bonfire

Fall is my favorite time of year, and its always a little hard to not feel like I'm missing out here - particularly wiener roasts but everything from apple orchards to furry boots (because mine are not actually Uggs) to crunchy, colorful leaves to orange pumpkins to colder weather to vests... ok, you get it. On the other hand, I decided maybe I wasn't missing out on so much when Leah told me today on Skype that she had hot dogs every night last weekend. I can see where there can be too much of a good thing.

But anyway, we decided to invite families over for a bonfire tonight. And you know what? God provided that cold weather we needed, in the wake of a short, early evening rain, and we had such a great time. The wind was even blowing in the perfect direction. We couldn't have asked for more.

We invited five other families from church (which is basically all of the families with young children in church) and four were able to come. It felt comfortable, which is saying a lot about the hand of God in it all, because cross-cultural hosting is typically not, for us, right now, anyway. It was a pretty American spread - complete with baked beans (which I made up the recipe for, based on a bunch of recipes I didn't have all the ingredients for, so that was a little risky) and apples and caramel - but no s'mores here. Just marshmallows, and that was thanks to Ruth. I think you can get graham crackers at Wal-Mart but I forgot and chocolate is just really expensive. Plus the kids had more fun setting the marshmallows on fire than anything, and they made up for the lack of additional sugar by putting caramel sauce on them. So I'm glad I didn't waste my money.

I think Ivory enjoyed her first bonfire. :) Silvia helped me a lot with her while I was running around trying to host, so I appreciated that. Bedtime was a little rough, since it was right in the middle of the whole thing, and someone, like their mother, isn't a huge fan of missing out on anything social. But overall she did really well and just spent most of her time being overwhelmed at the number of people running around and all the kids playing with the toys she usually has to herself.

The pictures don't do a great job of showing who all was there - there were quite a few people that somehow my camera didn't catch (maybe because I was trying to photograph in between making caramel sauce, feeding a baby, alleviating the thirst of several nearly-dying 3 to 5 year olds, and the like. Enjoy, anyway. :)

The last one probably needs a caption - we were trying to convince Andres to play the train whistle along with Grant's guitar - but he was a little embarrassed.