We started out the celebrations on the weekend before Hazel's birthday. Two families from Recife that we know were on the coast, so I baked a [pathetic attempt at a] cake and brought it there for a little happy birthday singing. I found out that my oven is hot (it only has the numbers one through five on the temperature gauge, no actual temperature) and the cake was super dry. Plus I had nothing to make icing with.... Fortunately children are very forgiving, and her smile got a lot larger than this :)
Here is the birthday girl on her birthday, and we are singing away to her.
A birthday song from her cousins! They phoned before they went to school. She also missed two other phone calls, but received e-cards, emails, and video messages. I think she felt very loved.
We made plans to drive to Maragogi and have ice cream with our family, then remembered we had a tiny little car, so we went for a walk for ice cream instead. Our power also went out for around nine hours on her birthday, and our neighbour strung a wire from his house to ours to at least let us have lights. The sun is down around 5:30 here and it goes from light to dark seemingly instantaneously, so that was really nice of him. It only affected around a quarter of the homes in Peroba, and depended on what wire you had strung to your house. This is the second time we've had a lengthy power outage. To other time was for around twelve hours, but we've had it go out for a couple of seconds probably five to ten times a week, and once for two hours.
We think the neighbourhood kids expected a party here, so they were hanging around waiting for cake. Whoops that wasn't very Brazilian of us! We fed them all peanut butter cookies and then as we were kicking them out of the house so we could send the kids to bed, this is what we got:
Just as a side note, our kids go to bed around seven, and that I think is super early for the Brazilians in our neighbourhood. They are usually up until nine or ten. And generally they do not appear to nap. We don't know how they function, since our children are exhausted by the end of the long, hot day.
Our neighbour's electricity wasn't enough to run our air conditioners, so we put mosquito netting on the girls' window and we had a mosquito net around our bed and Seth's. We were dreading the night of mosquitoes. Fortunately the power went back on around 9:30.
We made cookies on her birthday and she wanted a star one.
The Saturday after her birthday we made pizza and invited a few families over from the church and of course, the neighbourhood kids. They would have jumped over our wall even if we didn't invite them. This is Sandro and Djane's daughter Sofia. Unfortunately the battery to my camera died :( so I missed taking pictures of anything else.
Hazel also had the church sing happy birthday to her after the service on Sunday, which they do for everyone here.
So thanks to all the different people in her life that helped her feel loved and special on her birthday. Hazel is a dear, sweet, bright little girl who loves to please and take care of others, and we love watching her grow up! We are thankful that God has given her another year and we pray that she is blessed in the coming year as well.
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