Desert Gills

Ir: "Why did they eat manna off the ground?" Recently she has been taught not to eat food off the floor so the question was a good one. She was also seen recently crawling along the ground "looking for manna" since the "Lord would provide all her needs."

Ir quote from today: "Can you move to Wurren in a couple years because I want some gum?" She does talk on occasion about Grandpa's gum... its kind of amusing because he has this stash of gum which she found and which she was allowed liberal access to. This is something that looms large in her mind when she talks about Wurren. Another Ir quote: "I want to go to America in a couple hours, not a couple years." More seriously, it has been interesting to see her come to talk about flying to America or to Wurren or to Philadelphia fairly frequently over the past couple months. One of her favorite pretend play activities is to assemble various cushions as 'luggage,' and to pretend to enter a plane for her flight to sometimes Galmi, but more often America. Its just benign but I don't want to see it develop into a constellation of signs pointing to a dissatisfaction with where God has called us to live.

Ir: "Why do I have two fathers?" T: "You have an earthly father and a heavenly father." Ir: "Why do I have a birthday father and a heavenly father?" Yes, Ir is in that time of life when she is very preoccupied with birthdays. She keeps bringing imaginary birthday cakes to visitors and singing to them.

I participated in a softball tournament a couple weekends ago. Our team went 0-4, and I was unspectacular, but it was fun. I did scrape up my knees a couple times sliding into base wearing shorts, so the scabs on my knees were a source of fascination to Ir for weeks. She asked how I had gotten them, and having understood that it was from 'falling' while I ran, on a couple occasions she explained to me very kindly that 'kids run without falling,' and preceded to show how this feat might be done... running briskly back and forth across the room as a demonstration. She indeed did not fall.