a skinned knee and a happy birthday

Oh my gosh, has it been over two months since we've posted on the blog?! Wow... Where does the time go? 

written April 8^th, 2013, Monday

For the past week or so, we’ve had a niece and nephew staying with us at home. They had Easter vacation and wanted to spend it at our home. The niece is 11 and nephew is 7. It had been a joy to have them in our home – their laughter, messes, play, desire to be with Noé and I… It was so sweet. They left early this morning to go back to their home, since classes started up again today.

Well over the weekend we celebrated Noé’s birthday. Turns out that April 6^th is also Asleme’s birthday. So we celebrated both of them. That Saturday morning Noé and I went fishing. At 6am. After being there for several hours, we didn't have anything worth keeping (we caught several very small fish). But it was a great, relaxing way to start the morning.

So Saturday afternoon I was cooking dinner for that evening, and a cake! In spite of cooking on a charcoal stove, I was able to successfully bake a cake. I put the batter in a smaller pan (ok it was one of my sauce pans but I didn’t have anything else!), inside a much larger pot. The large pot I had about 1/3 of the way with dirt from the garden. Once that got super hot, I put the cake pan on the dirt in the large pot. The lid went on the top and hot coals on top of that. Surprisingly, the cake was cooked in about 30 minutes! It nearly burned, the fire / dirt / coals were so hot. I didn’t expect it to cook so quickly.

Anyway, while cooking or baking that afternoon, I was sitting near the fires with our nephew, wearing a skirt that was showing one of my knees… He looked at my knee and asked me, while pointing to it, “what is that?”

He wasn’t asking about my knee, but about the huge red wound on it!

The day before, Friday morning, Noé and I went for a walk before work around 6:30am. It was great! But 5 minutes into the walk, I stumbled on a stone in the path and went onto one knee. It took the skin off pretty good, but it really wasn’t too bad. Noé cleaned it out with alcohol when we got home (that hurt), put some antibiotic ointment on it, and sealed it up with a bandage.

So on Saturday after cleaning it I decided to let it air out a little. And our nephew saw it.

When I told him that I got it from falling the day before, he looked at me in disbelief. “You fell?” he asked me with a tone of total surprise. Yes, this newly 30-year old, pregnant, woman fell in the dirt just like he does on a nearly daily basis.

Getting ready to cut the cake! 

He’s young. It’s ok for him to fall.

I’m old. I’m not supposed to do those things!

But, he doesn’t know that I’m clumsy.

His expression though, of shock, that an adult was capable of falling and skinning her knee, was precious. 

We had the cake that night, and Noé loved it. I didn’t give him a piece with the burned part though :) To top off the cake, we had some chocolate frosting that I had begged our family to bring with them when they came last year. It made the cake fantastic. And Noé was happy.