LAILA TURNED SIX (on September 16th)!!!
We have been blessed to have her unexpected presence in our lives. She definitely adds the spice and an element of surprise to everyday. She has taken on our new life in Spain with gusto and enthusiasm.
The changes have not been without challenges for her, but she has faced them with a power and peace that comes from the Lord. We are blessed each day as she grows up and matures before our very eyes. Either by circumstances that she responds to with such grace and maturity or just by it being the nature of this time in her life transitioning from little child to little girl, we are blessed to see the Light of Life shining through her eyes.
She had learned many new things in the short time we have been living in Spain like learning and loving to swim, riding a bike without training wheels, and becoming quite the rollerblader- seeing her in full gear blading along the beach path or riding her bike far ahead of us with Jara is such an awestruck experience at how grown up she is becoming in her actions and her activities of interest. She is also becoming very Spanish in her mannerisms.
Laila was bummed that she had to go to school on her birthday. (It started two days before her special day and to make matters worse, Jara didn’t have school on her birthday.) We tried to start off the morning with a special birthday breakfast treat…
A pile of chocolate covered donuts topped with whipped cream and chocolate milk to wash it all down! We were able to have a small birthday celebration with a few of her friends thanks to a generous financial donor who provided funds for us to do something special for her birthday. Laila loves to decorate (just like her mother in yet another way). So after school, we got to work on making it look like a birthday around here!
.Jared and Jara busied themselves with preparing the birthday divas requested lunch- hamburgers on the fire outside, sissy's potatoes, and corn on the cob!
One person could not come to the party but had to stop by to give birthday wishes and shower Laila with gifts…the girls tutor, Marta.
Laila decided to go to see the movie, Pitufos (Smurfs) at the movie theater in the mall, a football field length walk from our apartment. What made this even more eventful for us all was that the movie was in Spanish with no English subtitles! We surprised her and invited her three very best friends from church (James, Emi, and Jada) to go to the movie with us. They all agreed to come and instead of purchasing a gift for Laila they just paid their own way into the movie.
These friends are all bi-lingual so they were able to translate anything that Laila didn’t understand during the movie. I was glad when they all decided to sit at the very back in the top row of the theater. (Their translations wouldn’t bother other movie patrons. However, there only ended up being two other families there.)
After the movie, Laila wanted to come back to the house and have s’mores on a fire in our grill. It was fun to find Pitufos marshmallows to keep with the party theme!
It was so exciting to have Laila’s friends try s’mores for the first time. She loved that she was able to share something from her “old” life with her new friends (and some of the parents at pick up)!
We also surprised Laila and made arrangements for Jada to spend the night with her. They had been trying to arrange a sleepover for weeks and this celebration provided the perfect opportunity and setting for Laila to have her first friend sleep over. Then, the next morning, we took the girls to the beach to hang for the day. She is such a girly girl and very social which as she gets older and bigger is only becoming more and more exaggerated. It’s so fun to be a witness to this growing up especially with her animations!
To make the birthday celebration even more exciting for both girls, several birthday packages and letters arrived from both sets of grandparents bearing gifts for both the girl’s birthdays (Jara’s birthday was on Sept.1st). They had so much fun opening the letters, cards, and goodies that came to make their birthdays special and to send them love from afar.
The birthday excitement didn’t end with mailed packages either. God has sent them SIX birthday blessings. The story must first start with GATA. Gata is the Spanish word for girl cat. After we had been here for about 4 weeks and the newness and frustration were setting in, we were sitting on the sofa one night in our apartment when we heard a cat meowing outside. We instantly went to investigate and found “gata” sitting outside our window..waiting. We gave her some scraps and she hasn’t left since! There are many stray cats running around the streets of Spain. But we really feel she was sent to the girls, a gift from God to express His love for them. The girls had to give up their cats their they have each had since they were two years old in order for us to make the move to Spain. These cats were not given to anyone to be their housecats (as they had been for us). Their cats were taken to a friends working farm and released to be mousers with the girls full knowledge that seeing them even on our return home in e few years would be unlikely. (A hard day for the girls as you can imagine.) As the reality of living here starts setting in with the girls, the Lord knew what to send to make them smile…a cat! She even has a heart on her side which confirms our believe that she’s a gift of God’s love for the girls.
Now, as time goes on Gata starts growing bigger through the middle, Jared and I suspected the cause. Because would you know it that EVERY house or apartment we have ever lived in (except on the Bible college campus), we have had a pregnant cat make it’s way into our home and lives. Then we find the mother and babies new homes once the pregnancy has run its term and the kittens are weaned. It seems, that even in Spain, we are not immune to this phenomenon. Gata delivered six kittens the weekend after Jara’s birthday and they were opening their eyes and becoming more active the weekend of Laila’s birthday.
Now, we have six little gatitas (all girl kittens!) running and climbing around our apartment. They are weaned, and we are searching for some homes for them.
Gata will return to being an outside cat once the kittens have new homes. She has proved her usefulness in catching a killing many lizards and mice, but she made her usefulness crystal clear the other day when she killed an enormous rat. (This was the half left after her feasting! She tried to deliver it inside to her kittens… Ummm, her request was denied!)
At least one kitten has earned her keep to stay in the apartment, she has become super attached to Jared (and he to her, though he would deny it) and caught a mouse in the house the other day. Mice, rats and other creepy crawlies (giant cockroaches and other undesirable bugs) are ever present in our living environment due to being on the basement level of the building, our close proximity (shared walls) to the storage and utility rooms of the building, and the normal occurrences in homes here. So, a cat is the house is a good defense mechanism to have in place.
We ALL have enjoyed the kittens- the entertainment and love they have given to our family.
We are thankful for each blessing that the Lord sends our way whether celebrating another year in the lives of our daughters, time together with friends, or a pregnant cat and her newborn kittens. We watch and wait each day with eyes wide open to see what abundant blessings the Lord has for us next. (And sometimes, we find those blessings in the quiet moments that we share.)
