I Never Post This Often

I just realized that I posted something just 3 days or so ago.  I guess I’m on a roll.  I just couldn’t help but share some of these pictures.  Now, I do preface with an “I’m sorry” if any of you are offended by these pictures.  But.  Let’s face it.  She’s 2.

The other day I was watering all of our plants in the backyard, and, of course, I had a little helper (refer to last post).  I was not opposed to her getting a little wet, but I did want to finish what we were doing before we did any playing.  And…it’s winter here.  That basically just means it’s chilly outside.  Not like winters in the States, but not water weather for kids, either.  So, after a bit, Cailyn just could not help but put her hands in the water, and her clothes were getting so wet.  So, I caved and just took them off.  Now, if you don’t know this already, our child is really not much of a risk taker or “just go for it” kind of kid.  She is cautious, has a ton of fun on the sidelines, and is all about watching someone else do it first.  So, with this in mind, I was not expecting her to immediately go for the water as if I had set up the sprinkler in the backyard.  But…she did.  It took me off guard, and I think it did the same to her.  She immediately ran through the water and then realized how cold it was!  But, that didn’t stop her.  Or me.  I forgot about the fact that pneumonia could come into play, and we let her have fun.  Here she is (yes, just in panties) having a blast in the backyard.  Can’t wait till it’s actually warm so we can do this more often.

Helping Daddy

One thing that we really tried to teach Cailyn early on was that she could help us with things around the house.  We began this fairly early (even when she couldn’t actually do the helping), because I felt like it would give her some sense of purpose in those small tasks that we do each day.  Also, I had heard from other moms I trust and from some parenting resources I had taken advantage of that toddlers really get excited when they feel they are contributing.  Anyway, that all might seem like common sense, but one thing I have learned from parenting Cailyn is that many of those things I used to feel like were common sense things are some of the hardest things to put into practice when you actually have a child to practice them with.  I find that not being intentional in parenting leads me down a path of not parenting the way I feel God wants me to.  So, for now, that’s how our family works. =)

Ok, so all that to say, Cailyn has REALLY taken to the whole “helping” thing.  Honestly, there are moments when we have to practice so much patience as she works her 2 year-old “helper” magic while completely messing up what we have going on.  I feel like it might be normal for 2 yr. olds to use the phrases, “I wanna do it” and “By myself,” but Cailyn never says those things.  Her version of those phrases is wrapped up in the words, “I help!”  Basically, she doesn’t always mean those words in a sweet way.  She uses them to mean, “Let me do it!”  So, we occasionally have to remind her that a “please” is necessary.  Bottom line, we love it.  Her eagerness to help us is just too cute sometimes, and I know that it will be huge when baby #2 is here.  Cailyn surprises us each day with the things she can do, and it has been a great learning experience for Justin and me in being patient.

Since moving here, we have had a ton of boxes and styrofoam that Justin has had to break down from things that we have bought for our home.  This has presented some great opportunity for our little helper…

Notice her broken pieces were slightly smaller than the pieces Justin was making over in his pile…

concentrating on her work…

helping contain daddy’s pile…

So, for now, we are glad to have such a great helper around our house.  Hopefully this lasts!

Happy Father’s Day! (yeah, that’s late. i know)

I just wanted to post a sweet picture of my 2 loved ones from Father’s Day and say a belated (on here) happy Father’s Day to Justin, my dad, his dad, and Andy.  I appreciate all that each of you have done in my life and the life of our families!

We’re still just plugging away at our home.  We have enjoyed getting to make it feel more homey, but I will say it has been tiring at the same time.  We hope to do some of our last bits of shopping for bigger items this week some time, and then it will be just odds and ends here and there.

The front of our new home (everything in green and orange color):

**oh…and that’s not our car.  we wish.  haha.  actually, i wish.  justin likes walking everywhere.  i would… except that i am 8 weeks from having a baby, and it’s getting old.  ok, anyway.

I also had another Dr.’s appt. yesterday, which went well.  The Dr. continues to make us feel comfortable about having the baby in his hospital, and I like him.  We do have 2 specific things we ask you to pray about if you would.  The sonogram I had 3 weeks ago showed 2 things that we want you to pray God will change in the next few weeks.  The baby’s head was not in the down position (which is of course what we want and need to have in order for me to have the baby naturally).  Also, the cord was wrapped around the baby’s head one time.  This is also something that could warrant a c-section if it doesn’t change.  The Dr. did feel my stomach in my appt. yesterday and said it seems the head might even be down at this point, but we will need a sonogram in the next few weeks to know for sure.  Also, he said I shouldn’t worry much about the cord’s position as far as the baby is concerned right now, but we will just monitor it as the time goes by.

Bottom line, please, please pray that both of these things will have changed by the time the baby is ready to make it’s appearance.  I very much desire to not have a c-section, and these things could make that decision less of my own and more about what is best for the baby (which of course we’re concerned for as well).  God, please prepare this baby to be born in the way that you know is best for our family, and provide us (me!) with peace about your perfect plan.

Thanks for your prayers!.

Just thought I would leave you with a picture of our sweet Cailyn enjoying her new room.

Another Year Older

Our Baby Turns 2 Today!

2 yrs. ago today…

I cannot believe it.  We sang Happy Birthday to her in bed this morning, and she knew it was her birthday, because she even slept in (good for all parties involved)!  We, so far have enjoyed presents, eaten the best breakfast buffet at an oceanside restaurant named Mangos…a treat the Davidsons have introduced us to, and picked up the keys to our new home!  We hope to share in some cake or ice-cream or some type of goodie with the Davidsons and their kids tonight.  It’s been a great day, and we are so happy to have enjoyed the past 2 years of this beautiful child’s life!  We ask that those of you interested in praying for her and the direction of her life pray specifically right now that as we make one final move (hopefully at least for a while!) into our new home in about a week that she be able to weather the end of our time of transition, that her behavior reflect the fact that she feels stable and knows we love her, and that she continue to understand and be prepared by God for the arrival of her sweet little brother or sister in August.  Thank you to everyone who has loved on her and who we know will continue to pray for her as she grows up.  We are extremely blessed by your prayers!  Here are some pictures we’ve gotten today of Cailyn enjoying her birthday:

Crawling through her new Cameleon Tunnel for the first time this morning…

Checking out all the new loot…

Cailyn loves to play with scotch tape.  So, we found this really cute kid-friendly tape dispensor with like 4 small rolls of designed/colored scotch tape…good arts and crafts activity…anyway, it said +3 yrs on it, and they were right…she can’t control how muche she pulls off.  It’s a good thing it was just $5 so we won’t feel so bad when all the tape is wasted by the end of the week.

p.s.-she’s still in her pj’s in case you were wondering…oh, and some leg warmers we are borrowing from Sofia Fletcher…crazy kid.

Enjoying her breakfast at Mangos…

You can look down and see the Ocean from the restaurant…it’s her favorite.  The buffet is ours…

Our new front door…well…it’s the door built into the garage door that leads into our front carport/yard area…

It’s been a fun day so far.  I need to share pictures from our time in College Station before we got here, but I wanted to post today and give Cailyn a shout out.  Like I said, we do have a home that we have found to rent.  We are super pumped, and we have spent all of this last week finalizing things.  We got our keys today, but we plan to sleep there for the first time at the end of next week.  We have bought our beds, and we have found the appliances that we want, but it all has to be delivered to the house.  So, we’ll be in our temporary apartment another week or so.  We still have tons of work to do, but we are very excited at how fast God answered our prayers for finding a rental home.  It is equipped with all we had hoped, and we are just so blessed to have the landlords that we do.  Thanks to everyone who has prayed specifically about our housing.

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One Final Thing…

Well, we had our first Dr.s appointment this past Monday morning here in Peru.  Thanks to all of you that were praying for us.  The Dr. was very nice, he spoke sufficient English, all of our Qs were answered to our satisfaction, and he said things look great.  We will be having the baby at Clínica Miraflores.  That is where the pediatrician will work as well, so it’s nice to have it all in one location.  The Dr.s there specialize in infertility and families that are unable to have kids, so there are many couples that need to have very specific sonograms done due to the fact that they are having multiples.  Anyway, they have the ability to do the 4D sonograms.  Actually, I think that’s all they do.  So, the Dr. ordered a sonogram for me since it was our first appointment, and we were treated to the wonderful technology of the 4D sonogram.  It was amazing.  I honestly had steered clear from this, because we really want to be surprised about the gender of the baby.  I was just always afraid to do one of these, because they are so incredibly clear that I thought it would be way to easy to tell if it was a boy or girl.  But…since we had to have one…we just made it clear that we didn’t want to know the gender.  The sonographer (is that the name of that profession?) did a great job working around it.  Anyway, we got a great picture of this sweet baby’s face, so I thought I would share it.  I just took a picture of the picture, so the quality might be a little worse, but you can see it ok I think. Thanks for all of your prayers!

Taken Care Of…

Well, we made it!  It is such a wonderful feeling to be able to say “we made it” and it be for real, for real!  I told our teammate, Tara D., today that it is great to know that I don’t really have to fly again until 2011 if I don’t want to.  Now, whether that happens or not, I don’t know.  But…it feels great to begin our process of settling into Lima.

We don’t have any great pictures really, but John Mark took a good picture of us and posted it on our team website.  It is just after we got through everything in the airport in Lima and were about to head to our apartment for the first time.  It’s like 11:30pm, so please excuse the absent look Cailyn has in the picture.  She really was excited.  So,  click here to see that.

Now, it all begins.  We hope to really start setting a couple of things up tomorrow, and then it’s in full swing till the baby arrives…and then it’s like really in full swing, I guess.

We definitely feel taken care of.  God laid out everything just perfectly for us, and we could not have asked for a smoother transition.  Ok…wait.  There was this one thing.

If you look at the picture I linked you to above, you can see those bags we have.  They are large army duffle bags, and each of them is maxed out to the 50 lb. limit.  We arrived at the airport in Houston yesterday with 7 of them.  We only made it to Lima with 5.  Oops.

See, every time we have flown, Cailyn has been a lap child, and we have always been allowed (even internationally) to pack her 2 bags.  In addition to that, to alleviate the stress of figuring out what all we would NOT bring with us from the States of the things we had accumulated, we decided last minute that the extra charge for one of us to have a 3rd bag was worth being able to bring our new things.  So, we had 7 bags.

When we got to the airport, we were immediately stopped by this guy as we made our way to the check-in counter, and he had a notion that our bags (yes, ALL 7 of them) were oversized.  Uh…no.  We’ve done our research.  So, he measures them all (of course to find that they are within the limit), and then he asks us (as he is looking very curiously at them all), “How many bags do you have?!”  I immediately said, “We know we are going to have to pay extra.  We have 7.”  Then, he looks at Justin and says, “Oh, well, where are you going?”  After hearing our destination was Peru, he then lets us know that Peru is one of like 3 countries (IN THE WORLD) that has some embargo rule, and you cannot even pay extra to take anything more than your 2 bags in.  2 is your limit.  Uh…what?  Our research had somehow failed us here.  This was not what we wanted to hear as we were walking up to check our bags.  Not the best timing.  Then, he tells us that we might have the option of upgrading our seats to first class, and the first class passengers are allowed 3 bags.  Oh…great.  So, in the heat of the moment, Justin and I decide that it would be cheaper (according to the price the guy had just quoted us) to just upgrade one of us to first class and be able to take the bag with us instead of trying to have the bag mailed to us or something like that.  (ps-we already had a lot of things my parents are bringing in August when they come for the baby’s birth…we really weren’t sure we could add to that).  So…to shorten this even longer story, the lady at the counter spends like 30 minutes just trying to figure out what is really the rule, and when it is all said and done, she has also informed us that Cailyn is not allowed 2 bags, she is only allowed 1.  UGH!  So, at the very last minute, we had to unzip each bag, decide based on what we saw on top which 2 we would then pack back up in Teri’s car, and proceed with just 5 of them.  Not cool.

God gave Justin and I a very strong measure of peace and the ability to laugh things off, though.  This morning, our first morning to need all of our things in our suitcases, was interesting as we were able to say, “oh, uh…remember what else was in that one bag…my____________ ” or “the_____________”.  All is replaceable in the immediate future, and the things that are more expensive to replace, we can wait on.  Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

So, minus that…our trip here was wonderful! =)  Cailyn’s plane behavior was beyond wonderful, and there were TONS of great movies to choose from on the plane.  Oh…and we got fed twice.  It was nice.

Thanks to everyone who was specifically praying for our trip, Cailyn’s behavior on the plane, and our safety.  God really took care of us…but what else can we expect!?

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New Subject, and really completely unrelated:

We also wanted to share with you a few pictures that we were able to have taken due to a great gift from our teammates, the Fletchers.  Hannah Vickers took 2 yr. old pictures of Cailyn while we were in Abilene.  Cailyn was (honestly) fairly horrible while it was going on, but Hannah’s expertise shone through!  Here are some of the better ones…well, and I might include some not so “better” ones so you get the idea of what Hannah had to work with.  She was a trooper! Thanks Fletchers and Hannah, for being so sweet to think of our family in this way.  We will cherish these pictures forever!

we got this next smile all due to Grover in her hand…

don’t be fooled, this is what we actually looked like almost the ENTIRE time…oh, and with no bow on the head now…

just lovely, I know.

Oh, and the next picture shows what she wanted to do basically the entire time we were out there taking pictures.  Hannah did a great job here.  Now…if only our child had been smiling at the camera!

Her dress was SOAKED after this…photo shoot…over.

I’ll leave you with another cute one…

Thanks, Hannah, you sure did a great job with a difficult client!

Thanks, Fletchers, we are honored that you treated us to this!