Numb

Penny died last night.

She pushed Ezra in his swing and helped him navigate the bumps in the sidewalk with his little bike. She happily went along with whatever rock, stick and mud building scheme Elijah was working on and dug for hours in the dirt with Caleb. She was the little boys' friend.

I cried and cried today.

I hate this part of living in a 3rd world country. Hundreds of little gravestones littering the cemeteries. Reminders that poverty and malnutrition and lack of medical care are real and dangerous and rob beautiful little girls of their lives. Reminders that sometimes, no matter how much I try, I am powerless to help.

House Tour

So here's our new house... I took all these pictures before my friend, Jen, came to visit (SO much fun!!!) and so the house was nice and clean. :)

Our house is the wooden house on the left - kinda dark and hard to see. The tin house on the right (behind the truck) is a guest house owned by another mission (so nice guest housing if anyone wants to come visit!!!) Together the two houses are some of the oldest mission properties on our island. The administrator for our house - who has 3 kids in college and is probably in his early 50s - lived in our house when he was a little boy and his parents were missionaries here!!! But, don't freak out... the house got totally gutted and redone two years ago so it's beautiful and nice and new inside. :)

This is the view when you first walk in the door... the kitchen is right off the dining area. Through the door on the left is our porch. The hall to the bedrooms is down the right.


I LOVE the kitchen! The pics don't really do it justice. It's really nice, with tile counter tops (that's actually standard here - it's tile or plywood) :) In the corner cabinets are "lazy susan" type cabinets and there's a slotted cabinet for cookie sheets.

You can tell how tiny our fridge and oven are though! Our oven is actually pretty standard size - the extra space is for the LPG tank (ours is outside). The fridge is tiny - it's a bit of a joke. But we weren't thinking we would even have a real fridge and this one was given to us, so I won't complain. (So you don't think we were going to be without a fridge/freezer we had planned on using our solar powered fridge and freezer that we have for when we live in a tribe - you can also run them on regular power - which is what we're doing with our chest freezer to have more freezer space.)

This is our enclosed porch. I LOVE it! It wraps around the back of the house and has our washer and our big chest freezer, but this part is the boys' play area. I had wanted to put all their toys out on the porch, but it's not real secure and the people living here prior to us had had some break-ins on the porch (but never into the actual house!) So for now, we basically just keep some little toys and their vast Play Dough stash out here. Elijah takes his rest time out here so Caleb can get a good nap.

This is the view from the porch door looking down the hallway at the bedrooms.

First door on the right is the older boys' room. Brant built the bunk beds; it's the first time they've shared a room and the transition is going HORRIBLE... so if anyone has any tips on how to get them to go to sleep at night and not talk and play then I'd be happy to hear them. (But I do NOT want to hear "You and Melanie were just like that, so you're getting what you deserve" from my parents!!) :):)

Ezra's room (last door on the right). I loved our old house with its tiny bedrooms. Why does a 2 year old need so much space???

Our bedroom is right across the hall from the older boys' room. It is HUGE. Not sure what else to put in it.... :)

Took a pic of all the cabinets/dressers/closets... every bedroom has these - SO much storage space. But it eliminates the need for dressers (which is good as we don't own any!) so leaves the bedrooms pretty bare.

The bathroom is at the end of the hallway. I LOVE it.... wonderful great inventions like a real shower and hot water. :) I do NOT love that there is only one bathroom in the whole house... sharing a bathroom with a 4 year old and a 6 year old little boy is not my idea of fun. :) But I'm very thankful that it's big and nice. :)

I didn't take a picture of our office - it's the smallest bedroom right next to ours. It's been our dumping ground for stuff that doesn't have a home yet so it's not exactly something I want posted for the whole world to see. :)

We've made a few changes since these pictures were taken - Brant's built some shelves/nightstands, and we put another bar on Elijah's bunkbeds (so the grandmas can stop freaking out!!) :):)

Just for a bit of reference for everyone out there that likes to study house plans (like my dad!) - our house measures in at just over 1500 sq feet (according to our measurements). And all the bedrooms are 10x12ish... so really, by States' standards, they are not huge. But we don't have a lot of furniture and we're used to bedrooms here (Elijah's bedroom at our other house was 7x9 and our "master bedroom" was 9x11) so to us we are living in a mansion. :)

I love my boys

All 3 of them...

The Move

So we moved last week. It went about as well as Elijah's self-hair cut.... not as bad as it could have been, but definitely not pretty. :)

Brant and a couple guys moved all our furniture on Tuesday. The advantage of living in a totally furnished house (where none of it's your stuff) and then moving to a house with all your own stuff is that we could live in the one house while we got the other house set up. Wednesday morning I dropped the boys off at a friend's bright and EARLY and then we started moving boxes.... we had packed a bunch the night before and so loaded those into our car - took them to the new house; Brant dropped me and the boxes off so that I could unpack while he went to get another load. We did the same routine all day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It was slow, but the advantage was that we never got too far behind on the unpacking - I could unpack and put things away about as fast as Brant could pack the old house and bring stuff over. The boys stayed with different friends during the days and we'd pick them up for nap time/dinner/bed time at our house. It worked really well.

Except we didn't see the boys much and it was Thursday morning before I noticed Eijah's hair. I'm still not quite sure when he did it... I was yelling so much... and then laughing so hard... that is was kinda hard to get a straight answer out of him. :) He just took this huge V shaped chunk out of his bangs... it looks horrible, but obviously isn't so noticeable that HIS OWN MOTHER didn't notice for at least a day or two... yeah, that was one of my feeling horrible as a mother moments. :)

ANYWAYS. I LOVE our new house. It's HUGE (by missionary standards!) and the walls are clean and the bathroom is really nice and we have hot water and I have a beautiful kitchen... It's a really nice kitchen by any standards - "lazy susan" cupboards in the corners and special cabinets that are slotted for cookie sheets and a big bar/counter space and more cabinet space than I will ever hope to fill... I have whole cabinets with nothing in them. My Nalgene bottle has its own self and the two jars of peanut butter we have get their own shelf too. :)

I also love the huge screened in porch we have and the views overlooking the valley. It's just beautiful. We moved our big papasan chair in their yesterday and the boys love to play out there for hours. Our yard is HUGE - it's almost an acre (by our guess) and covered in fruit trees and pineapple plants and more hot pepper plants than I will ever use for a life-time's worth of salsa. :)

I will take pictures and post them soon.... Brant is working on some shelving for me and it's going a bit slower than we had hoped and I wanted everything "finished" before I took pictures. There has been SO much we have to get set up that it's been overwhelming and discouraging at moments. We had to get the generator set up and a gardener hired and my solar powered fridge is still sitting in its plastic wrap it came in from the facotry (we're not going to run it on solar panels, but just regular electricity - it's for the tribe, but we figured we could use it now and save having to buy a different one for here in town.) We just got our AC installed last night and it's SO nice. Brant keeps reminding me we have just been in the house for a bit over a week now, so I need to give it some time before things all come together.