The 8 of Us

I have a confession to make: I posted Monday’s entry at 3am Tuesday morning. Having fallen asleep before writing the blog, my sub-conscious apparently would not let that fly and woke me up with a start in the middle of the night in order to post about verbs and English quizzes. And now Tuesday's entry is coming on Wednesday because of shifty wireless. Confused yet?

Tonight we had another Marathon Manna Meeting (3M), this time held in the much loved kitchen. As we circled our chairs around (and I put in a batch of oatmeal cookies baked with REAL WHITE FLOUR!), I found myself looking around at each of my 7 housemates, friends, co-workers, and supports with fresh eyes. Maybe it’s because we’re all finally under the same roof again now that Mark’s back from the states, but I was overcome by such a feeling of pride and awe as I thought about each of my roomies.

My last two years at Vanderbilt I lived in a house with 7 other girls; we called our house The Chimney for a somewhat inexplicable reason, and they were the dearest friends I could have dreamt up. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make the transition from the home I’d made at Vanderbilt to the strangeness and ‘otherness’ of Ecuador, but the newest 7 in my life have made it incredibly smooth and joy-filled. And I just love them all. Yes, Eliah does make fun of me for just about everything, and Jocelyn might look down on my inferior cinnamon-toast-crunch making skills, but without those little idiosyncrasies how overly cheesy would this post be?

I don’t know how I’ve been so blessed in the past three years to find myself living with two different collections of 7 roommates; what I do know is that they all color the house and my days in patterns I could never think up on my own.

Holly

(Jocelyn, Serena, Holly and Dana waste time while being locked out of the beach house)