At the Top of the Hill

I refuse to say that I'm "over the hill". I prefer to say that I have reached the summit...and I'm just gonna hang out here for a while! I celebrated my 40th birthday in October. My original plan for this memorable day in my life was to invite the neighborhood and have a big fiesta. However, we got home from our fall furlough only a couple of days before and it was still really hot and humid and the house was a mess and I was fighting off a cold...so, Sarah and I each made a cheesecake, we invited our friends Braulio and Pily over to hang out for the day and the day passed quietly.

Note to self: Peanut butter cheesecake and mocha cheesecake are amazing. Both of them. Better not to make them both for the same party or you'll gain 5 pounds.


My special gift from Doug and the kids was this critter:

And of course, if I got one of those, I need one of these:

And with both of those, I made this:

And then I made banana bread, but I didn't take a picture of it because we ate it too quickly! But it was really yummy!!!

Funny note: The sound of the grain mill grinding grain while clamped to the kitchen counter is almost exactly the sound of a 5.7 earthquake hitting the house. (Voice of experience.)

Happy birthday to meeeeeee!

A Little Bit of Shakin' Goin' On!

I'm back in bloggy land and getting back to posting. We were on furlough to the States for a month and then without internet for a while when we got home, but I'm still here!!! You can't get rid of me so easily!!!

It's late and I'm not going to post much. I just wanted to share what we've been dealing with this past week. We live only a few hundred feet from the ocean, so generally our "alarms" revolve around hurricanes and tropical storms. I never thought we would be concerned about earthquakes and tsunamis!
Our biggest tremor so far was a 6.8 which happened last Thursday. We were in the middle of a spelling lesson when the fan began swinging and the pillars groaned. Five seconds or so later, all the dishes began to rattle and the tools in the shop clanged. I now know how quickly my family can get out the door when they have to (and I reminded them of that on Sunday morning, too!!!).

We stood outside on the patio watching the van rock back and forth and the telephone poles sway for a good, solid minute. Our pool began to slosh and splash, and I found myself thinking that maybe "uphill from the house" is a bad place for a swimming pool.

So, we've been a bit shaken, but we are not beaten! This has been a great opening to be able to talk to our neighbors about our faith and about the God in whom we trust!

I'll post more soon... :^) Meanwhile, keep us in your prayers!!!

Getting to Know...Me!

Welcome to my weblog: Beautiful Feet

My name is Rebecca, and I'm so glad that you've stopped in for a visit! I started blogging in 2006 as a way to stay connected with friends and family in the U.S., and I've been tripping about in Bloggy Land ever since, learning as I go along...usually by trial and error. My daughter said it best:

"Life is like a mathematical equation. You spend all the time figuring out the answer to the problem only to discover that you plugged in the wrong values and miscopied the original problem to begin with!"

By God's grace I'm improving daily...I hope!!!

Here at Beautiful Feet, I try to keep my readers updated on our life as missionaries in Mexico. Grandma really loves that, since I'm lousy at sending photos and worse at writing letters. I've promised the kids that I won't post anything too embarrassing, and they do hold me to that. Four of our six kids have blogs of their own, so I'm aware of the possibility of retribution if I should happen to break that promise. The boys are less than faithful posters, but Sarah updates her blog regularly. Go check her site out if you have a minute. You won't be disappointed!

You'll find a bit of a hodge-podge of information here. I've made all the internal links (things you can click on to take you to other pages) green, and they should open in a new window, so as to not interrupt your reading. That's the plan, at least."Life in Mexico" is probably my biggest post category, but that's so all-encompassing. Our life includes homeschooling, working with the local church, hosting mission teams and reaching out to the families who live around us, to name just a few topics.

As THE MOM, I generally spend a large portion of my day in the kitchen, so I'm finding that more and more of my posts revolve around food and frugality in the kitchen. I'm OK with that -- I do love to eat, and I'm cheap. What a combo!!!

I just noticed, too, how many photos of cheesecake I have. Hmmm...there could be a reason for that.


In addition to food for the body, though, I like to include a little soul food. My husband, Doug, and I have been teaching parenting classes in our village for a couple of years now, and I've been sharing some of the principles here from time to time. In a perfect world, I'd share a lesson every week. News Flash: This world is not perfect. So, I post irregularly, but with much gusto!!!

That's me -- nutshell version (a big nutshell...like a coconut). You can find me on Facebook at Doug N Rebecca Coult or you can email me at WhatBeautifulFeetYouHave AT gmail DOT com. You can also click over to our Ministry Scrapbook Blog to see more photos of our village and our neighbors.

By the way, if you leave a comment with a link to your blog, I'll click over and "reciprocate". We all like comments, don't we?!

Have a blessed day, and thanks again for dropping by!!!

Family Exercise

On Saturday night, it rained hard and we awakened Sunday morning to puddles, mud and cloudy skies. It was a perfect morning for a bike ride!

We rode down to the beach with two main objectives. The first was to pray for people as we passed them and as we saw and talked to people along the way and at the beach. So often we go about our day without even thinking about praying for the people around us. The idea this morning was to spend some time in specific, focused prayer for the people we passed.

For myself, it was really good exercise. Not just the bike ride, which was good physical exercise, but the prayer was very good spiritual exercise. I used to be in the habit of praying for people spontaneously, but I have fallen out of that habit. I found myself able to really spend some quality time with God as I began to talk to Him about the people around me – instead of just praying about my personal struggles and trials and shortcomings, which I definitely do!!!

The other objective for the bike ride was to connect with some of our neighbors we hadn’t talked to in a while. It’s crazy that we can live within 3 or 4 blocks of people and almost never talk to them!

How can we be that busy? Well, my answer is that I’m really not that busy. I’m just comfy. It’s a little time-consuming and sometimes a little awkward to stop in for a visit. The weather is hot and the bugs are fierce, I should be washing laundry or making dinner or writing that update letter or any other of a dozen things which are pressing, but not of any eternal value.

Why do I get so caught up in the “tyranny of the urgent”? I would venture to guess that the enemy would rather me be busy-busy with household stuff so that I didn’t have time to stop in and encourage my neighbor whose father just passed away. It would be better, in the enemy’s eyes, if my house was spotless and ready for company than if I was at my elderly neighbor’s house cleaning for her.

So, our family bike ride was a success – at least for me! God used the time to really speak to my heart and to remind me what is of lasting importance.

The little kids got to swim in the ocean, too, so they were happy! I think this could become a family tradition – Church on the Beach!

Feeding Time at the Zoo

Had to share this...

I tried to post it on Facebook, but couldn't get the animation to work, so I'm posting it here. Adorable? Want one??? :^)