Merry Christmas from Spain

Christmas decorations

As is our tradition, we pulled out the Christmas decorations the Sunday after Thanksgiving. This year the kids were so excited to get to help. I (Keri) admit it is a bit hard for me to let them help, but I did my best to let the control-freak in me not get in the way. They had a blast!

This is our Jesse Tree. It is made of green felt and is about 6 feet tall. Last year, this was our only tree. Each ornament correlates to an Old Testament story that points toward the coming of Christ. We have a book that goes with it and read one story every night at the dinner table.

I am also a big fan of St. Nicholas Day. We celebrated St. Nicholas day this past Sunday (Dec 6) by having the kids put their shoes outside their bedroom doors when they went to bed and they awoke to candy and treats inside. More pictures to come on that. But anyway - here is our St. Nicholas with the gold pinecones and leaves Grandma made while she was here.

Here is the table inside our front door. The little penguins sing a song and wag their jingle-bell tails at the push of a button. Mathis loves to make them sing and has been heard singing to himself "Rockin' around the Christmas tree at the penguin party hop..." It's so funny.

And this year we were given an artificial tree. I wasn't going to put it up because we didn't have any of our personal ornaments here and I didn't really want a meaningless tree. However, while my mom was here visiting last week, she insisted that I could have the kids make ornaments and still make it meaningful. And she was so right! She worked with them all week to make jar-lid ornaments with the nativity characters, she taught Rachel to sew and made stuffed felt stars, balls and miniature christmas trees. I made some homemade cinnamon shape ornaments and a paper chain. And I really do love it. (I'm not sure why it looks crooked in the picture.)

So thanks, mom!

You just never know...

For several months now we have been battling a problem with one of the walls in our bedroom/closet. We think the shower is leaking and because our walls are concrete, the water is wicking up into the concrete and because our closet stays dark, there has been mold and mildew growing. We were finally able to contact the landlord about it today, through a friend whose Spanish is much better than ours, and said they would be sending out a repairman soon.

So in the discussion with the landlord, he said to our friend how he doesn't get over to his parents' (who live behind us) house very often but that they are always commenting on how nice it is that we leave our curtains open all day and live an open life and that they have noted that our home seems full of life and love. He said it in a very complimentary way. Apparently, most Spaniards, if they know someone is close enough to see in their home would keep things closed and maintain a high level of privacy. It hadn't occurred to us to keep our shades drawn for that reason.

It just struck me as such a nice yet strange compliment and is a good reminder that we never really know who is watching us or what kind of witness our day-to-day activities and the way we run our home is to those around us. It was a nice thing for him to say.

Elementary Thanksgiving Feast

I can't believe my last post was Nov 3! This month has absolutely flown by! I'll try to update with some news in a few days, but for now - some pictures of Rachel's class and their Thanksgiving feast at school today. The 1st - 3rd grades joined together to cook and prepare their feast, consisting of corn, roasted apples, mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets.

Rachel in her hand-made pilgrim outfit.

Here, Katja is stirring the corn while Yeji smiles at the camera.

Mariela and Laura are dicing the apples...

while Elyse and Aina dice potatoes...

Then while the food was cooking, they worked on thanksgiving crafts.

Here they are enjoying their hard work.
Interestingly, nearly half these kids are not Americans, but because we are an American school, of course we celebrate the settling of our great nation and give thanks to the Lord for our many blessings, no matter where we are from.

Some cute pilgrims. :)

Big Sib/Little Sib Day

Each October at ECA a day is set aside for Big/Little Sib Day, where the high schoolers are matched up with the younger students, a theme is set for dressing up in pairs and there is an afternoon of lunch and games. Rachel was paired up with a 9th grader named Stefanie. The theme this year was "Sports," so we dressed her up as a cheerleader.

Rachel and her big sib.

Another pair of sibs - Golfers.

and pool sharks.

American football players.

Outside enjoying the fun and games.

(these last 4 photos were taken by another teacher)

Dia del Bicicleta

Back in early September our town had its annual weekly "fiesta." The central plaza becomes a market and stage and there are different performers all week, as well as family activities each day. One day is "Dia de la Bicicleta" or "Day of the Bicycle," where everyone is welcome to join in a ride around our town. This year David and Rachel joined in the fun and as our house is fortunately on the parade route, Mathis and I stayed home to watch for them.

Here is the police motorcycle leading the way.

Followed by hundreds of bikers.

Here they come!

This was a cute homemade "taxi," to carry the little one.

The Ambulancia, just in case.

And another police car at the end.

Observations

I (David) have a new student in my sixth grade math class who has just come out of the Spanish school system. He is actually half Australian and half Irish. It has been interesting to learn through him how numbers are written differently in Spain. In the Spanish system, the "." is used to separate groups of thousands where we would normally use a "," and vice versa. Thus, the number one million would be written 1.000.000,00. This has been confusing for him as we first worked with larger numbers and are now working with decimals.

Another difference that sometimes frustrates us is that in Europe, dates are written day/month/year instead of month/day/year that we are used to. For example, my date of birth is Nov 8, 1973, which I have always written 11/8/73, but here it would be 8/11/73. So when you see it written but don't know if the person who wrote it was European or American, it's not easy to tell if they meant Nov 8 or Aug 11.

On a somewhat unrelated note, our headmaster Mr. Musser was asking all of the students where they were born as they came into the school building this morning. I'm not sure why he was asking, but it was interesting to stand and listen to the cities all over the world that were given. In one family, each of the three siblings was born in a different country! We are an American school, but our student body is certainly international.

Good Times

Here are some random pics of life lately.

Sophie and Jesse baking chocolate chip cookies one Sunday afternoon (with their little helper, Rachel, of course.)

This is what our table looks like on a normal night. From left to right, Rachel, Keri, Schielah, Laura, Sarah, Sophie, Jesse, Stephanie and Bop Bop. Thankfully, our large table comfortably seats all of us.

Rachel and Mathis love having big sisters to play with. Here is Jesse playing Barbies.

and a silly picture of Mathis, just for fun.

Matthew 5:14-16

This is the theme verse for our school this year. Rachel memorized it with her class.

Student Leaders

Really? My last post was Sep 10? I can't believe how time is flying. I can say that having five girls in addition to our own family certainly keeps me busy. Whew!

Anyway - last week a select group of juniors and seniors from ECA were privileged to attend a Student Leadership Conference for ACSI schools (Assoc. of Christian Schools Int'l, of which we are a part) held in Budapest, Hungary. One of our dormies, Jessica, was one of those selected to go. This morning in chapel, the group shared some of what they learned and gave a challenge to our ECA middle and high school students. (Click on pictures to make them larger)

Mr. Madsen, on guitar, was one of the teachers who led the group and who also has attended this particular conference every year for the last 12 years (I think). He was also in charge of worship for the conference.

The middle and high school students in chapel this morning.

Daniel is the student body president this year. Here he is sharing what he learned at the conference.

Here are Jessica and Susie, talking about a workship they attended on the plight of orphans around the world.

And here is Andrew giving his challenge to live for now and not to be afraid of being laughed at or mocked for doing what you know is right.

As each student shared, they talked about different Biblical leaders, such as Saul, David, Nehemiah and Esther, and what we can gain from their stories and challenges they faced. They closed with a few questions for us to ponder and reflect.

How am I living dangerously?
Am I willing to do what is right?
Am I willing to be laughed at or rejected by my peers for doing the right thing?
Who have I laughed at for doing what is right?
How is God calling me to live dangerously?

Language fun

For three weeks we are privileged to have with us two girls who are the daughters of an Irish mother and an Australian father. The girls don't have particularly strong accents, but in the last 48 hours we have had fun noting the differences in vocabulary. For example:

One of them came down to breakfast this morning and asked, "Where can I find the cuttle-ree?" "The what?" I said? "Cuttle-ree." "Oh, cutlery! Silverware, you mean."

Yesterday one of them had a headache and asked for the Mah-trin, (Motrin).

"Capsicum" is their word for red bell pepper. "Bikkie" is cookie.

I love listening to them. And I think it's awesome that we are a minority in our home right now with 2 Irish/Australians, a Columbian and a Philipino.

Good times. :)

10 ways to pray for us

This is a video done by Jacob Bock, a veteran missionary here in Madrid, whose kids have attended ECA. He tells 10 ways to pray for missionaries and we wanted to post it to ask you to pray this way for us and for others.

Camarma en fiestas

David and Rachel went to a "bull fight" Friday night. In a traditional bull fight, the bull is killed by the matador during the fight. In the event that we attended, however, there were 12 recortadores who perform acrobatics around the bull. Here are a couple of five second videos to give you an idea of what it was like:

Obviously, this can be rather dangerous. One of the recortadores tripped when running from the bull, which gave Rachel a fright. The bull roughed him up a good bit, but the others rescued him and he walked away!

One other note of interest - the guy who was walking around selling raffle tickets for the leg of ham that he was carrying. It was raffled off near the end of the evening.

Multi-lingual

One interesting thing we have noticed is the multi-language labeling on food products here. Because Europe has so many languages represented in such a small area, food distributors just

print them all, I guess.

Can anyone tell me what languages these are?

Here I'm guessing italian, Dutch, English and Greek?

Sometimes they make it easy.

When we were originally headed to Spain, one misconception that we regularly had to counter was that we would be eating lots of Mexican style food here in Spain. This is not the case. We did enjoy lunch at an outdoor table in the main plaza here in town today. We ordered our drinks and asked for a menu. The waitress brought us our drinks with a free appetizer to go with them - potato chips topped with what seemed to be cold pickled strips of fish. It was actually not too bad, and we all ate several pieces of the fish except for Rachel who wouldn't touch it. In any case, Spanish food is a far cry from Mexican.

First Day of School

Thursday was the first day of school at ECA and Rachel's first official day of school ever. Here she is with the ECA Headmaster, Mr. Musser.

And with her teacher, Miss Santie.

We began the day with an all-school assembly. Pictured above are high school worship leaders and Mr. Musser, giving the introduction.

Rachel sitting next to fellow classmate, Katja, whose parents have served in the Netherlands for the last several years.

During lunchtime, David snuck down and got this picture of her class. There are 5 students in her class. 4 girls and 1 boy.

A family picture just for fun.

And here is a picture of David's 6th grade classroom, with desks for all six of his students.