1 month left....

Wow, I can't believe that I only have a month left before I leave to go back to the States. Where has the time gone? It feels like just yesterday I was arriving in Peru, all nervous and scared of what was going to happen. Now I can call a taxi in Spanish and eat ceviche without gagging. haha it's just so crazy!!!

Amazing lemonade

Monkey!!!!

Last weekend was so much fun! I had my second lesson in surfing and lets just way that I definitely agree with the phrase "Beginners Luck." My first lesson went so much better than my second lesson because I was able to stand up may more the first time that I was able to this past weekend. It was very frustrating!!! After several hours of big waves continually knocking me off my board I decided to head back to the beach. Since surfing is hard work, we went and ate but it wasn't the food that was memorable. It was the lemonade! I swear, I have never had such good lemonade before in my life, I will never forget how amazing it tasted. I am now ruined forever because of this lemonade because nothing will ever come close to it. haha After eating we walked around on the beach for a little bit, hitting some of the shops ever so often. And then suddenly, I saw it...my very first monkey here in Peru!!!! Granted, it was on a leash and a child was sitting next to it feeding it chips, but it was still cool. I even got to pet it. :D

Well, this week has been so crazy and just full of fun. I feel like I say this alot, but this week definitely went by very fast. I'm afraid that now that I've hit my one month mark, everything will just fly by. I'm not saying that is bad because I am ready to go home in some ways, but I know I'm going to have a hard time not only leaving Peru, but leaving these amazing kids that I have come to love so so much!!! Well then, here's what happened during my week...

What our rice crispies ended up looking like

On Wednesday, Jayde and I decided to try and make rice crispy treats with one of the houses. Tried being the main word here. haha We couldn't find any rice crispy cereal so we had to improvise and bought another type of cereal and some marshmallows. Side note: one thing that I won't miss about Peru is their portion sizes. When you buy something like cereal or chips or marshmallows, their is basically nothing in it and therefore you have to buy to just to even make it semi-normal. It's very annoying! Anyway, after dinner, we headed over to Casa 1 to make these rice crispy treats. They didn't quite turn out the way they were suppose to. The marshmallows didn't melt like they were suppose to and then when we added the cereal, we realized that we needed more cereal and when we tried to make them set, they ended up being hard. But, none of this mattered to the kids, they absolutely loved making them and thought that they tasted fantastic. So, in the end it didn't really matter what they looked like, they just wanted to have fun and make something with sugar in it that they hadn't ever had before. :D

Girls just wanna have fun!

Our fort..

On Tuesday, we decided to make a fort outside made of chairs, boxes and then put our parachute over top. we set it up for the toddlers, but we ended up having several older kids join us as well. It was so much fun, even though there wasn't really a lot of room for everyone. We read stories, blew bubbles, and the kids went crazy for our camera. They absolutely love it when we pull our camera's out and constantly try to steal them so they can take pictures too. The funny thing is though they are often times the best pictures that I have, the just aren't always so gentle and careful with my camera. I've had my camera dropped several times and once the lens wouldn't retract and I was nervous that I would have to buy a new camera over here. That would definitely not be good.

So many kids

This week, it was my turn to do afternoon school runs which means that I ride in the back of a pick-up truck to pick the kids up after school. My job is to make sure they stay sitting down while we are driving. We usually end up having to make 3 trips, one trip in one direction to one school and two trips in the other direction to a different school. Well, one in particular we had already pick up the kids at one school and were headed to the other school. When we got there, I didn't hop out of the cab fast enough to get into the back because by the time I was out of the car, the entire back part of the truck was completely filled up. There was no way I was going to be able to fit in there with the amount of kids in the back. So, I had to stay with the 4 other kids and wait til the driver came back to pick us up. Ya, all the kids but 4 were able to fit in that trip. haha it was totally crazy!!!!

Girl's pinata

Last, but certainly not least, on Friday we had our monthly birthday party for all the kids who have their birthday in March. This one was much bigger than the others because we had about 10 kids to celebrate. This party was also different because a church group came and ended up doing the whole thing. It was fun to see the kids interact with this group that included both young kids and older adults. They brought tons of treats and cakes for the kids to eat as well as pinata's which everyone went totally and completely nuts over. There were 3, one for girls, one for little kids, and one for boys. When those pinata's came down those, it was pretty brutal and I was afraid that someone would end up getting hurt because of how the kids just flew to the ground and pushed each other out of the way. They also taught them some new balloon games which was fun to watch the kids get into. And as always, there was dancing. American's need to take notes from Peru in regards to throwing a party. Their parties are much more fun and there is tons of dancing, but the best part is that everyone dances. Not just the kids, but the adults too. Parties will never be the same now that I have experienced a Peruvian party.