Thursday, February 25, 2010

Two Birthdays and a Parade

So, here we go again, jumping in with both feet (after having been "out" a bit too long!). We're going to try real hard to go with shorter and more frequently!

At the end of January, Kyle turned 40 years old!!! We celebrated with pancakes in the morning and cheesecake in the evening. A double recipe of cheesecake was required to be able to handle all the candles. No, he couldn't blow them all out at once!

February 14 was Proska, or Day of Forgivness. You are supposed to go to friends and relatives to ask them to forgive you for any offenses over the past year. Tradition is for children to dress up and go to friends and relatives – kind of like trick-or-treating, except they are given money instead of candy! In Skopje, Proska was mentioned as a holiday but few „celebrated“ it and children do not dress up (or collect money!).


This is something new for us here in Prilep – there is a huge celebration in town center Saturday night and tradition is for the town butcher society to dress up in animal skins with cowbells and goat heads and dance around to scare off the evil spirits. The festival can be fun though the goat-head guys were a little too pagan for our taste!

Rebekah dressed up as the popular new country/pop star Taylor Swift, Daniel was Zoro, and Joshua was chosen to be Papa Smurf for his fourth grade class in the town parade on Sunday!


Josh even made a head-and-shoulders shot on national news – unfortunately he was so well disguised, no one would be able to recognize him unless they knew he was the Smurf in red. He said of his friends in Skopje, „Maybe they recognized my eyes!“


On Monday Daniel celebrated his ninth birthday! Because the children go to school in shifts, and because all of us have responsibilities (be them sports clubs, English classes or Bible studies) in the evenings, we are seldom home all at once for long during the week. So we decided to celebrate on Sunday; we ate Spiderman cake (excuse me, I mean: SpiderDAN cake!) and were merry all day long! What a blessing to be family!!