Baking and Bugs

This week has been a rollercoaster, as our lives seem to be right now (emotionally, and in any way possible it seems). Right now we've been praying for guidance with this dessert business and even trying to decide if it is something that we should keep investing into or not. The vision from the very beginning was for this business to prosper in order to bless the church financially, bless people with jobs, and then hopefully be able to help finance Chad's future trips down here. At the store location where we opened up at a month and a half ago, sales have been extremely low. It is a very new mall, and the administration has been very corrupt and hasn't been advertising to get people in. So the main problem is a lack of customers. What Beth has been doing, is going out with the desserts to a market nearby to sell. This has been working ok, but we still aren't selling enough to be able to offset our expenses. So we've been brainstorming about what we can do differently (without incurring more costs) to sell more. One main idea we have come up with is to find people to go out to various open-markets around the city selling, and they would just earn comission. So that is where we're at right now - we're praying for God to show us who those people are. Our big selling item has been cupcakes. We started making them the "filled" cupcakes, where you cut a circle out of the top and fill it with icing and then put the top back on. People just think they are so pretty. So right now we make chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting, banana cupcakes with vanilla frosting, pumpkin cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting and lime cupcakes with a lime custard filling. We also sell cookies, brownies, yum-yum cupcakes and apple danish squares. Sometime soon I will try to post some pictures of the goodies and of us making them. We are training Vânia (the new pastor's wife) to make the desserts, and she is catching on really well. On Thursday, Chad was downtown all day helping Beth sell desserts, and Vânia and I made 255 cupcakes!! That was a really long day on our feet. We started at 8am, took 1 hour off for lunch (in which time I fed the girls, showered them and put them down for a nap) and it was nearly 7pm until we finished wrapping everything in plastic wrap. I learned that I need to wear sneakers when I'm on my feet all day instead of just my flip-flops! We have renewed excitement for the business, as Chad just learned today that the shopping mall where our store is located is getting new administration and that things are really going to get better there. So our hope is that in the future Beth will be busy there and will be sending others out from there to sell at the markets. We just continue to pray and do our best to leave it in the Lord's hands and believe that He will make it prosper.

In other parts of our "world", things are going well. We had an incident with Elysia on Wednesday night. We were over at the church making desserts and the 3 girls were outside playing in the sand. All of a sudden Elysia started crying. I realized she had a dirty diaper, so I took her home (just across the street) to change her. As I was carrying her over, she started to really cry hard and kick her feet and pull at her hair. It was odd, and as I was changing her diaper, I noticed that her left arm from her elbow down was bright red and her hand was swollen. I decided to run to the pharmacy with her (down here there are little first-aid/nurse's offices in the pharmacies to attend to minor injuries). She pretty much screamed the whole time I was there with her, but the nurse there said it looked like she was bitten by a bug and she sold me an allergy/insect bite cream to put on it. It was almost bed-time, so soon after I got back home with her I put her to bed. It took her a while to settle down, but she finally did and by morning she was back to her normal happy self. There are a lot of poisonous insects/animals down here, so it always scares me a little more when something like this happens. Then on Thursday morning while Vânia and I were making desserts, Giselle & Larissa called for me saying, "Mommy, look, a big caterpillar!" I went to see it, and here it was one with really long hairs on it. I showed it to Vânia, and her eyes got big and she said "that is what they call a Fire Caterpillar, because its hairs burn your skin really bad". Thank goodness the girls didn't touch it! I've learned that insects are "Super-sized" down here!!