with their 3rd! Her older two are really excited and I know they'll be a big help.

~ Friday was so intense and full of finishing some projects that I didn’t realize until now that I received 40 emails that day! No wonder it was hectic, trying to keep on top of those while doing the rest. They ranged from a soon-to-be-married couple wanting more info to various updates from CDA III to questions from pretty much all the volunteers and visitors due to visit us soon.

~ Yesterday, a Saturday, I got 21 emails, probably 95% CDA related.

~ Also on Friday I was approached about two children, a 9 year old with developmental difficulties (and maybe more) and an almost-one-year-old taken away from his street mother two days prior. This street kid organization doesn’t know where he was taken yet but they’re already asking if he could be transferred to us. I said well….later. One year olds are difficult and noisy and I have a whole parcel of them currently, thankyouverymuch. In fact, within a week, all 5 of our twins (yes 5, it's a long story) will be between 12-22 months old, yikes!

~ Speaking of many children, I really appreciated MckMama’s blog post yesterday entitled “Do the Duggars have too many children?" where she proceeds to say we can't actually know if they (or anyone else for that matter) have too many children (or too few children, as the case may be). The night before, I had read a very negative blog post by a mother of multiple multiples on them and the whole Quiverfull movement (maybe I live under a rock - we know tons of large families but I had never heard it labeled, much less accusingly called a military movement) so it was a pleasure to read what Jennifer McKinney had to say {I'm a Jennifer from McKinney, TX...just had to mention that!}.

I for one just love seeing such a functional, united, hard-working, God-fearing family, and say: congratulations!!!!

~ I recently came across (no idea how) a blog post by a librarian about a day in her life. The point was to dispel the myth that librarians just sit around and read all day and have a really boring, easy job. Well I am sorry and no disrespect intended (I LOVE libraries and miss ours in McKinney, Texas, so much!) but I got to the end and she moaned that she was almost too exhausted to put on her coat and go home. I re-read it wondering what terribly exhausting or stressful activity of the day I had missed. It was an 8 1/2 hour workday with a lunch break in the middle...nope, still don't see it. Then I tried to not bust out laughing and made a mental note that librarians should stay far, FAR away from our work. And that it might make a nice retirement job for me. ;-)

~ I'd appreciate prayers for our relationship with the owner of our house for CDA II. Things detoriated quickly last week during a meeting. We're not sure how or why and to protect the innocent (or guilty, as it may be) I won't go into details, but PLEASE pray for favor and a resolution of the issues so that 1) child social services renews our operating document and 2) we can stay until the end of January 2010. This whole arguing with the owner thing is new territory for me and I don't like it one bit. It made clear to me again what a huge responsibility I have towards these kids.......keeping a roof over their heads being one!!

Okay I think that's all I wanted to say (aren't you glad?). I did a lot of work related projects/emails/errands yesterday thinking that today would be so calm and peaceful without transportation, but it's been almost as full as yesterday, go figure.

Happy Sunday!