We are back into our routine.  Tate is in school, Theo isn’t yet (next month he’ll start) but we all appreciate waking up knowing more or less what is coming.  It might not never turns out to be exactly what we scheduled, but we have a great outline at least!

We still feed about 10 people at dinner.  Although it gets expensive at times, we’ve been blessed by people throwing in money to cover, or buying groceries and always we have tons of help prepping and cleaning.  We’re really enjoying this aspect of community living.

It’s now the dry season, so even though we wipe off our table about 3 times a day, there’s almost always a fine layer of dust covering it.  I suppose I could continue to fight it and be frustrated with it but I just honestly don’t worry about it anymore.  I’m not going to be featured in Good Housekeeping anytime ever, so as long as it’s clean when we eat-whatever.

Poor Tate has had a rough week.  We finally came clean about our dog dying (it happened in July, but since he was living in Seattle we waited to tell the boys until we had Winnie). Then the poor boy’s bike got stolen.  I’m not sure which earned more tears…I have a feeling we’re not done mourning the loss of the bike so that one may be inching ahead in the polls.

Since the loss of his bike he’s been riding Theo’s.  I’ll try to get a picture of it because it looks completely ridiculous.  Theo’s bike is a small two wheeler that doesn’t have pedals.  The theory is that this will enable him to learn to ride quicker*.  Anyway, Tate’s legs are way too long for the bike and he looks goofy doing a run/ride thing on the bike but it’s pretty hilarious.  Maybe instead of pictures I’ll have to get a video because it’s that funny.

A puma escaped near us.  They aren’t exactly sure where it is or how they plan to get it back.  We laugh every time we say puma.  While you might (logically) think that the puma escaped from the nearby zoo, I am here to inform you that this is not the case.  The puma is privately owned.  We are careful when we let Winnie out to go to the bathroom…we don’t want her becoming puma food.

Theo told me the other day that “I’m not the boss of him”.  After spending some time in his bedroom he retracted his statement, saying that, “Actually, mom, you are the boss of me!”  The next morning he did ask me if I was still his boss.  I replied affirmative and he let out a big sigh.  Life is rough when you’re three.

Thank you for all of your encouraging words from the last post.  I received many nice emails and facebook messages which were very appreciated!

*For the record, we didn’t buy him the bike like this.  We took the pedals off of his training wheeled bike because he didn’t ride it anyway.  Ghetto, I know.