New Things

So I'm hoping the cuteness of my subject matter will compensate for the poor quality of the photos... maybe I can get a new camera for my birthday next month :-) (This is a test to see if anyone is still reading this neglected, abandoned blog!) 

 Yesterday the kids had their first school excursion, to a farm the school owns just outside the city. I had to send them off with their special-ordered sweatsuits, complete with the school logo and embroidered with their names on the pockets. I also had to buy them rain boots, rain ponchos, and pack it all up with a change of clothes and shoes in a backpack.

 There was some ambivalence about all the newness, sort of dread mixed with excitement.

 Valerie asked me never-ending streams of questions the two or three days leading up to the outing.

They both cried when I dropped them off that day, but I think they ended up having a really fun time. They came home exhausted, full of stories about a sandbox and a white cow and a llama and how the farm was dry, and it didn't rain!

I think next time it will be easier to get them into their outfits than it was this time. I hope! New things are hard, the second time is usually easier.

Lluvia, Shiu, Rain

I spoke to soon - as soon as I remarked on the sunny weather we've been having, the rains began. It's been raining almost every afternoon and one day I had no idea what to wear because all my shoes were wet from walking home in the rain for three days in a row. I need to get some rain boots!

The kids have been settling in to school. One of the teachers told us they seem to be understanding more and more Spanish. Gabriel says he likes "the music place" and Valerie loves the jungle gym. I'm looking forward to being able to sit down with the teachers at some point and hear more.

Today and tomorrow I'm in Cali to talk over budgets and MOUs and worker evaluations with one of our partner organizations here. It's not as boring as it sounds :-). The part of this job I've enjoyed the most has been supporting personnel, even working through some really difficult situations - for some reason it energizes me. I feel like this context, this work, this organization brings out the best in me and makes me a better person, and that's been incredibly encouraging.

Parque Simon Bolivar

One place we've enjoyed exploring here is a huge park called Simon Bolivar. There's a lake with ducks and fish, playgrounds, walking paths, a little "train" that goes around, lots of food vendors. 

I have to say again, we've been pleasantly surprised by the weather here - we didn't realize there was a sunny season, we thought we were in for five years of cloudy drizzle! A taxi driver told me that this is coffee-drying season right now. We have had a little rain, but I'm still really surprised by how green everything is given how little it has rained in the last three months. Another person told me "Colombia is a very wet country." 

Here Terry is buying some corn-cakes stuffed with cheese and guava fruit paste - yum! Guava fruit paste, which in Guyana they called "fruit cheese," is a very popular snack/dessert food here. I love it. It's usually sold in little blocks, sometimes with cheese, sometimes with blancmange, called "arequipe" here ("Manjar blanco" in Peru).

School!

 The first two days of school, parents and other caregivers were instructed to come with the kids in order to get them acclimated. My mom was able to come with the the first day, too!

There are lots of murals painted all over the building. We liked this one a lot. (The photos where Valerie is wearing a blue shirt and Gabe has green stripes are from the first day. Pink shirt and grey hoodie are from the second day.)

The blocks are in the workshop area where the kids also help sand boards to refurbish their own little chairs.

The indoor jungle gym is Valerie's #1 favorite room in the whole place! Behind it is a toy room that they both like.

Facing the slide is this carpeted area where they played Bowling.

Snack time!  The school has a no-sugar policy. Gabriel liked the fresh fruit juice. V wouldn't touch it!

 Drawing room upstairs. The mural on this wall depicts the school's farm where they go on field trips once or twice a month.

More soon - someone needs me!

Tomorrow...

... is the first day of school for my two littles! I will take lots of pictures.

Their preschool has a process for easing in kids the first year.
Day 1: The children (just the new kids, not returning) come for 1 hour, with their parents, and explore the place.
Day 2: The children come with their parents or caregivers for 2 hours, with a little more structure - snack time in the middle.
Day 3: The children are dropped off for 1 hour. (We were asked to please keep it simple when we drop them off, assuring them we'll be back soon, and to be PROMPT in returning)
Day 4: The children are dropped off for two hours.

* weekend *

Monday: Toy Day! Each child is encouraged to bring a clearly marked favorite toy from home (not too big and not too tiny). They are dropped off for four hours.
Tuesday: Regular schedule commences (some kids are half-day, some are full-day, etc...)

I'm staying home from work Tuesday and Wednesday, and working limited hours the other days to support them in this transition. They're really excited about it though. Yesterday Valerie asked me "is it Tuesday yet?"

~ :: ~

My parents are also leaving this week - Thursday morning - and I'm glad that they are here for the first few days of school; I think it will make the transition less abrupt, perhaps, on both fronts. Maybe. I could be wrong. In any case, it's been great having them here and I don't know what we would have done without them, during the month our babysitter was on vacation! Well, worked less, probably!

Just Kid Stuff

I think the kids, for the most part, are settling in. We have an interesting challenge ahead of us in February when they'll both start going to preschool half-days - I wasn't planning to put G in school so soon, but after visiting the place I kept thinking - he's going to love this. They have an arts and nature focus, and own a farm outside the city that I think Valerie will love visiting - there's even a llama, apparently! I think G will enjoy the music workshop they do with all kinds of musical instruments. It will still be an adjustment for them since they haven't picked up a whole lot of Spanish yet - but I expect that will change soon with immersion.

The kids are both growing like weeds. When we arrived, G didn't have to duck to go under the rail that surrounds the playground near our house - now he does. Sleeves that were overlong last summer are now just right. And I keep having to trim the hair out of their eyes.

G is talking a mile a minute, he's a natural mimic so picks up a crazy amount of vocabulary from us and his sister. There are still adorably "baby" things he says - like reversing word order ("Where's my little own toy!") or sounds ("Pliget" instead of "Piglet"). Another phrase he says that I love is "no many" (e.g. "The dog is sad because it has no many friends.") He's also really into mamas and babies - every toy he can, he puts into big/little pairs that are then Mama and Baby - like mama and baby tow trucks, mama and baby cement mixers, mama and baby helicopters. They must then stay together or they get sad.

Valerie continues with her acrobatics - she has excellent balance. Yesterday she climbed on the back of the couch to get more traction for pressing play-dough flat on an end table - her feet in the air, her middle balanced just so on the couch, one hand on the play-dough. She loves monkey bars and basically climbing anything and everything she can. She often talks about Tirana but tells me she likes it here and is happy.

We've had opportunity this month to check out some kid-friendly fun things in Bogota, including the children's museum, a huge park surrounding a lake in the middle of the city, and exploring a big mall in hopes of finding an indoor play area for rainy days. The park was pretty awesome, you could buy fish food for the carp in the lake, as well as all kinds of other finger foods, and there was a huge playground for the kids. The Children's Museum and Mall were both pretty expensive, we thought (my parents have been kind of shocked at food prices here as well, compared to Peru). So I'm not sure how often we'll be doing those things. But the park was great. Anyway, I do have photos of all those things just not on the computer yet, so I'll save them for a future post.

Our sitter has been on vacation for about a month so we've been relying completely on grandparent care! I don't know what we'd do without them!

Hello, 2013

Well. A year ago I promised you all 150 posts in 2012... I didn't even break 100! The last quarter of this year was a doozy... we moved to Bogotá, Colombia, on November 1, and pretty much hit the ground running. Things didn't really slow down until after Christmas. 

Well, I'm not sure to what extent I'm going to be able to catch you all up on the past two months... but at least, here is an assortment of photos that I finally got around to downloading and prettying up on my laptop (my camera suffered a rain-related mishap in October, so the lens cover doesn't open all the way anymore... which is why a lot of my photos have a dark shadow in one corner. Those that don't, it's been cropped out.)

This is the view out our bedroom window. We don't actually get direct sunlight in our apartment, but we are close to some green spaces - the trees you see there are on the National University grounds.

Another nice green space nearby: this is a sweet little park half a block from our house. This neighborhood is referred to by some as the "Mennonite neighborhood" because so many Mennonites live within a few blocks of each other!

For the past month, my parents have been visiting us here in Bogotá while house-sitting for a Wycliffe missionary who is in the US right now. These roses are from her garden - a sunny little backyard patio where the kids have been having a ton of fun playing. The "Fancy House" (as we've been calling it) is quite a distance from our apartment, so we've been dividing our weeks between the two places, staying 3-4 days at a time over there. Bogotá is seriously huge... although the TransMilenio bus system does a lot to facilitate transit.

We spent Christmas Day relaxing at home, and also at a team Christmas party in an apartment complex that had its own little grassy area with a playground, which the kids vastly enjoyed.

For New Year's, we went to Montserrate - a local landmark with a wonderful vista of the city. We took the Funicular - a train built at a slant to go up steep slopes - to go up, and the cable car to come down. At the top we enjoyed the view and had a delicious lunch at an Italian-themed restaurant there. 

Well, 2012 held a lot of surprises. We'll see what 2013 will bring!

pictures!

 Beautiful landscape outside Bogota, where our team retreat was held in November.

 This butterfly mask was at a clever ad for a resort near where we stayed!

 Carport/ patio where the kids enjoy playing. 

 Park near our house

 Baby bananas! This photos is from my trip to the Atlantic Coast a few weeks ago.

Apres bath!

Assembling our Christmas Tree! Valerie is currently fascinated by how things work. She pretty much put together the whole tree by herself, a big 3D puzzle!

Trip!

No photos yet... but I just got back from a trip to the Atlantic (or Caribbean) coast of Colombia, visiting one of our partner organizations and several MCC volunteers placed there. Miraculously, I feel more rested upon returning than I did before I left! Part of that is due to the fact that I ate something that disagreed with me - rather violently - on my second day, and couldn't keep anything down, not even water. I know that doesn't sound particularly restful - but my hosts became concerned enough that I was actually urged to lie in a hammock and nap at every opportunity. Plus, I had a double bed all to myself for three nights... try co-sleeping with a nursing toddler for a few years, and then you will know exactly how bountifully restful sleeping alone can be! So despite the heat, despite long meetings and despite bumpy road trips to visit projects in the rural communities, I returned to our home in Bogota feeling amazingly rested and restored.

About ten years ago, paramilitaries devastated this area of Colombia, displacing thousands of people, mostly farmers of Afro-Caribbean descent. Slowly now people are returning to the land and trying to re-establish community. Personal trauma, issues over land titles, and basic agricultural livelihoods are all struggles these internally displaced people are working to overcome.

Many aspects of the context on the coast reminded me of my childhood in the Peruvian Amazon - the heat, the parrots flying overhead, the tropical fruits - but in other aspects it's an entirely different context. Different lingo, different music, different foods and ways of being. Our first month in Colombia has been exhausting - dizzying, even. I feel like right now things might be slowing down enough to catch a breath.

Home, Sick

Well, I'm back in Bogota, with some kind of bug - sore throat and bone-tired. Hit the ground running but then took the day off yesterday to just be at home with the kids. It was good. And only coincidence that it was Thanksgiving! We ate noodles, canned beans, peanut butter and jelly, yoghurt. It was a quiet and peaceful day that I think we all needed.

This morning we walked to a private preschool nearby where we're thinking of enrolling Valerie for the coming school year, which starts in January. I have to meet with the director soon to learn more. After that I took the kids with me to the office for the weekly Bogota-staff lunch we share together. It was fun for them, and apparently the whole adventure wore them out because they both fell asleep around 7 p.m.! Amazing.

Off to bed myself.

Sojourner

It was crazy-strange, less than two weeks after landing in Bogota, to get back on a plane and fly to San Francisco via Houston. By myself. This is the longest I've ever been away from Gabriel. Terry's been sending me nightly updates. I have to say that I've been vastly enjoying my time at the conference, just soaking up all this intellectual and social energy. But it's been tiring too and I think I'm beginning to get sick. My presentation is tomorrow so I should probably get some shut-eye.

Less than 48 hours til I'm back in Colombia again!

New Home

Here are some photos of our apartment. It's very much a work in progress... I didn't include photos of the bedrooms because the level of chaos is just unreal. 

The door you see is the front door we come in. Opposite this door, on the other side of the wall you see by the table, is the big bedroom. Just behind those hat trees is the small bedroom which we are only using for storage right now (we inherited a lot of MCC detritus...)

To the right of the dining room table is the kitchen/laundry area (you can see the top of one of the dining room chairs there at the bottom left). Clothes take forever to dry inside; smaller, more frequent loads seem to be the thing to do.

To the right of the laundry area, on the other side of a dividing wall, is a little nook where we put this couch. The view out this window is actually prettier than what you see here - you can look down into the patio garden, and to the right you see the trees from the small park and the University grounds nearby. The kids LOVE playing in this little nook.

Opposite the nook is this small fireplace, and a painting we inherited from someone. (The butterfly wings were acquired in the States and have spawned a really fun series of bedtime stories about Caterpillar and Butterfly and their adventures in the garden. Opportunity to insert morality tales about sharing and taking turns!!!)

 Wider angle view - another play area (imagine that!) The two doors you see there are both bathroom doors - why we have two adjacent bathrooms, I do not know. But it works. One or the other is always running out of toilet paper. 

Like I said, I've been impressed by how well the kids have been doing (so far). They are very much looking forward to visits from their grandparents, though!

update

So I'm in San Francisco! The past two weeks in Bogota have been a bit of a blur - days packed with meetings, traveling to and from the office, applying for our ID cards (oh bureaucracy...), spending time with the kids. We also had a four-day retreat with the entire MCC Colombia team, partly at the office and partly at a LOVELY little village just outside the city, so we were out of contact for a good chunk of time there.

And I can't find the cord to upload photos from my camera to my laptop... I did take some pictures on the iPod Touch that I can post here so will do more of that later today (now that I'm connected to free wireless at the hotel here!)

I'm in SF for a six-day Anthropology conference; I'll be re-connecting with grad school friends, attending talks and panels on topics related to my research, hopefully getting some sleep and maybe even some writing time. And updating my poor neglected blog! Beginning with this picture, of our kids hanging out at home:

More soon.

A really, really long way of saying "we arrived safely" :-)

We are in our new home in Colombia! It doesn’t feel that far away, despite the long haul to get here. Exiting the airport into the crowd felt so familiar. The ambiance of Bogota reminds me a lot of Lima, except that Lima is sea level and Bogota is what, 8,000 feet? Enough that we’re feeling it, anyway. Huge, bustling, noisy, smoggy city with riches, poverty, and “getting by well enough” rubbing shoulders on each corner.

Our neighborhood is near the University and a lot of Mennonites live here, apparently. It’s a quiet nook of a neighborhood with small groceries dotted throughout and a little park with a playground just half a block from our building that the kids LOVE.

Our building is a four-story brick apartment building with purple bougainvillea foaming over the gate. We have six keys, two gates, and three deadbolts to get through every time we want to go in and out. Oh, and a flight of steps since we are on the 2^nd floor. We’ve met our neighbors briefly – a family with tween/teen kids – and they seem very nice. There’s a small patio for parking cars and bikes, but the kids like to pretend it’s the ocean and they are fish swimming away from the ‘octopus’ (me) to hide under the huge spreading potted plants in the corner. Our bedroom overlooks this patio and yesterday I saw an emerald-green hummingbird darting around the plants briefly.

Our apartment is spacious and well-lit, although the lay-out is very odd. A number of the inside walls are set in at non-right angles, and there are some slightly awkward nooks the intended functions of which are unclear. But the kids seem to like it; a lot of furniture left over from previous MCCers is stacked in one corner and we unearthed a box of children’s books that also contained four My Little Ponies. Valerie keeps asking where they came from, I think their appearance was like magic to her.

We’ve been incredibly warmly welcomed by the MCC team here. We arrived late Thursday night and were met by two volunteers – I was so bummed the battery on my camera ran out, because we’d stacked the four suitcases on a cart and then Terry perched the kids on top of the stack of suitcases and they were just too cute sitting there riding backwards.

Friday we all went to the office together for a celebratory lunch – cookout on the roof (including an AMAZING quinoa salad and fresh-squeezed guava juice). The office occupies most of a four-story building, an old home not too far from where we live. We got to meet the MCCers who are based in Bogotá although I’m still putting together names, faces, and service assignments. After lunch we had a short meeting during which both kids fell asleep on my lap… fortunately we were able to transfer them to a bed upstairs (there are two guest rooms here for out-of-town service workers who are passing through the capital). We also met the very sweet woman who will be providing us childcare.

Saturday we puttered around the house sorting ourselves out, went to the playground, and had lunch at the home of the MCCer who has been our primary guide, and her hostess/housemate, an older Colombian woman affiliated with the Mennonite church. More amazing food (potato soup with capers, cream, and shredded chicken; fresh-squeezed passion fruit juice) and great conversation.

Today (Sunday) we went to the Mennonite church that Terry and I had visited in 2007; it was nice to be in a familiar-ish place even though I didn't really know anybody. People kept coming up to Terry and commenting on how much he looks like Vern :-).

I have to say that it’s SOOOOOO NICE to be fluent in the language. There are a few differences in accent and vocabulary but wow. I can just, like talk to people. Terry still tends to default to Albanian so I have to translate for him sometimes. The kids are very receptive to learning new words in Spanish, so I hope that comes along quickly for them. 

Valerie has been talking a lot about Tirana but overall the kids both are doing really well. Of course when they get tired or hungry they get a little fragile, but for the most part they seem to be having a lot of fun. I think they’re really enjoying getting so much time and attention with Daddy.

We have internet at our apartment but it’s super-slow and not very reliable… so that’s mostly why it took me so long to post anything here. We’re going to get a different kind of connection… eventually… so hopefully I’ll be able to blog more often before too long.

I have tons of great photos to post from our time in the US, too! Little by little...

Tomorrow

Photo: Arrival in Dulles Airport 4/9/12

So, here we go again! Our two(ish) months in the States flew by... and tomorrow (barring complications) we'll be headed south for a new adventure. 

Photo: mid-flight on Turkish Airlines

I still haven't downloaded my photos from our trip to NY to see family and stop by Cornell, but it was a good trip (albeit highly compressed!) I hope to have those up soon.

Today was a full day packing, taking care of loose ends, voting (!!! we were able to vote in person by going to the city registrar and filling out applications for absentee ballots, which they gave us then and there and we just filled them out and slid them into the counting machine). (I was super excited about that.)

More soon as time permits... almost too much to process right now!

Zoo (and Visas!)

We are very excited to have our visas to Colombia in hand! I’m still not completely sure whether or not it was necessary for us to take the kids with us to the consulate in DC, but we did, and it turned out to be a [mostly] fun family outing both last Friday when we submitted the applications, and this Wednesday when we went back to pick up the visas. Overall the whole process went smoothly, aided I’m sure by Gabriel’s dimple when he returned the restroom key for me to the woman behind the counter at the consulate.

Both days, we drove to the Metro station in Vienna, loaded the kids into the double stroller that I am SO glad I decided to bring, and made our way into DC. The kids loved riding the train (what kid doesn’t?) At the consulate, Terry entertained the kids while I interacted with the consulate staff (all in Spanish). MCC staff in the US, Canada, and Colombia all provided different pieces of instruction, advice and supporting documentation that got us through without any major hitches. We were given 2-year religious visas because MCC in Colombia works entirely through the Mennonite and Brethren churches there. (One piece of advice we were given beforehand: “dress like missionaries!”)

Since the consulate is on the same Metro line as the National Zoo, and since our kids love animals, and we’d never yet taken them, both trips then included a zoo visit. The second visit went much more smoothly than the first, to my mind, since we packed a lunch instead of waiting in a line for 45 minutes at the one cafeteria that was open like we did the first time (glacial pace + hot sun = grumpy mommy), only to get extremely expensive fried-and-over-salted food that was not very good anyway. So, word to the wise when you visit the zoo: PACK A LUNCH!

The kids’ favorite part of the zoo was the small mammal house. Valerie’s favorite animal there was the armadillo, trotting around on its little wee feet, though she was also a big fan of the meerkats. Gabriel could not be torn away from the naked mole rats scurrying blindly through clear plastic tunnels. Terry enjoyed making other zoo visitors laugh with his off-the-cuff humor (“Don’t you think those naked mole rats look exactly like Grandpa?” or “We’re going to play a game called Let’s Sit Quietly

For a Long Time”), and I enjoyed being outdoors and getting to look at amazing animals FOR FREE!

We have three weeks left in the US before our next big move and it just dawned on me that soon I’ll have to start thinking about packing again. I’m so glad and thankful for all the different pieces coming together. 

Whew!

It's been a crazy two weeks here since Terry got back... but good, in most ways. We're trying to cram so much into the time that we have. A lot of that time, though, is spent doing fun things with the kids - doing the rounds at nearby parks, visiting the Children's Museum about twice a week, going to the Farmer's Market, watching ducks.

And my sister and her two girls came to visit for a WHOLE WEEK! It was such a marked change from the last time we saw each other a year and four months ago - this time the kids really played together and she and I were able to have real, prolonged, in-depth conversations. Not without interruption, of course, but we could focus enough on what each other was saying to have some really satisfying times together.

(My camera and I got caught in the rain and now the shutter won't open all the way...)

And it was awesome watching the kids interact. There's nothing quite like cousins who are close in age. No other playmates develop quite the same vibe, I think. The first night after the cousins went back to their hotel, Valerie just sat staring out the window sadly, and every morning she would ask (in Albanian) "Ku është Solana? Ku ështe Lotus? Ku është Aunt Anita?" Gabriel was always ready to bestow hugs and kisses (which inevitably culminated with somebody - or everybody - getting knocked down). So it was awesome (chaotic, but awesome). And thanks to Dot for accommodating the extra chaos around the house!

The same day they left, I also left for my first trip ever away from Gabriel!!!!!!!! I was in Winnipeg for two days visiting the MCC Canada offices, since they fund the MCC programs in Colombia. It was a good time to meet a lot of people and get re-oriented to different facets of the work. Many MCC structures and procedures have changed quite a bit since my previous volunteer term (1995-1999 in Bolivia), plus in the country representative (director) role Terry and I will be handling new responsibilities. So it was a good visit.

I also got to see a good friend from MCC Bolivia days, Jodi Read (Hi Jodi!) whose PhD research overlaps a good bit with mine - related to the US/Mexico border - so that was a lot of fun (it would have been a lot of fun even if our research interests didn't overlap at all) ;-) and she showed me around the Forks area of Winnipeg which is super, super cool and I highly recommend you check it out sometime if you get the chance.

I will have to say that I did not realize prior to this trip how much milk Gabriel was still getting from me. *****Breastfeeding content ahead****** but it quickly became clear to me after about 12 hours that I had severely underestimated that, and I spent most of the trip in a LOT of pain as a result. I didn't have a pump with me, or really much opportunity or space for hand-expressing, but I did what I could and mostly just had to grin and bear it. Whenever we do get around to weaning (and since this is my last baby I'm not in a huge hurry) it will hopefully be a much more gradual process because wow. I have never felt so much sympathy for cows that miss a milking. Nor so happy to see my little calf again. Moo.

"Home"coming

Terry is right this minute en route to the US - I'm sure experiencing a mix of emotions similar to what the kids and I have been processing (or just watching a movie... or sleeping...) We're all super excited to have him back very soon.

I'm slowly starting to dig through my long list of things to do. Made some good headway this morning which felt great.

Photos soon :-)

Snow Shoes in Jello

We've been here six days, but it still doesn't feel like we've quite landed...

I realized that while I am navigating familiar and comfortable ground, that's not quite true for the kids. Valerie seems to remember a lot of things, but it's hard to gauge how clearly, and what the emotional dimension of the memories are for her. She feels thing intensely to begin with, so I watch her staring with her solemn little face out the window as we drive places and wonder what she is feeling. For Gabriel, it's all a new adventure. He's meeting the experience with a sense of play and adventure, but is also at that volatile 2-year-old stage where he'll instantly flip over into whining limp-noodle mode if he's a little tired or hungry. We've been doing fun things every day but they've also been more tired than usual - and of course recovering from jet lag (although I think we're just about back to normal on that front).

Grammy and Grandpa's house is a paradise of toys and books. We've been made very comfortable in the family room on our own king-size mattress, with space for a train set given to us by a friend whose kids have outgrown it, and our little toddler table with two matching chairs is the perfect place for eating meals or playing with play-dough.

I have a varied range of things I need to attend to; while I'm starting to chip away at my list, I often feel like I'm running as fast as I can through a pool filled with Jello. With snow-shoes on. (I stole that line from one of my elementary school yearbooks, but that's exactly what it feels like.) So much of my energy and attention is soaked up by the kids, which is exactly as it should be. I just wish there were two of me sometimes!

I'll post some photos once Terry gets here with my lap-top.

We Made It!

So, that was an adventure!

21 hours door to door. 11 hours from Istanbul to DC. One mom, two little ones, and a sanity-saving iPad filled with apps for preschoolers.

It was pretty cool seeing Istanbul from the air, too bad that was all I saw other than a seriously confusing (if posh and shiny) airport.

We're still adjusting to the jet lag, slowly starting to re-acquaint ourselves with the 'Burg, and spending a lot of time exploring the wealth of toys and books at Grammy's house.

More soon when my brain starts working again!