Ok, This Was Fun...

Just a warning, this is NOT a harmonious or sweet. I've always promised to be incredibly honest when I decided to start blogging so I'm staying true to that. Today has been ROUGH! My mom got here on Tuesday night and I literally felt my body start relaxing yesterday and it is SO nice to have her here. The kids have just been glowing.

Today though was a different story (this has nothing to do with my mom.) Lee and I have REALLY been struggling with this whole school thing for Sofia. To put it lightly I have personally been literally sweating, got a fever blister and my emotions have been running on high. Lee is calmer in general but he has been struggling with it some too. We went to go visit a French school yesterday and let's just put it this way, we left within 5 minutes and I cried for the next 45 minutes in the parking lot.

My poor mom came at a time when we are having to make some really tough decisions and we just don't feel equipped to make them. My main purpose for this email is to ask for MEGA PRAYERS. We have been told "NO" by pretty much every school we have visited. They tell us we should have been on a waiting list TWO YEARS ago!!! I mean what in the world????

For those of you that don't know about education in Peru, public schools are NOT an option. In Latin America Peru is ranked like 149 out of 149 for education (149 being the worst.) Therefore are only options are private schools. Bring into the mix that our kids ONLY speak English and that narrows it down to bilingual English schools (we don't want just English because we want them to master Spanish obviously.) Take out a couple schools that cost as much as ACU and well that leaves several good schools that, oh yeah, WE CAN'T GET INTO!!!

Today was the first time I thought to myself "Ok, this whole Peru thing was fun, I'm ready to go back." I am very aware that others have much more important things going on in their life and this is trivial in comparison but if you have any time in the next few days I ask that you cover this in prayer. This has been a tearful and stressful time in the Fletcher household. Today I just wished that this decision would be easy like it would have been in Abilene. I wish I was just told where to go depending on the street I lived on and I just needed to decide whether Sofia was going to buy her lunch or pack it (dah, that would have been an easy choice) and would have felt good that she was going to learn what she needed, to be a person of normal intelligence. (ok so on a side note, I didn't even know how to spell "intelligence" and the spell check had to correct it! This is why homeschooling my kids is just NOT an option for us.) Unfortunately life is just not "easy" sometimes and I'm pretty sure God didn't call us to have life be easy but today I just needed it to be for a few moments.

So this coming week we have to go visit about 5 more schools, switch our original daycare that we had enrolled the kids in (and lose our enrollment fee :(), decide if we want our kids to learn German as well (this is NO joke, this might be one of our options), figure out how in the world we are going to come up with the funds (these schools run about $600-$800 a month for Sofia and Maddox to attend and were not talking about the mega elite schools here) and lastly we are going to do a lot of praying that God will give us a clear door to walk through (and hopefully very quick.)

We honestly had no idea what we were walking into with school options here and because Sofia is the oldest kid on the team none of us really had tons of info on how this whole process worked. You live and you learn I guess. Unfortunately my child might end up not learning her alphabet until she's 17 but oh well at least she's cute, haha. That's what I'm going to start saying to the next person who gives me a look like "oh poor American girl, she doesn't know that her kid, being almost 5, isn't suppose to be in daycare she's suppose to be testing for the FIRST grade!!!" Literally, they enter pre-school at 3, kinder at 4 and by five they are either in their second year of kinder or testing for first grade. I can't count how many times I've been asked which school she's entering in a few weeks and when I answer that "I don't have her in one" it's like I just burped out loud or something.
Ok, I'm done venting. I'm sorry if you had to read this but I can honestly say I feel better now. If you did read this, thank you for putting up with my written thoughts and for your prayers. If ANYONE has any ideas, words of wisdom, knowledge of any foundations we could write to on behalf of missionaries kids for schooling, know of any teachers that want to move to Peru to teach our kids:) or just sharing that you are willing to pray for us for this next week, we would TRULY appreciate it.
I promise that my next post will have a picture in it. Possibly even a video :)
Goodnight All
P.S. Have I mentioned how excited I am that my mom is here?? Thank goodness she has some good insight about this whole schooling thing. Especially since she decided to send me to a French Catholic school for one year in France and my male teacher smoked in the classroom and I was traumatized for life.