This little piggy went to the market

This little piggy never made it home.

This is a typical Ecuadorian meal that was served for our Christmas meal

Getting ready for the big night

Here we are getting ready for our big Christmas Party at the Hospital.
As I have shared before I have the joy of visiting a government hospital here in Ecuador that is for children who are low income. Today we got to be Santa Claus. We did a very simple role play of the story of Christmas and then we would sing (we sounded horrible) and finally we passed out gifts to the children w/ homemade cookies and left tracts with them. It was so much fun to see them light up when they opened up their gifts. Some of them weren't to excited about their gifts b/c some of the gifts weren't that great but we had no say in that. Either way many kids were happy to recieve a little something.

Here's a happy camper!

How do you pack for xmas when your moving to another country you have never been to?

We had no idea what Ecuador was going to be like so when we were packing in the states to come Christmas stuff was not a priority so we packed lightly. I manage to squeeze in a small fiber optic Christmas tree b/c I thought it would be very sad if we didn't have one at all. No ornaments though I figured I could make them. I also packed 3 toys and 1 gift for Ben that we could give to each other for Christmas. That was it. We had no idea if they would have toy stores nearby. They do have toy stores but they are triple the price so I was glad I brought gifts for them. And we packed our family tradition Interactive Nativity set that we do with the boys to tell the story of Christmas. Well we were delightfully surprise to find out that they sell real Christmas trees. That was a real treat b/c our tradition is to go to a farm and cut our own tree. We didn't get to cut our own tree this year but the guy swore that he just cut it that morning. So if you remember we don't have a car but were out buying this huge tree. We got a van to go get this and it was the 2nd time I was out driving. The parking here was horrible it took me 30min to park my car not b/c I didn't have a spot but b/c they try to squeeze in 75 cars into a parking lot that was made for 25 cars. After much sweating and backing in and backing out I was ready to get our tree. This has been our prettiest fresh tree ever. Last years tree was a disaster (that story made it to our blog). If you look closely you will see that Ethan is digging into his Xmas mitten not stocking. That was interesting to discover that they do mittens here. We did our own little xmas celebration here yesterday morning, it was sweet. Notice our kids don't match thats b/c Ben dressed them!

Quito Days

I am still not totally positive on why we have Quito days but I think it has to do with the independence of Quito??? Well it's a month long celebration and there are festivities through out the city. We were able to go to a parade and they are great fun here. They have dance shows and everything. They don't just walk by and wave they stop and do performances. They last for at least 3hrs.

Our school does a little celebration where all the Ecuadorian staff run typical Ecuadorian games for the students and at the end you get to ride a Chiva (just secondary). You may be asking what is a CHIVA! Chivas are very popular here during this time of the year. They are packed with people and they ride around town dancing, singing and some drinking. Our schools chivas were the same minus the alcohol. They gave us whistles(very annoying) and flags instead of alcohol. It was a blast I got to ride with the Seniors. We had tons of fun. Here's brief video footage, its really loud.