Granna is here!

Granna (my mom) has braved the long plane ride and jet lag once again. This trip makes her seventh trip to Asia, if I am counting correctly, and six of those times have been to come see us since we moved here in 2004. We are having a great time and savoring the last few days of her visit. We miss my Dad this time but know he is right where he needs to be overseeing a busy project at work. July has been a crazy month for Kevin managing lots of visitors and projects, so it has been a double-blessing to have my mom around while we are still settling into life in our new place. Granna has worked her tail off helping me get my house in shape, loving on my girls, and helping host meals for visitors. I do believe if she hadn't been here this month I might have had a few meltdowns along the way! It's been like having my own mental-health professional living here this month to keep me from going insane. Ha! God is very good. I will post more thoughts later but here are a few pictures to get us going... Here's the view from our new apartment balcony. I enjoy how peaceful (quiet!) it is where we live now. Another nice thing is we live close to local gov't officials and therefore don't have the power outages like folks do in other parts of town. The bad part is we don't live close to any markets or stores so getting out to buy things is a bit of a hassle. I enjoy our view of the karst (limestone) formations in the background! And sometimes we see water buffalo walking down the street.

This is completely random but Trinity started making this face one day and saw how we laughed when she made it. So now when we ask her to make her "excited face" this is what she does. She is such a ham!

I love this picture of these two...

See Trinity's black eye? She had a run-in with our coffee table. We've remedied the sharp corner situation but this child seems bent on getting hurt somehow every day. She's into EVERYTHING but I do love this toddler stage!

We love you Mom! Thank you for being here! More to come soon...

thoughts from the first two weeks

I keep meaning to download pictures off my camera and get some blog posts going, but by the time I sit down at night lately all I want to do is sleep! So until I get around to downloading pictures, I'll write a little bit of what I've discovered over the past two weeks.

• Our move went more smoothly than we could have even asked! And ironically, I like this apartment better than any I've lived in before. Go figure. Sure, this apartment has some of the funny plumbing and electrical quirks that are standard for living anywhere in this country, but overall we are really enjoying our new place.
• By day two of living here, I had a long conversation with a local friend that reminded me why we moved here in the first place. In regards to our relationships with local friends, the benefits of living here are going to be amazing.
• It is a funny experience to have local friends in your home who have never, ever in their life eaten western food. A few nights ago we had 3 ladies join us for spaghetti. I figured spaghetti, garlic bread, broccoli and fruit wouldn't rock the boat TOO much. Two of the three ladies enjoyed everything but one girl didn't like the spaghetti sauce. (Kevin laughed at the funny faces she was making and said it's a little bit of payback for all the times he's had to throw down some weird food here!) They examined all of my silverware (something we brought from the States) and couldn't believe how well-made it was. Even my apple-corer was a source of great conversation. They were thinking up new business strategies how they could make apple corers and sell them here!
• I was totally, utterly, completely spoiled in the big city by having a helper. It looks like my days of living the high-life have come to a close until I can find another helper here that I trust. The "that I trust" part is the kicker. Actually we've been asking around but have been told it will be difficult to find a helper here. My body might be 33 but most nights I feel somewhere around 73, or maybe 83. I don't know. Between going to the market/store almost daily, walking more in the heat, cooking everything from scratch, daily sweeping/mopping my new nemesis (aka the all-white flooring in my apartment), and taking my kids out to play each night I am using muscles I haven't used in a while. At night I'm tired but it's a good tired!
• My girls are transitioning so well, PTL! Grace is overall really excited to be here. One thing I've prayed specifically for is at least one or two good friends for her. There is a sweet girl two days younger than Grace who lives in our apartment complex. She and Grace have already been swimming together and last night Grace went to her birthday party to celebrate this girl's birthday on the lunar calendar!
• Another pleasant surprise is that the local knock-off version of KFC is actually pretty good. There is one place in town where we can go get our fast-food fix. I just can't look at the floor too closely. When we went last week to eat, I walked to the sink to help wash Trinity's hands and a boy (probably around 6 years old) came and peed on the floor right beside us. Not even into a drain, just right on the floor. Some of it sprayed onto my foot. I know I've been in this country long enough because I didn't hesitate to tell him he really should have gone into the toilet, which was a mere 10 feet away. He just looked at me, finished his business, and walked back to his table.
• My family consumes much more cheese in a week than I realized. We have to store it up from the big city and were (GASP) running low but had wonderful friends save the day by sending some cheese, butter, and other supplies down to us. Lesson learned: always buy more cheese than what I think I will need.
• The big preschool-hunt has begun. This is worthy of a blog-post in itself. Grace is SOO ready to go to preschool. I'm ready for her to go. This will be trial and error. I am torn between taking her to what everyone calls one of the "better" preschools which will likely have almost 50 students in a classroom versus a smaller one that everyone says is not as good but would have 25 or so students in a class. More on that and pictures to come later...

Thank you for lifting up our move!