Got It!

Hurray! We finally have internet access at home. We don't have our computer yet, just Scott's work laptop which has all kinds of firewalls and so is preventing me from viewing any blogs... ugh. I am so anxious to catch up with all of my blogging friends... I miss you and miss reading about what is happening in your corner of the world. But I am so thankful to be able to send and receive email now (hint, hint, I'll write you if you write me!) and to be able to post again.

It is Saturday morning. It's a foggy (smoggy?) day, as it often seems to be early in the day. Hopefully it will burn off later. I'm anxious to see how much longer this rainy season lasts, and what the weather will be like once it's over. It has been very humid every day since we've been here... which I guess is a week now.

Our air shipment, which we had hoped would be arriving at the end of this week, will probably not be to us until the end of next week. Strange, as it's been in the country for several days now. We had to pay duty on several items in the shipment, including the food (which was only 6 boxes of mac and cheese and five bottles of spices). Some of the other things that duty was charged on were strange.... a small wicker chair, a plastic storage shelf. Also all the cds that we brought.

We are so anxious for the air shipment to arrive, as it has all the kids' stuff... toys, books, our music and dvds. Yesterday I remembered that the library at Concordia, the school the boys will be attending, is open in the summer. We headed over there and hung out for an hour, reading and picking out storybooks for the girls. I was so happy to be able to get books for them. The boys had brought chapter books with them on the plane, but the girls had only a couple of small books with them, and we were quite tired of those. So nice to have fresh reading material! We were actually only supposed to be able to get a total of 10 books out, 5 for each of the boys, but the librarian took pity on our situation and told me we could use her password and take out as many as we wanted.

All of our kitchen stuff is also in the air shipment, so I've had to be quite creative in my cooking methods. I really wanted to make chicken soup last night because of the cough/cold crud we seem to be passing around, but I have only one small saucepan, which I picked up at the grocery store the other day. I ended up cooking things in stages and transferring the parts of the soup that I had already cooked to the one mixing bowl I have. It actually turned out to be pretty good, even though all the ingredients never got to simmer together! Seth, who is our egg making aficionado, had a similar problem this morning... how to fix eggs for six in one small saucepan? He ended up making soft boiled eggs, four at a time.

Last night I was feeling pretty melancholy, even tearful. Not having our phone (Vonage) hooked up to be able to call friends and family yet has been hard, in addition to the lack of internet. I was feeling pretty far from all of you. Part of my feeling so low was the fact that I felt physically weak, with a sore throat from all my coughing, and minor ear pain. It's amazing how quickly I dug a deep hole for myself. The view from our apartment is so beautiful, esp at night... I took some Tylenol for my physical discomfort and attempted to take some pictures of the view to take my mind off myself. Scott reassured me that we would be able to get things at least partially hooked up this weekend, and that helped too.

That's all for now... I have lots more to tell, but it will have to come a bit at a time. Hoping to have pictures posted later today!