A Fun Weekend with our New Sponsor Family

Charlie at one a zillion playgrounds!

We start our weekend at a market that we follow our social sponsors, a wonderful state department family that has taken on the challenge of showing us around.  They already took Greg to a bunch of places before we arrived, now they are showing us amazing places.  We start our day at a Farmers Market, lots of food and incredible handmade crafts.  The girls are happy that they have their own SA Rand to spend.  They buy presents from friends at home and some cool decorations for their new room.  They are thrilled to have a new friend, our sponsor family has a 13 year old daughter who they immediately loved hanging out with!
Every mall/restaurant we go to has a playground for Charlie, so he is in heaven!

We venture to the new(only) ice skating rink in Pretoria.  Charlie's rental skates still have the tissue paper stuffed inside!  It is in a mall and it is packed on Sat afternoon for public skate.  Crazy outfits on most kids because its warm outside!  The thing we notice most is there are no Dad/Mom skaters that actually know how to skate, the few that are out there are true beginners!  We are not in Boston anymore!  We grab some pamphlets for the hockey and figure skating programs so the kids can get back in their comfort zone.

The mall has this cool thing called PonyCycles and you pay 30 Rand ($3) to rent them for 15 minutes and the kids can tear around the mall.  Pretty funny to watch, Katie was bummed that all the bigger ones were checked out at the time, she is excited to try it on a future visit.

On Sunday after a world record morning mass (lots of singing for Greg) we head to an old Dutch plantation to hike and have lunch outside among the animals.  We see tons of Zebra, springboks, Guinea fowl and even try our first bird hide.  When I say we see zebra, they are wandering around next to where you are eating.   My only regret was forgetting my camera so we just have one picture from Greg's phone. We had a very long lunch (service is on Africa time, so there is no hurry to anything). We actually take bets on how long it will take the waiter to bring our ice creams for dessert...Doug was the winner at close to 16 minutes!!  So you can imagine how long the main course took! The nice thing is we just sat at a beautiful table under the shade of a big tree, watched animals, chatted and watched Charlie run back and forth from the playground which had a trampoline.  The girls also teach there new buddy, Annalise, how to do many different varieties of rainbow looms.  (which they have heard of in Africa too!)

Girls are heading to bed early as they have their placement test for the new school in the morning!