Women's retreat 2012

Hey!
Has anyone missed me yet? :)

I guess I really only post something when I've experienced something special. Like this week...

I was at a women's retreat from all of the Mennonite Brethern churches from Paraguay. There were 201 women there from the Chaco and east Paraguay!

This is the view from the fifth floor of our hotel. We stayed at the Hotel Ex-condovac in San Bernardino. San Ber is a well liked resort city, known for it's lake, called the Ypacaraí.

Here you can see the sun set over the lake, we went down to the lake a few times, and for a parched-out Chaqueño, it's a sight for sore eyes.

This was a deck on the water. It was beautiful in the morning. We did our homework (for the retreat) sitting here, but the view did distract us:)

This used to be a restaurant when I was in ninth grade. I remember coming here. It's called the Mexican Sombrero. But it looked deserted now.

My friend and roommate doing here homework. (Is it OK that I posted this? You can't really recognize who you are, R! By the way, I had a great time with you!)

In the background you can see the top of the hotel.

Andrea Rouf from Germany, she was the invited speaker. Our motto of the retreat was: called to freedom. I enjoyed her lectures.We also did a personality test, where I was very surprised of the results!

This was the line-up for meals. We stood on some stairs and the women stood in line at least 30 m long.
One downside of the retreat was that the hotel personnel were probably new and not practiced in serving food to so many people at once. The quality of the food wasn't too great either, but we came to hear God's word and not gain weight, after all.

All in all, it was a blessed experience and I'm thankful for the coordinators of the retreat (MBG church of Concordia Asuncion) and my family for giving me the opportunity to go.

Another thing that bugged me was that I forgot the battery for my camera, and all of the above pictures were made on my phone. Sorry for the bad quality, but I stopped beating myself up for it.

So, talking of cameras, Amy bought a new camera 2 weeks ago, and she is loving it! I'm so in awe of what her camera (and Amy) can do, I'd like to show you some of her pictures (with her permission:)

Cindy got a new female rabbit at the rodeo, isn't she cute? Her name is Xaffi. Don't ask me where she comes up with these names.

I absolutely love this picture!
Amy took it on the high school yard, while all the students were having their siesta. She made another picture even better than this one, but I don't want to post it, because she's entering it in a contest soon.
Isn't it pretty? Or is that just her proud mom speaking? :)

Brianna finally got her hearts desire and picked up her puppy today. So next post will be pics of Baxter and Brianna!

Thanks for dropping in and come back again!

Brenda

May things

We hosted some barbecues last month and I always try to mix up the menu a bit. I like to serve a vegetable platter rather than a stirred-up salad. 

This was my attempt at decorating with veggies!

I also made two cakes from a new recipe book I bought last month. This is a typical German cake called: Frankfurter Kranz. Without my sister's interest in this cake, I wouldn't have tried to make it myself. (Thanks, D!)
The next time I'll make the recipe slightly larger. The cake turned out great, but a little on the small side.

This is the second cake I made from the book: Backen macht Freude from Dr. Oetker. It's marble cake. Simple and sweet!

I also got some sewing done. :) 

This is an owl bag I made for a swap. The lovely lady that loves owls was very delighted to receive this:)

Ever since our store has ordered fabric from Pilar (a Paraguayan town with a fabric factory), I go crazy with ideas for all of the heavy and medium weight cottons. This is my creation slightly changed from the original pattern from Sew4home. You can't see it very well, but the edges are open zippers. The pattern calls for zipper trim that you can get by the meter in the civilised world, but I slaughtered 3 zippers to make this bag:)

My next project is a tablecloth that I want to give to the Thanksgiving church service on Sunday. They always have an auction after lunch where they auction off fruit, vegetables, cows, chickens, crafts, etc.

And now back to my sewing room! The weather finally turned cold and I love sitting with my Pfaff and a cup of coffee sewing all (or at least 10%)  the ideas swimming around in my head!

Thanks for the visit!

Brenda

Things that happened in April 2012

Hi folks,

I know it's almost the end of May already, but I wanted to share some special pictures of April with you. If I remember (remind me!) I'll post the highlights of May next week.

These past two months have been the rainiest fall months that I can remember. We are going into winter with full cisterns, full water holes, green pasture and a lot of muddy roads and dirty trucks that need to washed often.

The picture above and below were taken on Easter Sunday, when we were sliding on muddy roads to town for a family gathering. (I was driving and to distract the girls, they took pictures)

I love watching Brianna play with Chester! She is begging for a Lab, but we just can't seem to want two dogs on our yard. Chester is a great watch dog, but he's on the chain in the daytime. Except when Brianna plays!
He just loves her!

When we were going to my parents ranch one morning, we saw the school bus and a semi in opposite ditches. Our neighbor helped them out. (School bus is left and way in the back on the right side you can see the semi filled with a farmers crop of sorghum. He had slipped in the ditch the night before and spent the night in there:()

At my parents ranch. Their sow had 17 piglets!

Mom loves baby animals.

This was my favorite:)

I know I post way too many pics of my cat Eskimo. But I just love how he likes to sleep in this position:)

We spent a lazy Sunday and a neighbors field. The men were shooting pigeons, and the ladies lazed! I loved the little picturesque waterhole close by...

You could forget we lived in the place called : the green hell...

Another exciting thing happened in April. My oldest best friend (oldest because I've known her forever) (she's only 3 months older than I), had a baby girl! Her name is Tiffany René and she is one of the cutest babies around. I know I say that about all babies, but I just love all babies:)

Thanks for taking the time to browse through my pictures! I love having visitors on my blog and I LOVE your comments. I'll be back sometime soon!

Love, Brenda

What we did this week - Easter 2012

Hey, I'm still alive! I know you were all worried about me:)

So, today I'll show you some fun we had over the Easter weekend. My lil' sister from Asuncion came up for the holidays and had the wonderful idea that we should make some cake pop-eggs!

Here my niece is crumbling up the chocolate cake for the raspberry/chocolate eggs.

Here my other niece (I do have wonderful nieces, by the way) and my beloved redheaded daughter are crumbling up the sponge cake for the tiramisu cake pop-eggs.

My sister J and my daughter Cindy posing in front of our first ever cake pops. We learned a lot along the way...

Like: don't forget to drink terere while making them...

From this perspective: a cake pop forest...

I know I look absolutely beautiful in this shot, so please don't give me any compliments! We're making little Easter baskets as well.

Cindy found that they were the perfect size for her cellphone. (I'm surprised she let go of her phone long enough to take a picture)

Some cake pops were not fortunate enough to make it to the end. We will remember them with a smile...

Because we had some melted chocolate leftover and a bag of german pretzels, we did this:

We had a great time, and I would like to thank my sis and my nieces for the wonderful morning.

A few weeks ago, as some of you might know, we won this in a raffle:

We were very happy, but we wanted to buy a motorcycle that Amy could use, as she has her driver's licence since January. So we brought that moto to the shop and brought this beauty home last week. The Kenton was a 250 cc. and too big to drive (motor-wise) for Amy, and this one is a 125 cc. She loves it!

She was so happy, that she went and made pretzels!
No, actually she did that because I was too lazy to, and she, no, we all love eating them.

I have tons of work in my sewing room, so I'll end now. Hope you had a blessed Easter with friends and family that loves you as much as mine do!

Have a great week!

Brenda

P.S. I bought myself an iPad a few weeks ago ( :) Anyone have suggestions or advice how to post a blogpost on it? I'm only finding paid apps for it.

School,... finally and a finished quilt!

So, our girls started school again a few weeks ago. I love my kids like crazy, but I love having a schedule and lunch on time and kids out of my way for a few hours a day. Does that make me a bad mom? I hope not.

Wednesday, Amy and Cindy went back to junior high and high school. Cindy is in eighth grade now and Amy in tenth! I'm not sure what you would call her classes, but here they are divided in Curso Basico and Curso Sociales, and she is taking Basico. She explained that there are more math and physics classes in Basico. I hope she does ok.

At first they were all:

then they were like this:

But really they were:

Brianna gets to take the bus from home, so she likes waiting with Chester.

And, (drumroll please) I finished the Grandmother's Fan quilt I started in January. I love how it turned out, even if it did cost me two fingernails:)

The most work was quilting all of the roses and leaves by hand. But I think it gives a patchwork quilt more personality when it's quilted by hand. I had a buyer for it even before it was done! And I know that the people buying it with cherish it for many years! (You know who you are:)

This was the last stitch I had to quilt

Then I had to finish of the edges and voilá...

My poor nails now have time to grow again:)

I'll be going to Asuncion next week to visit my lil' sister. I'm so ready for a trip! When I get back there will be pictures from there!

Love you all, and good night!

Brenda