gifts from abuelita (grandma)

he reminds me of "Joe Cool".  I'm sure he would never get the reference.

of the three, Santi needed the helmet and knee-pads the most!  I guess the three wheels really threw him off.

even Brinks is protecting him!

I'm sure this is the only time we'll see that helmet on him by choice!

spontaneous kisses

For those of you who have been following regularly, you know that our eldest son Josua has some issues with any displays of affection.  We celebrated the first time he said “I love you” and now we have more reason to celebrate.  Today, while reading a bedtime story, he leaned over and gave me kiss on the cheek!  Now, unlike the first kiss, which he gave me because he wanted to eat a piece of candy that I had in my hand—this one was totally spontaneous and lacked any ulterior motive.  J  He gave Ben a kiss goodnight last night as well.  I think he may be finally warming up to us.  We have had an incredibly busy week as our first one home.  Josua went to the doctor and he ordered a bunch of tests:  we did blood tests to test which shots he has had and we also did a full bone survey so that we could have that on file (thanks to the Hollis’ who mentioned that in their blog).  Josua was a trooper and was able to start school on Thursday.  He LOVES it.  His teacher has been great and so far he thinks it’s fab.  I think his favorite part is telling his brothers that he is the only one in school because he is the oldest.  The others are appropriately jealous and he just smiles.

All of them are learning English very well.  There is a lot of Spanglish spoken in the house…  the current favorite phrase is “quiero mas tomoates, please”  (I want more tomatoes, please).  All of the boys absolutely adore tomatoes, so we keep the grape tomatoes in the house and serve them at every dinner, so they learned “tomato” really quickly because they all want them so badly.  We laughed the other day as I said what no parent thinks they will ever say, “No more tomatoes until you eat more pasta.”  Honestly, what parent has to tell their kid to eat FEWER vegetables (ok, technically tomatoes aren’t veggies)?

Today was also a big day because we bought the boys bicycles.  More precisely we bought two bicycles and a tricycle.  They were all so excited to get on the bikes until they actually did.  They all fell quite a few times—training wheels and all—which dampened the mood quite a bit.  However, they all stuck with it and are learning well.  Josua got the hang of it pretty quickly.  Samuel doesn’t yet understand that the brakes stop him whenever he pedals backwards, so he often jerks himself to a stop accidentally.  Santiago pedals beautifully, but can’t quite figure out the steering.  All I can say is yay for helmets and knee pads!

The kids are asleep, and we should be too, so I think I will sign off and head to bed.  My little ones get up REALLY early and I need to keep up with them!

WE ARE HOME!  IF you’re wondering about the title, public toilets have no seats in Colombia, and they rarely provide toilet paper to you.  Regardless, you throw the paper in a trash can next to the toilet, and never the toilet itself—it was tough to remember as it’s habit to just chuck the paper into the toilet and flush.  How great it is to sit on a toilet and flush without thinking!!  But I digress…  We have had an adventure getting home, but we got home over the weekend and are settling in to life at home as we speak.  Life last week was a blur.  On Sunday we went to Jaime DuQue, a sort of Busch Gardens where the boys saw animals (mostly monkeys and this HUGE rabbit) and went on a few rides like a huge slide and this decrepit “monorail” which was actually on two rails.  They has a great time.  We went with two other families, Erin and Lucas and Cory, Jeff, Elkin and Norma.  We got rained out, so the boys could not go on the boats, but they handled it pretty well.  All in all, I am really impressed with them—no major meltdowns despite a pretty big day!  The next few days we pretty much took it easy and worked on getting immigration visas for the boys.

The next big issue was travel day, we had to get up at 5am to finish and eat before the cab picked us up at 6.  ugh.  We made it with no huge issue except that the boys were exhausted.  Luckily, the idea of going up into the sky in an airplane won out!  All went really quite well.  We had their backpacks, so they had things to keep them occupied—I even pulled out a few new toys.  They were enamored of the little tables that fold down and most impressed that the airplane has a bathroom.  Their eyes got huge when I told them and they all wanted to “chi chi” as soon as possible just to see it.  Everything was dandy until we started the descent.  Santiago began screaming because he had to buckle up again.  He has never been buckled before in his life except for the take-off and that was so exciting, he didn’t notice being strapped down.  He was screaming at the top of his lungs when Josua (he decided to spell it with an “a” because he didn’t like his name mispronounced) realized the pain of decompression in his ears, so he began crying as well.  Samuel was happy as a clam—the only one sucking on the candy we gave all of them, his ears were fine—he clapped and giggled while we landed.  We made it through immigration and customs in record time.  Santiago had still not stopped screaming (we were at about 1 ½ hours of scream-a-thon at this point), and even the intimidating guards were giving us kind “I feel so sorry for you” looks.  Santi continued to scream for another hour while we got our luggage and took the shuttle to get the rental car.  After 3 hours of solid screaming, we thought he would sleep in the car—no such luck.  We popped in the movie and he kept crying and pulling at the car seat restraints.  At least at this point, his throat hurt too much to scream, so it was more of a soft wimper…  I pray that this will get better because he’s going to be in a car seat for many more years.  We got home around midnight and we checked out the house and the cats and then pretty much crashed.  We have spent the past couple of days just trying to find a routine.  My favorite thing is being able to actually sleep in my own bed!  YAY!

We have more to share with you all, but I am exhausted and need to sleep.  Thanks for your thoughts and prayers!

The boys became fast friends with Elkin and Norma, two other kids in the house.  They, honestly, were just like this on the slide....no prompting at all!

We went to an amusement park with the boys.  At the entrance, there were a couple of dinosaurs.  They HAD to have a picture with them.

In the park, there was a monorail ride.  In reality, it's a 1950's farm tractor wrapped in sheet-metal on a concrete track 25 feet in the air.  The whole thing tops out at about 2 MPH, so it's a thrill a minute!  This picture is from inside!

This was also on the monorail.

On our last evening, we took a number of pictures with the boys and the other famlies that were staying at El Refugio.  Here are the boys with Gabriel and Theo, who are the sons of Matilde and Yvan from Paris.  Gabriel and Josua loved playing soccer together.  In this photo, neither is all that excited about posing as you can see.

We have had the most insane few days.  We got a call late on Thursday, Lucia told us that we would be signing the papers for sentencia.  What good news!  I went to sign the papers (Ben was trying to get some work done).  Then on Friday we got a call at 7:45 in the morning with a full itinerary for the day.  We got birth certificates in the morning, went to the passport office at lunch time and then went to the embassy doctor.  Oh my word, it was such a hard day.  The boys were trying to be good, but they were hungry and tired and had to keep still for a really long time.  Ah well,  it means that we made it before the strike.  Incidentally, for those of you who will be travelling—all of the judges in Colombia are going on strike as of September 3^rd.  I’m not sure if they’ve been on a “slow down” in the meantime, but I don’t think so.  The good news is that all of Colombia is affected, not just one region.  It means that the strike is much less likely to last very long.  We have heard that it is not likely to last more than a few days. 

We will head to the US embassy on Tuesday to start the process of getting visas.  Isn’t it just our luck? No Colombian holidays to slow us down, so we get one of the few US holidays smack on the only day we need to go to the embassy.  We’ll probably be coming home next Friday, so it will be four weeks in Bogota for us.  The good news is that we will be home in less than a week!