Merry Christmas 2015

Gingerbread Houses

We look forward to this every year.  

Gingerbread chaos

Totally busted eating the decorations

Jedi Gingerbread?

Any day that can start with swim training and move to sugar overload while decorating gingerbread houses is a pretty good day in their book. 

Thanks, Carolynn for the gingerbread house makings.  We love this!

Tis the Season...

…for power outages.  It’s been really bad lately.  Saturday we had power from 4:20 am – 6:25 am.  Doing laundry at 4:30 am isn’t really all that much fun, but we’ve been dealing with it pretty well. Matt’s been traveling lately (most recently Beijing and Hong Kong), so of course his first day back we have power – I’ll take it though. Luckily, when we bought our oven 6 years ago, someone was smart enough to tell us to get a gas stove so it’s not impacted by power issues.  Some of our other friends weren’t so lucky.  We took full advantage of it this past week. 

Before she left for Zanzibar Chris did a kids’ cooking class for us.  They made veggie spring rolls, chicken and biscuits, and pain au chocolat (nutella and peanut butter and banana because, ya know, kids).  I didn’t have to do anything except show up to eat it.  Thanks, Chris!

Then later in the week we really got into the Christmas spirit by making cookies.

Christmas season, Tanzania-style. 

Just one more week of school and then a 3 1/2 week break when we’ll meet up with Webb and Jeff at Loisaba Conservancy just after Christmas.  We’re so excited!  The LA Times just published a great article about it and TNC’s work there:  here.  We can’t wait to go back. 

(The interface between the blogging software I normally use and Blogger isn't working, so now it's back to basics until they've figured it out i.e. picture formatting)

Serengeti with Matembezi

We had a great weekend at Naabi Hill in the Serengeti with Chris Clarke who made Tanzania a stop on her around the world tour.  So happy we were able to get her out on safari.  This was the first time that we went to the Serengeti this time of year; it was so green and beautiful.  Tierney was still in Moshi playing soccer and swimming, so we missed her, but were so happy to be able to get away for a couple of nights.

It was the type of trip that was not conducive to sleep because animals were calling all night (lions, hyena, zebra…), but it was totally worth it. We had a lioness walk through while we were having sundowners at camp.  Could this be the same one we saw in February with the Goyles? 

Ashlyn documented almost 90 species of birds and 25 mammal species over the two days!  (And I finally got to see an African Wild Cat)

Cheetah standoff.  Lone male sees three young males across the plains before he decides he’s outmatched and runs away. Hagai wrote a fun summary about it here (his pics are better, too). 

Golden jackals have recently been re-categorized as a wolf after DNA testing. 

We got to see a male lion display the Flehman Response after he smelled the female’s urine to tell if she is ready to mate. Really cool.   

 

Serengeti Silliness

We found toilets with the best view (of the Ngorongoro Crater)

We have a few more pics:  here

Thanks, Matembezi for a great weekend!

Tanzgiving 2015

We celebrated our 6th Annual Tanzgiving at the Foley’s.  What a great tradition this has been for us.  Unfortunately we were missing some of the big kids (i.e. Tierney) since they were in Moshi representing ISMAC at the Secondary Sports Weekend.

Hope everyone had as great of a celebration as we did!  Happy Tanzgiving!