Kids always win

Hello, again-

We’re often reminded that kids always win:

-- We try to teach the boys some Bible stories and talk about the Bible when we have a chance. It backfired on us recently when Annette found Chris and Mark in the yard launching rocks at each other. She yelled, “What are you doing? Quit it!” They yelled, “It’s okay, Mommy! We’re David and Goliath!”
-- Our city boys drove their little bikes into the kitchen the other day and parked them bumper-to-bumper in front of the fridge. They all looked up and told us, “We’re playing traffic jam!”
-- We try to teach the boys to always stick together. It works most of the time, but we got in the car a few days before the 8-hour drive to Mombasa and found the stereo/GPS/backup camera didn’t work. We figured out pretty quickly that the coins in the console were missing, so probably had been put in the CD player and shorted out the whole system. I interrogated the boys for a while and finally realized they had taken my point: each one refused to roll over on his brothers. So, we have a “lesson from Mommy and Daddy” learned, as demonstrated by $400 worth of new car stereo.
-- We got out of our tent on Sunday morning at Masai Mara. I thought the kids would be impressed with the fact that a variety of wildlife had, as promised by the camp staff and as evidenced by noise throughout the night and the odor, obviously been directly outside of our tent during the night. I said, “It smells like we had some big animals outside our tent last night.” Chris replied, “All I smell is animal poop.”
-- We’re always harassing the boys about washing their hands after using the toilet. Chris came out of the restroom at a hotel we stayed in and told us he had washed his hands. Mark, Jr., who is taller, had just come out of the same restroom and said he couldn’t reach the faucet. Annette asked where Chris washed his hands, to which he replied, “In the baby sink by the toilet.” Chris had encountered his first bidet.
-- We’ve gotten to like a new dish called “bounty rice,” which is made of all sorts of fresh vegetables and such. The boys, who love bouncy castles at fairs, insist on calling the dish “bouncy rice.” I’ve enjoyed watching the battle between them and Annette:
Boys: Mommy, can we have bouncy rice?
Annette: It’s bounty rice!
Boys: How high does it bounce?
Annette: It doesn’t bounce! It’s rice!
Boys: Okay. Will the bounty rice bounce off my plate?

Enjoy the photos,
Mark & co.

Catching up

Greetings, all-

The monthly update has turned into a quarterly update, apparently. This’ll probably turn into two parts.

Annette’s mom came out in February and got to meet Joy. We didn’t do much travel outside of Nairobi, as I was traveling for work quite a bit during her visit. She seems to have enjoyed the visit, though.

Joy was baptized on February 8. She didn’t cry when the water hit her, about which we were pleased until a helpful parishioner came to after Mass and said, “You know what they say, right? If they don’t cry, the devil’s still in them!” I was struck when the priest was sending the kids off for their kids’ Mass, but knowing our boys had to stay for the baptism said, “All children, except for the Zimmer boys, come forward for your blessing.” I think “The Zimmer boys” makes them sound like the neighborhood hoodlums, which sometimes isn’t too far off.

There’s a photo here of the kids in their gear for Annette’s annual Mardi Gras party. The big boys assigned themselves as keepers of the hot sauce, so spent the whole party at the end of the serving table pouring hot sauce on the food of whoever asked.

We took at trip to Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, for Easter. Chris had never seen the ocean before, so it was neat to see him stick his toes in the “big swimming pool” and build a sand castle. I got Little Mark on a jet-ski with me; he spent the whole time asking if we could go back now, but when it was over and his brothers asked if it was scary, he puffed up his chest and said how much fun he had had. We did a trip in a glass-bottomed boat, and the boys did some swimming on a reef. Again, they were all scared until Mark, Jr. hopped in. Then they all followed. Who needs peer pressure when you have two brothers? The hotel also had five different pools, each with a theme – diving platforms, a swim-up bar, a slide, etc. All of boys were a little leery of the water, since we don’t get to swim as much as we used to in Singapore. But, after the second morning of uninterrupted pool time, they were all very brave. Luke, who doesn't fully know how to swim, got so brave that he’d jump in the pool without telling anyone. Joy wasn’t too interested in getting in the water, but did great with the travel.

This past weekend, we spent Annette’s birthday at Masai Mara. The boys and I had been there before with my cousins Shannon and Tamara, but Annette and Joy had not, due to Annette’s travel restriction before Joy arrived. We stayed in a nice camp and enjoyed some good game drives. My saint of a bride claims she enjoyed the day of her birthday, even though I managed to slide our car into a deep rut and we were stuck for a little under three hours. We started out the trip with a cooler of beer, but it got depleted pretty quickly after I gave some to the guys who pulled us out of that hole, and more to the Masai people who materialized from a grove of bushes only seconds after we got hung up on a separate ditch the day prior. All in all, it was a good trip. We saw a lion, which is rare, as well as many elephants, some Masai giraffes, and then lots of zebras, gazelles, warthogs, impalas, hyenas, and others. The dining tent was invaded by monkeys on our last morning; the boys thought it was a big adventure, though Annette and I spent the whole meal waving umbrellas at the critters for fear of a bite on the kids.

Chris came home from school a while ago and told us he’d been put in charge of the class for a bit while the teacher stepped out. He said he had to “watch his childrens” (the Kenyan way of talking about his classmates). I guess he had to stand on a chair and tell them all to be quiet. So, after I finished laughing hysterically at the idea of Chris being assigned to keep order, I made a joke about the #1 inmate being put in charge of the asylum. Annette jabbed me and said that was no way to build his confidence.

More to follow,
Mark