Merry Christmas!

Charlie, Katie & Kelly's wishes all came true for Christmas, however the Grinch is still controlling our internet connection, so we didn't call anyone yesterday because our internet phone doesn't work...we wish we could have called to find out how your day was and let the kids tell you about their visit from Santa.

Luckily our neighbors let us borrow their signal, which at least allows me to write this post!

We were very busy the days before practicing for the Nativity play at church, another American family recently had their third baby and they were gracious enough to let her be baby Jesus.  Kelly was the Angel Gabriel and was thrilled to have a big speaking part.  Katie played Mary and got to hold the baby (and get bossed around by the Angel Gabriel, just like in everyday life), and Charlie was a very sweet baby star.

When Katie sat down with the real baby, their was an audible gasp from the congregation, everyone was surprised she wasn't a doll!

The baby star in the middle is Charlie...If you want to get Kelly & Katie fired up, ask them about the lady who directed the play, she was very into costumes, acting, and putting on a quality production.  She was a former dance teacher so in her mind we had to go for the gold medal, rather than act out the gospel for the Children's Mass.  (which was how it was done at our old church in Massachusetts).  The only other thing was it was BLAZING HOT in church, no AC here or heat in church, even at 6 pm in the evening it was still roasting in there.  Greg especially enjoyed all of the singing, there had to be at least 20 songs...

As he predicted, Charlie has been very busy playing with all of his new toys from Santa, he got a ton of Ninja Turtles toys, his favorite is the van that they drive around in and also a cool toy that sticks to the wall and lets them zipline around.

The girls were happy with an ice cream maker and a "soda stream" both cool things for South Africa as the ice cream here is pretty awful (all has vegetable oil in it no Richardson's here).  They also don't really sell flavored seltzer (like Polar) here, anything with bubbles also has the sugar in it.  So we are looking forward to a lots of good ice cream and beverages that the girls whip up.

We spent our morning yesterday playing with everything and in the afternoon we were busy party hopping to two different Christmas open houses.  The nice thing about embassy life is everyone is far from home, so they are happy to get together on holidays.

We hope all of you had a very nice Christmas, and are getting some down time to relax and play with all of your new toys!

Riding The Rails!

We got the chance to go to Cullinan, the mining town where they dug up on of the biggest diamonds from Africa, which now resides in the Queen of England's scepter.  Driving it would have taken us about 45 minutes, but instead we went by steam train and it took about two hours!   We were explaining to the kids that its about the journey...not the speed with which you get to your destination.

Charlie & the locomotive...

A special visitor came on the train with gifts!

A very enthusiastic Santa rode up front for most of the journey, people all along the route were waving and getting out of their cars to see the train pass.  We went through one township and the kids were running alongside the train.  We wished we had brought huge bags of candy to throw to them.  I may have written about them in the past, but the townships are the shadow black towns that remain from apartheid days, they are very, very poor areas where most people still live in corrugated steel boxes, without power and running water.  It's tough to be on a train full of well-off white people and go past the areas where people are living in such terrible conditions.  That is the part of South Africa that is really hard for myself and my soft-hearted kids, we want everyone here to have food, clothes, and shelter, maybe not on our American scale...
I have many experiences we have had with those less fortunate here and I'm not sure where to write about them, if I put them in the blog it would probably be too depressing for our readers!

We arrived in Cullinan and had a lovely lunch, checked out the playground full of old mine equipment, Charlie liked it, we also went in the few shops that were open (it was Sunday so most things were CLOSED).

Behind Greg & the kids is the "big hole" from the mining days...

South Africans have what we would consider some strange fashion tastes, people watching at a mall here is always entertaining...this teenage boy had the worst fashion sense we've seen..I had to take a photo..he is on the right walking with his Mom.

We had to get back to the train by a certain time so we wouldn't be stranded in the town with nothing open... so we got there early and had lots of laughs at this guy who was lounging in his front lawn directly across from the train station.  It looked like one of those postcards you see at a beach gift shop!  Hope it makes you laugh as much as we did...

On the ride home the kids learned about coal dust, they spun our train car around and we were now the car right behind the locomotive, by the time we got back we had coal dust everywhere!  

Charlie is very excited for Christmas, he never misses a day on his Advent calendar, he knows exactly what day it is.  He also told me the other day that he is going to be, "very busy after Christmas".  I replied, "Is that because you are going to Kindergarten?"  He said, "No, I'm going to be playing with all of my new toys from Santa!"   Silly me!  So if you need Charlie for anything, get him in the next few days before he's very busy!