The Christmas season in Spain concludes with three kings' day on 6th January - a day in the religious calendar that remembers the coming of the wise men to bring gifts to the baby Jesus. Most Spanish towns celebrate this day with parades through the streets; those passing by on colourful floats throw handfuls of sweets (the Spanish call them caramelos) to the people lining the streets. When we moved into our new house this month, we found that one of the kitchen drawers was filled with literally hundreds of these "caramelos" - mostly wrapped in shiny foil papers. We gave most of them away, but Ada displayed some of them in a decorative glass, high up on a shelf in the kitchen.
Something rather puzzling has been happening over the past two weeks. When we come home in the evening, we often find some of these shiny sweets scattered around the house, or outside on the terrace. Or we find one of the cats playing ball with them, but we can't work out where all these caramelos are coming from. The glass is on a shelf about eight feet off the ground and, even if it were possible for a cat to climb up on the microwave and reach the shelf, surely there's no way it could steal some caramelos without knocking the glass to the floor and smashing it.
This morning, the mystery was finally solved. I heard a rustling sound from the kitchen and guessed that it might be the caramelo culprit in action. Sure enough, when I got to the kitchen, I found Teddi high up on top of the freezer, carefully extracting caramelos from the ornamental glass!! Time to say, "Off, off!!" again, and to hide the glass safely behind cupboard doors.
It's birthday time again. Last week was the kittens' birthday, and today - which also happens to be my brother's birthday - is Ada's thirtieth. Gabriela and I surprised her by decorating the house with balloons before breakfast time, then waking her up with coffee, birthday presents and a rousing chorus of "Cumpleaños Feliz." Tonight we're going out to eat a meal with friends at their home.
See how they grow! It's time to say Feliz Cumpleaños, because Teddi and Tobi celebrate their first birthday today. I can hardly believe that it's been a whole year since I arrived home from church and found a very pregnant cat crying on my doorstep. On this date last year, I was sitting up at midnight, playing midwife to Teddi and Tobi, Timmy and Pickles. And now our quadruplets are already one year old. I don't know how Timmy and Pickles turned out (they were adopted by a Spanish family) but Teddi and Tobi have grown up to be very fluffy and very cute. They were not much bigger than my thumb when they were born.... but now Teddi is a huge boy who's quite heavy to pick up, while Tobi is small and light, but even fluffier than her big brother. Both of them have passports now (Spanish passports, of course!) and vaccination booklets to prove that they're protected from rabies and all the other cat diseases. The plan is still that they will travel to my parents in Scotland at some point, but we haven't managed to work out the logistics of the trip yet. In the meantime, they're still with Mama Tamba, and are enjoying being outdoor cats since we moved from the flat to our new house.
Chris, Rite and I had a lot of fun today on our children's ministry seminar with a gardening theme. As we shared some Biblical principles for working with young people, the seminar participants were able to plant their own seeds in pots of different shapes and sizes (illustrating that every child is unique and that we can sow into young people's lives in many different ways.) There was lots of variety among the seminar participants too: many foreigners live on the Costa del Sol, and we had people in our group from twelve different nations!
It's great to have friends visiting from Scotland this week. They're helping us to run a seminar for people involved in ministry to children and young people. The seminar topics are built around a gardening theme: just as plants need good soil, plenty of sunshine, pruning and watering, children need an environment conducive to growth, lots of encouragement and sufficient healthy discipline/discipling in order to flourish and grow in God. Amongst other things, the seminar will look at understanding how God sees young people, creating a child-friendly environment, and leading creative prayer with children and youth.
