A Day At The Zoo

There is a zoo about an hour away from us. I am drawing a blank on the name. It's about 15-20 minutes past the Port so it's a nice drive to see the coast. If someone reads this and knows the name, please leave it in the comments. The park has a zoo and a water park, as well as some small cabins for rent. I think the owners are Jewish. reason one, because I saw a few passages from the old testament painted on murals and secondly, because the zoo is closed on Saturdays. I'm thinking this is in observance of the sabbath which according to the old testament and Jewish law it would be considered a sin to work on the day of the Lord.

The zoo seems to be well kept. The animals look like they are fed well, not under stress and the cages are clean. The only complaint that I would have, and this is true of so many places in Honduras, is that they do not maintain their bathrooms very well. With a lot of traffic, bathrooms really needs to have better attention.

There are many different kinds of trees and plants on the grounds and they put signs stating the type of tree/flower/plant it is. One such tree had me smelling the air it was so fragrant and really quite beautiful. It was a pepper tree which I think was this. The sign read, if I remember correctly, "pimenta grande".

All in all it was a great day. I tried to take lots of photos to show what types of animals they had but as always, I look back and think I should have taken more. This was our second time to the zoo and it didn't disappoint. I hope you enjoy the show I made. I wish I would have had more space on my digital camera for more footage of Brother chasing the birds. He really enjoyed running after those poor things.

A Good Friday

Yesterday for Good Friday, the church we attend held an annual pot luck picnic on the property of a woman who's ministry in Honduras is to host medical teams when they come to help the poor and needy receive medical care and treatment. The woman has lived in Honduras for quite a few years and has raised two children in Honduras.

This is one interesting thing about attending an English speaking church in Honduras. With a large group of church members in missions, you get to know a lot of the ministries going on. It's pretty inspiring. We often have the visiting mission groups coming in and hear lots of first hand experiences.

The location of the picnic was near Lake Yajoa about an hour away from SPS. I love the area. You can see the property is just below some gorgeous mountains. The concrete buildings that you see in the photos are where the medical teams stay in. The owner and operator of the ministry has a modest but very quaint home on the property too. I'll let the slide show and video show more of our fun afternoon.

Here are some videos of the slip & slide. Wheeee!

What's Crackin' ?

One of the problems about living in Honduras is finding convenient and somewhat healthy packaged cracker type snack foods for kids. Especially when one of those kids has a genetic propensity for high cholesterol (Sister). Most of the fats used in the crackers they sell in the stores are made with all the bad fats. Like shortening (aka Manteca here), or Palm oil or some kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil. All of which are bad, bad, bad. Especially to the cholesterol conscious. Even the bread at the grocery stores is made with the bad fats. I had to search and search until I found one that does NOT have some kind of hydrogenated fat listed as an ingredient. If it's palm oil they use in my bread listed as "vegetable oil", at least it's not providing as much fat as the the others I looked at and it also has enough fiber to be worth eating.

No wonder so many Hondurans have big bellies. Oh, if you didn't know that about Hondurans, it's true. It's very common to see. Lots and lots of belly fat. Maybe that's another topic since today I'm doing show and tell of what I made for the kids in an effort to avoid these saturated and trans fats in the snack foods the kids want and enjoy.

Sister is supposed to keep her saturated fats around the 9 gram mark per day. That is not easy to do and it's hard to abide by this when she is the pickiest eater that I know who also loves all the junk foods that kids love. She has a selection of about 5 healthy things she'll eat every day depending on her mood. Thank goodness for Pricemart selling Jennie-O's turkey burger patties.

Crackers for snacks - they usually go over pretty good and they travel great. I've experimented with 3 different kinds of crackers so far, but the overall family favorite were the home made graham crackers. The wheat thins were a no go, except for me. The banana ones were so-so. I still need to try making soda crackers and I'd like to try a different vanilla cracker recipe too.

I'd write out the recipe I used, but I ended up kind of creating my own and did not write down what I did. This is very common for me. I seem to have a complete inability to actually follow a recipe. Usually this is in an attempt to make it lower in fat. For these crackers I know I used skim milk and less butter. Here are some links of recipes I looked at if you'd like to try making these on your own.

I made a log of dough and sliced pieces out and flattened them on the pan.

Here the crackers are all flattened and pricked with a fork ready to go into the oven


Hot out of the oven. Good eats!

It's A Girl.....Kitty

Introducing out newest little angel in the house, Lucy. Papa came home with a 4 week old female kitten on Feb 27th and she has weaseled her way into everyone's heart including Papa, who before couldn't stand cats. Now he is very protective of Lucy and loves to play with and take care of her.

You can see from the picture on the left that Sister loves to cuddle with her too. Lucy likes to crawl under her hair and take a snooze.

I had to leave my cat, Jambalaya (Jam) behind in the states. He is getting older and I just didn't want to put him through the stress of moving. Not to mention the hassle it would be to try and bring her in properly. I've read some really bad stories from other ex-pats. Jam is happy with my folks back in MN and thankfully they took him in. I was feeling a little cat lonely and the kids had been begging for a puppy, but I had to stand my ground that a puppy is just too much work right now for the family (me).

Look at that little ball of cuddly sweetness. Yes, at this point she is growing rapidly so she sleeps what seems about 20 hours a day. She gets up, eats, plays and then it's back to sleep. Brother has been having a hard time knowing how to play nice. He wants to be rough which has caused her quite a bit of torture. Poor thing. She'll be big enough to stand her ground soon though.

We had a little trouble picking out a name so Sister and I looked on the internet and read that cats respond best to names that end in the long "e" sound. We narrowed it down and Lucy just stuck the best.

4 weeks is a little young to take a kitten from it's mother, but we got her some vitamins to make up for the loss of it's mother's milk. It took her only a few days to stop looking for her mother. Now she gets a mix of wet and dry food. At first I felt so bad because I think she wanted to nurse and I almost sent her back for a few more weeks, but then I thought about how Papa said they were being fed raw hamburger and I didn't want to be worried about that.

I love her white boot feet and the way she runs unstable like she is a little tipsy. But even after a week she is getting more stable and is starting to try out her jumping feet. She seems happy and thriving here and it's nice to have her around.