Excited for January
Why am I writing this blog post at 3:30 AM?
I only went to bed 2 and a half hours ago.
Can I survive the day with only 2 and a half hours?
Why can't I sleep?
Something happened that completely took me by surprise.
I am excited to start house parenting.
Not just exited though, like excited.
I was this excited before when it was Christmas eve and I couldn't sleep.
I was this excited before when my grandma and aunt took me to Disney World.
I am so excited I can't sleep and its 4 AM now.
It was strange coming here knowing that the kids we had previously bonded with already had house parents. We were pretty certain that we would work best with girls.
We prayed for an open mind and prayed for some bonding to happen with whatever kids God intended us to work with, expecting it to be girls.
Well, as these things normally happen to me, our expectations were not met.
God completely changed our hearts and we grew new connections... with boys! We could not have imagined that we were supposed to parent boys.
We don't know exactly who we will be working with but we will be working with boys, that is pretty clear. We will officially start in January.
We have been watching over the group of 11 little boys this week while their house parent visits home for Christmas.
We've been doing it for a week and feel so much more capable than we did on the first day.
Some of the older boys have been very helpful. They are helping us keep the little boys busy and helping with Spanish-English translation. We did not expect to bond with the older boys like this. It became clear pretty fast that we would work best with boys.
Of course, some of the older boys have also not been helpful. Some pick on the little boys, some are mean, and some are not respectful to them. I was anxious about giving consequences to older boys. I was worried that I wouldn't know what to say to them. I was worried they wouldn't listen to me. As it turns out I am working really well with the older boys and have created effective consequences...THAT HAVE WORKED. I totally surprised myself.
God knew what he was doing.
He amazes me every day.
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We had our first Christmas in Guatemala. We were able to video chat with our families and also had an awesome midnight dinner party! We had good food and had fun helping to prepare it. We were surprised to find that it is tradition for the whole city to do fireworks at the same time, at midnight. It was so beautiful! We watched American Christmas movies with the boys, they liked Frosty the Snowman and Charlie Brown but didn't like Rudolph.
