Three months in Shqiperia

Some pieces of random now that we've been here 3 months:

I'm enjoying browsing through the archives of a blog I found titled "Our Man In Tirana." The blogger was here from 2005-2008 and is now in the UK but I enjoy reading his impressions and comparing them to my own. His life as a guy without kids was very different from mine but he noticed a lot of the same things I see around here.

One day when Valerie woke up in the morning I took her out on the balcony to show her that the weather was nice. "Look, no rain!" I said. Sleepily she answered, "take rain off."

The way I explained the concept of "time-outs" to Shpresa was that it's like a yellow card and then red card in soccer. She finds this hilarious.

Yesterday was unseasonably warm, for a change - we went to the park and Valerie spent an hour and a half running around, jumping, and scratching in the dirt with sticks. (Why do we buy toys???) It felt like spring and I wore short sleeves on my walk to my Albanian lesson in the afternoon.

Gabriel is trying desperately to grab things with his hands. He rolls over like a pro now!

Terry is on another overnight work trip. We thought about going along but it was going to be a lot of time in the van and didn't really seem like that much fun to me. We might take a short trip to another city in Albania over the Christmas break.