About the time I finished my last post, we had a couple more updates on the boys. Pictures say so much more than words, so I’ll let them speak for themselves, but here are some shots of the boys playing as they do most days – and ending up looking like they do by the end of most days. In so many ways, we feel like we have stepped back a few generations from what we know of modern Western culture. One of them that we appreciate is the freedom our kids have to explore freely throughout the great outdoors and enjoy unstructured (and apparently unsupervised) play without the distractions of busy American life.
Rowan also lost his first tooth this week! He actually knocked it loose playing soccer with his friends at school and we monitored it all day, including a few failed attempts to extract it. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner that included sweet corn from the market and afterward discovered that it was missing! We’re assuming that it snuck down with the corn, but we have a request in with the tooth fairy to see if she would be willing to make her payment without proof. This isn’t the first lost tooth for the DeKams in Zambia as Clayton has lost 2 since arrival, but we are celebrating with Rowan’s first. He is very excited because African folklore has it that when a child loses a tooth he places it under a hollow gourd and in the morning finds a chicken! We’ll see…
The DeKam Family in Zambia 