This week we visited one of our students and her family in a small village, about an hour and a half away from our town. The nature was beautiful, the air was so clean, and the lifestyle was so simple and peaceful. We loved it there and enjoyed climbing mountains, scaling some cliff-like mountains, exploring caves, watching fishing, chomping on sugarcane, and being together. Here are a few pictures from our time there.

For Austin's birthday this year, I decided to go the cupcake route. We had just received cupcake tins with paper cups so it was easy. Of course, decorating them, making icing, etc. is sometimes more tricky. Here are some cook-out themed cupcakes I made for Austin. The chocolate cakes sunk in terribly (I haven't found a healthy from-scratch recipe I really like yet), so I opted to use some sugar-free chocolate pudding to heap on top as a healthy icing option. Then I sprinkled red and orange sugar crystals on top as embers, and decorated the cupcakes with kabobs, "hotdogs", and "steaks". They weren't gorgeous, but fortunately Austin is easily pleased and not that interested in aesthetics when there's chocolate cake to be eaten.

We also went out to dinner with one of our friends for Austin's birthday, so I made these Oreo-icing cupcakes:

I've decided to start blogging again. I guess it's been a few months, and I know I don't exactly have dedicated readers who have noticed, but I just love to write, to journal. The past few months I've been writing more and more, writing my daily thoughts in my trusty journal, but it's time to whip out some pictures again and share a little more.

We had an absolutely disgusting dining experience recently, yet it was a whole lot of fun and we got some great pictures! We were invited to one of our student's homes and his dad introduced us to his rodent farm. Out back, he keeps about 100 fat part guinea-pig-looking, part rat-looking rodents.  We got to look at them, hold them, and pet them... and then ingest them. He fried up some rodent meat, paws and all, and added some horse meat and goat stomach as side dishes. Here are a few photos of us taking in our new experience.