Happy Birthday Tom!!

Yesterday we headed back to the pastor´s home and visited the feeding centre. What a great time! The kids were so excited to have new poeple there. We had no toys or anything for them, but we had fun just hanging out. Our digital camera astonished many, and we took some fantastic and funny pictures.

After lunch (the bill for four large meals =$6.50, plus tip of course ;) we headed out to Boquete. It was beautiful, kinda reminded me of Jasper, but a bit warmer, and better coffee! If you can believe, it is very, very difficult to find good coffee around here. During the few hours we spent in Boquete, we had a total of 5 cappucino-like beverages. Delicious. We toured some gardens and had great photo ops. Apparently the pastor is also a photographer, and used us to practice for an upcoming wedding. Can´t wait to get those from him! It felt like our wedding day all over again, the smiles were starting to quiver near the end as our cheeks got tired!

We said our good-byes to the Rodriguez´s and headed to our hotel. We were planning on doing a Tree Trek this morning for Tom´s birthday (a little belated). This trek is a crazy 3 km ride down the moutain side on pullies and a cable system. Looked pretty awesome...But when we laid our weary heads to rest last night, all we could think about were the kids at the feeding centre and how much fun we all had. So, we threw the cable ride out the window this morning, and used that money to buy a soccer ball, skipping rope, balloons, a load of celery, raisins, peanut butter and spreadable cheese product. Games and "Ants on a Log" for all! Tracy and I were throwing around some ideas as to how to get the children to actually eat vegetables - and this one worked!! We made a really big deal of racing to build them and eat them. I don´t think they even realized it was a vegetable! We learned after that these kids have never tried raw celery before, nor even saw peanut butter. Wow.

Tom played soccer/baseball with the kids in the afternoon, they had so much fun. No one really wanted to go home. Including us. The balloons were a hit too. Well, until they busted...lots and lots of tears. No worries, we had extras.

So, forget the cables, we had a big vegetable-soccer-birthday party instead!

Now, if we can only get some of those pictures on the net...