• Family

    Mixed Media Art Project

    I am homeschooled. During homeschool we learn all of the things you would learn at public school: Math, Reading, Language Arts, Typing, etc. Recently we did an art project as well. We made self-portraits that are all different and unique according to the person. Mom took pictures of us and we used them to make a simple outline of our face. And Tallulah did a really good job drawing her hair! Then we went in with watercolor to finish our faces and think I took the longest because I really wanted to get the right shade for my skin.

    Creating the Background

    Each day for a week we did a different part of the picture using different media like markers, prismacolor pencils, pastels, crayons, string, foil, glue, and plaster. The first thing that you look at when you look these is the our face but the background is actually really cool! We drew lines going out from our head and filled each section in with things like our names, our birthdays, our favorite bible verse, abstract lines, and something we like. Each one is very specific to that person which makes them all so different and unique!

    SelahMae

    We all wrote our names on our pictures. I wrote SelahMae instead of Selah because Mae is my middle name and I like it when people call me by both names together! The next section has curvy lines. My mom asked us if we were walking on a sidewalk how would we walk to describe our personality: I chose curvy lines.

    Next we chose a favorite Bible verse. I chose Psalm 149:3, “Let them Praise his name with dancing.” This verse fits me because dancing is one of my favorite things in the whole world. It almost seems like this verse was written just for me. I don’t really know why I chose flowers for my background; it just felt right. (Also clogging shoes are too hard to draw, lol. 555.)

    Tallulah

    I think Tallulah did a great job. She wrote her name and her birthday herself. Mom wrote her Bible verse which is Psalm 139:13-16. For her line section, she drew all of her made up letters which I guess is perfect for her. In her last sections, she worked really hard to trace circles and made a Captain America shield because Captain America is her absolute best friend!

    Jeremiah

    Jeremiah wrote his name nice and big. He wrote his Bible verse and made some 3D lines which I think look so cool. Since his birthday is in July, he made some fireworks.

    Josiah

    And last but not least: Josiah. Josiah wrote his name in a really cool way. Also, for his lines he just made them nice and straight which totally fits him. His Bible verse is Collossians 4:18. He wrote his birthday in such a creative way because it looks like a code. He also cut out a piece of sheet music and glued it to his picture since he is really good at piano. I like the detail that he splattered paint to make freckles on his face. I think his is really awesome!

    Finishing Touches

    We made all of our shirts our favorite colors so mine is teal, Tallulah’s is purple, Jeremiah’s is green, and Josiah’s is this yellow orange color. Well actually Josiah’s favorite color is black but that is not on the color wheel so he picked this orange-yellow color. It had to be on the color wheel because all of our Bible verses are our complementary colors so mine is orange, Jeremiah’s is red, Tallulah’s is yellow, and Josiah’s is blue.

    After the background was done, we added some finishing touches like adding texture to our shirts with plaster, glue, string, and toilet paper tubes. We also added string to our hair and foil somewhere on our picture. Can you find where we put the foil? COMMENT BELOW where you think we each put it! (Hint: we each put them in different places.)

  • Life in Thailand,  Paradox

    Airing our Dirty Laundry

    Last time I lived in Thailand, I failed to take pictures of the “normal things.” In the years since, I discovered it was difficult to explain the basin of water in the bathroom that we used for bucket showers and flushing the toilet, and I wished I had taken pictures. So every once in a while I am the crazy person who takes pictures of the most uninteresting things I can think of: like laundry drying on a rack. I am also the person who documents the trip to the laundromat with photos of my children. Because there is a story of what God is doing in our lives even there.

    When we renovated our home in America, I REALLY wanted a laundry room upstairs. It was one part of a huge process of reworking our home. See, in order to fit a triple bunk bed in the boys’ room (Eli was supposed to come home in 2020), we needed to move a wall and take over some space in the bathroom. This meant reworking the bathroom. The bathroom was sort of awkwardly large (we think it was originally the entire maid quarters of our 1890s home). We had knocked the exterior stairs out at an earlier phase of the renovation, so the bathroom wall included a second story exterior door to nowhere and I thought that wall should be occupied by the washer and dryer. This was totally possible if we also moved the shower and the door to the closet. And rerouted plumbing through 130 year old floorboards. And also rerouted wiring, which meant replacing all the old knob and tube kind (eh, details). A huge benefit of this idea was that by moving the washer and dryer out of the back entryway by the kitchen, we could gain mudroom space for shoes and coats. And since we were redoing that, we could also take over some space from the main level bathroom to create a pantry…as long as we got all new kitchen cabinets in a new arrangement so that we could cut a pantry door where it would need to be. Cutting into all these walls was helpful anyway so that electrical and plumbing could be correctly routed upstairs (yep, details 🙂 ).

    My dad and my husband were amazing and worked so hard to accomplish this feat! It was certainly no small task, but I truly loved the finished product SO MUCH! Seriously, it was a game changer EVERY day. I could get a load of laundry done each morning while also aiding Tallulah in getting herself ready. And it was easy to stay on top of getting it all put away because it was seriously only a few steps to each person’s closet. Laundry never had to be toted up and down the stairs and the dirty laundry baskets were right there next to the shower, so it was almost as convenient to put dirty clothes where they belonged rather than leave them all over the floor! It was every bit as wonderful as I hoped it would be.

    Then we moved to Thailand. My washing machine is now outside and we don’t have a dryer at all. At first, I had no regular laundry routine. The laundry on the line was never dry by sundown (around 6 pm) so the laundry stayed out all night. In the morning, it housed THOUSANDS of mosquitos who were taking refuge from the smoke and breeding inside our damp clothes. It felt like an accomplishment when I realized that getting the first load of laundry in by 7 am meant I could get two loads on the line in the morning AND they would be dry and ready to be put away at 4 pm. If I did 2 loads a day each weekday, I could stay on top of my family’s laundry needs. I also discovered pretty early that if I took over the front porch with drying racks, I didn’t run the risk of losing my progress to an afternoon rainstorm. Sometimes things need to be rewashed due to the droppings from the birds who nest in this grate thing on the porch ceiling…but not nearly as many as you might suspect based on the number of birds that swoop over my head while I hang the laundry each morning.

    That worked through the hottest season and into the early rainy season…but then the truly rainy phase of the rainy season came. Now the laundry can be on the line for days on the porch and not ever be dry, because the air is just wet. All the time. On a sunny day, we can move the racks to the driveway, but it is so difficult to tell when the rain will come: it is a regular occurrence that without a moment’s notice it is pouring–even though the sun is still shining–and we are scrambling to run through the rain to pull in the clothes that are once again drenched. So instead, the laundry often takes over the living room and we use a fan to aid the drying process. This works alright.

    There are still details we haven’t figured out. For example, I am still working to figure out how to get some of the funk smell out of dry-fit fabrics, but I think it helped the other day when I boiled a pot of water and soaked the worse offenders in a bucket first (we don’t have a water heater so most of the laundry is washed in cold water).

    There was also the glorious day a rogue gecko slithered out of the bundle of socks and underwear I had just brought in to put away in my drawer. And so my boys got to dig around in their mother’s underwear drawer to find it and take it back outside since that gives me the heeby jeebies. Every day brings a new adventure around here.

    We have another line strung between two poles under an awning outside where we dry towels. Bed sheets, though, are another challenge. One bed set takes over all the racks… and the sheets get covered with lint residue worse than the clothes do (you know all the stuff that you collect in the lint trap of the dryer? A lot of that ends up on the floor of the porch from shaking each thing out before hanging it…but with sheets it just stays stuck). I have declared that the best way to wash bedsheets is to take them all at once to the Otteri (the name of a chain of laundromats here) and to take advantage of the wall full of dryers!

    Tallulah is a grand laundry helper and especially loves to help with the coins.

    While it is a whole new system I had to learn and a lot of convenience we left behind, I really don’t hate it. I’ve found a rhythm that sort of works most days and have developed a lot of patience for all the mishaps. Dirty laundry is just one of the many little things in our lives that is both the same as always and also so very very different.

  • Adventures

    A Murder in Malaysia

    We saw a murder on the street in front of the Royal Thai Consulate in Penang, Malaysia. I wasn’t able to get a good picture but that wasn’t the only crazy thing we saw. We also saw two (or three, we aren’t sure) wild monkeys walking on the telephone lines and eating by the trash cans. We did get some pictures of them:

    While we went to Malaysia to apply for a new visa, the best part of the trip was seeing all the wildlife from the window of our hotel. We were on the eighteenth floor of a 29 floor apartment building. We watched the dirty river below us as giant monitor lizards, at least 5 feet long, swam. It made it a little scary to see people working (clearing a fallen tree) and playing in that river with those dinosaurs in the water.

    We also watched a Brahminy Kite swoop down and grab dead fish floating on the surface. We watched a couple of bright blue–I mean bright blue–Kingfishers fly from tree to tree. There were small white Egrets walking along the shore. My dad kept seeing Blacknaped Orioles flying below us, but I never saw them. Even though we saw all of these cool tropical birds, my favorites were these small, green and blue parakeets flying all over the trees. They might have been Monk Parakeets (my dad had a pet one growing up and thought they looked the same). Dad has told me about a lot of his pets growing up but he always held Buddy (the parakeet) as his favorite.

    I did not expect to see so much wildlife on this quick trip to a big city.

    P.S. Did you know a flock of ravens is called a Murder?

  • Family

    101 Guppies

    My dad has many jobs at Zoe International. At the beginning, one of them was designing a water filtration system for fish and frogs (for the kids to eat). One day, when he looked into one of the pools that they were going to put frogs in, he saw a couple dozen guppies in there. To this day we have no idea how they got there. Maybe some eggs were in the water and maybe a bird dropped some in there, but there were a ton of guppies in there. My dad got a small net and a movie popcorn box and filled it with water. Then, he caught about thirty and put them in the bucket.

    They were in there for about two weeks before Dad got a fish tank for them.

    We put in our living room and my dad filled it with aquatic plants. We wanted an all-natural tank so we selected a few of the fish to stay and dumped the others in the canal behind our house. Since then, the fish have given birth and so have the snails that got in because of the plants. (I am not a very good photographer but if you look closely at these pictures you should see tons of little babies.

    We aren’t done yet. We added some algae eaters to the hundreds of creatures in our tank. We added an ugly Suckermouth Catfish named Argus Filch and two pretty Siamese cleaner fish named Bobby and Kreacher. We also added several shrimp but they’re impossibly good at hiding considering that they are bright yellow and blue.

    The guppies are not the first pet fish we have had in Thailand. Only a few weeks after we got here we stopped by a fish market and bought a beta fish we named Malfoy. We didn’t want to be late for some baptisms at Zoe that day, so Malfoy swam contentedly in a coffee cup in our car while during the baptisms. When we got home, we put him in a small vase with a floating plant on our kitchen table. Sadly, the beautiful Malfoy died one morning for an unknown reason and the dining room table was empty for a few months. Fortunately, when my dad went to the market for the cleaner fish he also got Bellatrix Lestrange, a small dark blue beta fish who only cost one baht ($0.03 !!!!!!!!!)

    Still, while Malfoy was our first indoor pet fish, he wasn’t our first fish in Thailand. Week one we noticed that there were big fish in our canal. We have a big canal that goes through our neighborhood and right behind our house. In it there are giant, bright orange koi fish and numerous other fish we cannot identify. Almost every morning at around 6:30 our neighbor dumps a bunch of fish food off her patio and watches as a mass of wiggling fins goes crazy right under the surface of the water.

    P.S. I do not have pictures of the koi fish in the canal because they are very camera shy.

    P.P.S. We have had several pet fish in America and we know what we are doing (for the most part).