Just for fun
How To Take A Shower (at our house)
Sometimes you get so used to things, you don’t realize what you’re actually going through. But even though you don’t realize it, it just may still cause stress.
Today I decided to see if I could make a flow chart about all the issues we have first thing in the morning when we want to take a shower. I’m not talking about checking to see if I remembered to buy soap (which I did, by the way). No, our morning routine is complicated in other ways.
So here it is. Click the image to see the larger pdf version (which will be a lot easier to read).
(By the way, everything on the chart is accurate and has happened, usually quite often. In fact, three of these issues happened today alone, which perhaps is why I have it on my mind!)
A lot of these things, of course, are related to cooking a meal, doing the laundry, dishes… but don’t make me do anymore charts. Sometimes it’s better not to know! 😉
Retro: Snow Angel
Ten years ago today, Hannah was doing something she hasn’t done much since – make a snow angel!
Nathanael: Mexico
Somehow I missed this picture from last Independence Day, but it made me smile! It’s Nathanael’s creation from bits and pieces around the church’s property. Notice the face with the moustache…
Shari Made Ponche. Here’s How.
Ah, ponche. A Mexican Christmas season tradition. Shari made some today – her second batch, just to use up what we hadn’t used over the holidays.
Kindly enough, she took some pictures so that you could see, step by step, how she did it. Shari may not have the years of experience some Mexican women have, and everyone makes it differently, but this is a good representative recipe. And I can attest that it turned out great!
Ponche, or Christmas Fruit Ponche (say pone-chay) is something often served at a special event or a community Christmas party. It’s a hot drink.
Tejocote
First, she boiled some tejocote for 5 minutes, to make them easy to peel. Tejocote is a type of hawthorn fruit, that look a little like crab-apples. The tejocotes were peeled and then added to the other fruit.
Other Ingredients
Here you can see the other ingredients that were used in the ponche. On the bottom right is sugar cane, which is cut up so that a few people can have a stick in their mug of ponche. On the left you can see cinnamon sticks and dried tamarind pods. The red at the bottom is dried hibiscus flowers. The sliced yellow fruit is guava. The big brown cone is unrefined cane sugar, known in Mexico as piloncillo. You could get a similar effect using brown sugar.
Shari put everything except the apples in to boil, leaving it for about half an hour to forty minutes. The apples were added in the last ten or fifteen minutes. Add a little sugar if it’s still too tart.
The Finished Ponche
Keep it hot on the stove as you serve! Here is the finished product. You serve the liquid, and if preferred some fruit and a bit of sugar cane (usually it is preferred!).
English Class: Christmas Vocabulary
Tonight is the last English immersion class of the year, and we’re going to be learning some Christmas vocabulary. I zipped over to Tagxedo and made some word clouds to share with them (and you).
First is a word cloud that comes from the commonly read Scriptures about Jesus’ birth, as well as five of the most popular Christmas carols. The second word cloud comes from other common Christmas songs (maybe you can guess which ones they were!) and “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas”.
Personally, I think the first cloud offers a lot more hope than the second!
I chose 15 words from each word cloud, and we’ll be doing some games with them tonight. 🙂
We would appreciate your prayers this week as we wrap up our classes and have our closing program on Thursday. We haven’t been getting a lot of sleep at our house for various reasons this week, so we’re just trying to keep going!
