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Christmas In Shell

A belated Merry Christmas to everyone. We've just enjoyed a very, very relaxed day after Christmas. Let me back up a bit. As has become our tradition, we opened our gifts on Christmas eve, after reading the Christmas story. Christmas morning we slept in a bit. Taylor woke up first, and he wanted to open his stocking, but he waited until Dustin was up, so we could all do that together. We shared our Christmas meal with several other families--two MAF pilot families, and an HCJB doctor family. The wife of the doctor, is Carol, who grew up with Ellyn and me in Papua New Guinea. Who would have thought that over twenty years later we'd end up together in Shell, Ecuador. Christmas day was very warm, and by 5 PM I headed to the river with six of the boys. Oldest was Loren, who is graduating from the Alliance Academy in Quito at the end of the school year, and who was in my class as an eighth grader my first year here in Shell. Youngest was Taylor, who is rapidly approaching the age of ten. He has, just in the past few months, really started to enjoy the river. Our oldest, Dustin, has always enjoyed the water more than Taylor. This morning we all slept in. I have no idea when Taylor got up, but he was up playing Xbox when I got out of bed at 10:30 AM. Ellyn and Dustin got up about 11:30 AM!! As you can tell, our family is a bunch of night owls who love to sleep in. I made breakfast, which I guess you could say was really lunch, and while we ate we listened to our Sierra Vista Presbyterian Church service. In the middle of the afternoon I took the boys up to the swimming hole in Mera to cool off a bit. Today was another hot day. And, just as I started writing this, the rain began to hit the roof. That'll cool things off a bit. Ellyn was hoping for a cloudy, rainy day so it would feel more like Christmas.