APRIL ‘08 ARCHIVE
POSTED: April 30, 2008 Abby is a social butterfly. She loves to visit people. I took her with me today to visit one of the ladies in our goat project. She had a blast. She loves to run around outside with the other kids & she loves all the animals that they have inside their huts. Today she was really interested in one of the chickens that had a bunch of little chicks. They even caught a chick for her and let her pet it. Abby loved every minute of it !! Abby loves the national food here. At our visit they gave us some tea and some injerra made from barley and corn. Abby chowed down on it. They just kept giving her more and more to eat. I finally had to stop her because I didn’t want them to give her all of the food that they had to eat for the day. We started potty training a couple of weeks ago. Abby’s doing really well with it. We try and take a potty seat with us wherever we go. Today, she had to go potty while we were visiting in our friends hut. I bet there aren’t many American children that have gone potty on their potty seat inside a hut. She definitely drew a crowd while going to the bathroom. Abby loves the movie, Mr. Bean’s Holiday. It’s rated G and it’s one of the only “grown up” movies that we’ve let her watch. For some reason she LOVES that movie. The other day she was sitting at the dinner table and she took her bib and through it back over her head like a hat. Then she started singing something that sounded like Opera music. I asked her what she was singing & she said she was singing Mr. Bean. Then it dawned on me that she was re-enacting a scene from the Mr. Bean movie where he is lip singing an opera song in the market and begging for money. She was actually doing a pretty good job impersonating the scene. It was hilarious ! Here’s a picture of Abby as “Mr. Bean.” We get bored sometimes with what we eat & we crave food from back home. When we start craving a certain kind of food, we usually try and see if we can make it. This week we were craving Perogi’s (pasta with mashed potatoes inside) & donuts. So, we tried to make them. They came out pretty good ! Abby’s comment was, “Mmmm, yummy.” I must say I had to agree !! POSTED: April 26, 2008 Abby’s growing up so fast & she’s talking so much now. There’s never a dull moment around our house. This week Abby told me that she was going to go to “Mommy’s Office” and play. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I just said, “OK.” She went in to the shelf where I have all my nail polish, etc. and said she was playing in Mommy’s Office. It was cute. It always surprises me the things Abby understands. We’ve been having lots of power outages lately. Sometimes she will ask if she can watch TV & I have to tell her there is no electricity so we can’t watch a video right now. She never complains when I say that, she just seems to understand what that means and she knows I have no control over it. Yesterday, she was playing with a little book that you press a button and it plays music. The battery was dead so it wasn’t playing. I said, “Is the battery dead?” She said, “No, there’s no electricity.” We thought it was pretty funny. Here are a few fun photos of our little sweetheart this week. Reading a book to her baby Tea Party Time Hard at work Abby LOVES to cook. She helped me make bread yesterday. I know she takes after her Grandmamma Gallion because she wants to eat all the dough while she’s making it. Abby cracked me up yesterday. She wanted to go out on the back patio. I told her she could go out there if she put some shoes on. Here’s what she came up with. She looked like she came straight out of an “I Love Lucy” episode. POSTED: April 20, 2008 It’s been almost a month since I last posted. We’ve had a lot going on this past month. We had a wonderful visit with Andy’s parents. They came and stayed with us for 4 weeks. Abby loved having her Grandma & Grandpa around (actually we all really did). They helped us out a lot around our house & we really enjoyed getting to take a vacation with them to the Southern part of our Country. We already miss them a whole lot !! We hope they can come back to visit real soon. We are supposed to be in our “short” rainy season right now, but the rains have not come. All our power comes from hydro-electric power plants, so that’s causing quite a bit of a problem for the electric company. They don’t have enough power to distribute power to the country 24/7. So, they’ve started rationing power. In the Capital City they have a schedule of when the power will be turned off. Out where we live it seems to be a lot more random. Last week our power was out (on & off) for 64 hours. Crazy !! The even more serious issue with the drought is that the farmers can not plant their corn crop that they usually plant this time of year. The corn that they usually harvest at this time of year tides them over until they harvest their big harvest at the end of our long rainy season. If they can’t plant their corn, they will not have any food to eat. The people here are very scared about the prospect of a famine. On a lighter note . . . we had an ultrasound last week & it looks like our newest Hatfield addition is going to be a BOY !! We’re super excited !! Abby’s doing great. She’s growing up so fast. She’s talking ALL the time & she’s really starting to enjoy new things. Right now her two favorite things are singing & cooking. :0) We started potty training this week. She doing great with it, so we’re really happy about that !! Our little girl sure is growing up fast !! Abby’s potty training venture. The first few days we let her go potty wherever she was currently playing at. So, here she is out on the front porch. :0) It took a few days, but now she has going to the potty in the bathroom down. Bare bottomed & playing with Molly We don’t have any American Restaurants in Country, so we’re always craving food from our favorite restaurants. We try to have themed nights every once in a while where we try to make food from one of our favorite restaurants. This week we had a Taco Bell night. We made Mexican Pizza’s & they actually turned out pretty similar to Taco Bell’s. Mmmmm, delicious !! We were going and going for about a week & poor Abby was starting to get worn out. She was so tired that she even fell asleep in the middle of lunch. Poor little girl. Abby loves to cook. Here she is making popcorn with her friend Desta We took a vacation down to the Southern Part of our Country with Andy’s parents. We had a wonderful time !! Abby really enjoyed the crocodile farm. We saw LOTS of baboons on our trip. These baboons were sitting right outside our hotel room. We also saw lots of monkey’s & zebra’s Abby really enjoyed driving through the game park. She thought the zebra’s were neat. Our latest family picture