Holiday! Day before Deepavali

Today is the day before Deepavalia! The kids didn't have school so it's been a non-stop day. No lazing around reading or scrubbing laundry. We woke up early and had the early morning snack of ragu (a sweet, brown, liquidy meal) and tea with the kids at 7. We then headed out with the kids to supervise the massive sweeping of all the dirt in Bethania. All the kids had duties and many of the girls had plots designated as their area to sweep with their brooms made from bundles of straw. Kelsey did some vegetable cutting with 3 girls and the kitchen ladies, cutting takil (tomatoes). Paige helped Antony feed the new baby cows, basically just wave Spinach that we'd just pulled up from the fields in their faces until they decide to eat some. They are ridiculously cute, two copper colored baby cows, one with a white star and both are so soft. Alagarsamy, the head coconut chopper (he loves that machete) got us some tender coconut water as well.
After breakfast, we made even more Happy Diwali cards and played more Chess with the boys. I want to teach them better strategy, because right now they move out a whole wall of pawns and then don't know what else to do. There is one boy, Satish, with a pretty good understanding of the game and then little Antony with a good understanding of taking the opponents pieces and the sound effects required when doing so. Hahaa. Today Karthi, Alagarsamy and Mani decided to wash the dogs with the new shampoo everyone got today. The little puppies were scrubbed, much to their dismay, and stuck into laundry buckets. The little boys wrestling the puppies with buckets of sudsy water was pretty funny. Sethu helped me pull ticks off the bigger dogs and smash them with rocks. The bugs here are everywhere, so the kids don't make a big deal about it. When washing Zeus, the big golden lab, the puppies' dad and Heylia, the puppies' mom, Karthi stood on top of the rainwater drum and dumped water from above while Mani and Alagar scrubbed the very dirty dogs with shampoo. It was quite sweet, although Zeus and Heylia weren't too excited about it.
After lunch, eating outside and talking and playing with the older girls, we didn't take our usual nap. During lunch we played the 'out' game, where if the person who is out sees you eating, you are 'out' and then must call the next person you see eating as 'out.' We are pretty easy targets, with our lack of eating with hand skills, and therefore are almost perpetually out. Today Kelsey Sister lost the whole game...awww. It was either loosing or not eating, and we needed our energy! After our defeat, we went up stairs to do Henna for Deepavali. Ramya, a beautiful artist in 9th grade, painted our hands with flowers, patterns, leaves and stars. We then painted nails and showed pictures. The girls decided they wanted to keep the pictures 'of sisters, to look upon daily.' Some of the people who are also in the pictures we gave away include, Josh, Gaelle, Ana B., Lindsey, Jenna, Peter and Suzanne. So that was pretty funny. They also kept some of the pictures that Jenna Sister and Ella sister took with them last year with a bunch of the kids in them. They love to see pictures of America, our school, family and friends.
We then made bracelets with the girls. We had brought green, orange and pink (rose color!) string, colored beads and letter beads. This was a huge hit. We had some difficulty with trying to not have all the kids take all the beads at once, and stop any fighting. Despite having several hundred letter beads, we seemed to run out very quickly. Too many names have m, a, s, i and e in them apparently. By the time we made bracelets with the boys at night (there's basically no gender segregation when it comes to activities- the boys want to do everything the girls want to do and proudly display their "rose and violet" jewelry on their painted finger nails) there were very few beads left. Little Karthi didn't seem to mind, and took all of the left over letter beads and ended up with a much loved mix of x's, q's, z's. We braided the colors together too with 3 strings which was popular.
After the kids had finished their Christmas practice and prayer, we planned on doing an English lesson with the 8th and 9th standard girls. The excitement for Deepavali was too much to concentrate for long though, so we took out our music and danced instead :) we played a lot of hip-hop, the limited Indian music (everyone loves Jogi and Jai Ho!) I have, Spanish music (which everyone really likes even though they don't understand the words at all) and other fast songs. We learnt some Tamil dance moves too, and took pictures in various amusing poses. Muthumari and Ramya taught us fun moves and hand twirls. It was very fun, we were laughing the whole time. After, we cooled down with some Uno playing, chess and chinese checkers until 8.00 dinner.

'Deepavali tomorrow Sister!!! Iravu Vanakam Aka' (Good Night Sister) we can already hear the fireworks beginning outside the window.