Four years

Today is our four year anniversary. 

 

I can't believe we've been married for four years.  The time has flown by!  It's especially crazy to me considering my relationships pre-Davie never lasted longer than two months.  :) 

I'm so glad we are all together for good and not just visiting each other this year.  Last night we were making dinner and I realized how much I had missed the day-to-day part of our relationship while we were apart.  I love getting to kiss him as we pass in the kitchen while we make dinner together.  And him asking me how much ketchup I want for my fries.  The big things are nice - trips and kids and concerts and fancy restaurants - but it's the little things I love the most.  Last night Davie made the comment that we aren't able to go anywhere today for our anniversary - no car, job or babysitter makes it hard to go somewhere to celebrate.  :)  But I told him that all I really want to do today is be with him, so we don't need to go anywhere.  The last two weeks here with him and Eduardo and the animals have been great.  Tiring and busy and crazy, but so great too.  For all of the anxiety and uncertainty I felt about the move beforehand, it has really turned out to be a wonderful thing and I'm so glad we are all together here.  I think we will end up really loving this life, even though it doesn't look like what we had originally planned.  I'm not that good with plans anyway.  :) 

Year five promises to be a big one with lots of excitement.  And hopefully with lots of time spent with our growing family just around the house, enjoying being together.

Eduardo

This little boy is seriously beyond adorable.

He's currently reading books in his room because he's pouting that he can't go play in the pool more.  But it's dark and it was chilly at 3:30 this afternoon when we were in the pool, so we really don't want him in there again.  So even though the other kids are playing in the pool, he doesn't get to.  Davie told me Eduardo was mad so I told Eduardo to go take a shower then go lay in his bed and read books.  And Eduardo said ok and he's currently in his bed reading.  :)  I love how easy it is to get him to do things.  :)  Most of the time we don't even have to tell him anything.  We've given him the task of cleaning the cat litter boxes in the morning and at night.  And most of the time he just does it without us having to remind him.  He takes his dishes to the sink and puts a book away before he gets out another.  He is so easy going and mostly happy.  And I swear he has more patience than anything I've seen.  With all the errands we've been running and all the not-fun-for-children places we've been going, he just goes with us and doesn't say anything and stays mostly still for the long waits.  We had a forever long wait getting him student insurance (he has to have it to be able to go on field trips with school, assuming his teacher ends her strike soon and he can go to school) and we couldn't use cell phones at the insurance office, so he just had to sit and wait with us.  And he did awesome.  I have no idea where he gets his patience from, maybe his mom, because Davie certainly doesn't have any!  :)

We've been watching movies at night.  I brought some of my favorites from when I was a kid that I wanted him to watch, in addition to all of the Disney movies I've been buying him over the last year and a half.  We've watched Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Hook, Doctor Doolittle (the original, not the remake :P), The Neverending Story, plus more.  I love that he is loving these movies.  Even though some of them don't have Spanish dubbed or subtitled, he still seems to like them.  He cried when Atreyu's horse died in The Neverending Story and seemed to really enjoy the novelty of Honey I Shrunk the Kids. 

I'm so excited to get to share in his childhood and be a part of his life.  I can't wait to be able to cheer for him at his soccer games and watch him continue to grow into an amazing person!

Week 1

I can't believe we've been here a week already.  Time is going by so fast!!  Today we really did just stick around the house and got lots done.  They came to put in the cable and WiFi around 11am and after an hour and a half told us the signal strength wasn't strong enough to reach our house and we couldn't get them through their company.  :P  But supposedly the landlord says the people here before us had the same company so we should be able to get it fine. We're going to have to call tomorrow and see what they say.  Davie is very distressed as there is a soccer championship this weekend that he wants to watch Saturday.  :)  Maybe we can find the game online and he can watch it that way. 

The appointment with the lawyer ended up being rescheduled for next week.  Hopefully we'll actually meet with them next week and finally find things out. 

We finally unpacked today.  We have a room in between our bedroom and our bathroom that's our closet.  But instead of having the normal closet set-up like you would see in the US with bars to hang the clothes and maybe some shelves, there are armoire type things that are heavy wood and leather pieces of furniture that don't have a back.  I do not like them as they are dark and seemed dirty and I just kept picturing that there would be something creepy crawly behind the door every time I opened it.  I did not want to put my clothes in the dark and then go to get a shirt (or a pair of underwear!!) and come out with a huge spider or a centipede or something!!  Davie finally came up with the plan for him to just take the doors off the things, since that's what was really freaking me out, and he did that today and it worked perfectly!  He cleaned them out and then we put our clothes away and baby's clothes away as she has a similar piece of furniture in her room instead of a closet like we would have in the States.  Eduardo just has a white bookcase type thing with doors in his room that doesn't bother me nearly as much.  I wanted to switch the armoire in Eduardo's room with the one in the baby's room as I would prefer white furniture in her room, but Davie said the one in baby's room is nailed to the floor, so that was a no go.  I really have no idea why the armoires were bothering me so much, but I love the solution that Davie came up with.  When he said "I'll just take the doors off" I couldn't get over how simple it was but how much of a difference it made in how I felt about the closet situation!  I guess if these are the things I'm really worried about right now and Davie's worried about watching the game Saturday, we're doing pretty darn well for ourselves here.  :) 

Davie got to see baby yesterday for the first time.  Her little face was very cute!!!  She's over a pound now, which I've been waiting for as there's just something about her weighing a pound that makes me feel better.  I know she still has a long way to go, and a pound isn't much, but I much prefer measuring her in pounds now instead of just ounces! 

I think that's all we've got for now.  I applied for a bunch of jobs today and reached out to people who I have met here or who might be able to help me from the US get a job here, so hopefully something will work out on that front soon.  Keep your fingers crossed for us! 

I was going to end with the paragraph above, but I just have to tell you that Davie is currently reading a book that only has English to Eduardo.  He's translating it into Spanish as he goes for Eduardo.  He's asking me some questions on each page (and I'm using Google translate if needed :)), but he's getting a fair amount of it on his own.  And twice now, Eduardo has had the answer for what a word meant!  I'm so proud of how far Davie has come with his English.  He still has a ways to go, but considering he was in Nicaragua without anyone to practice with for 17 months, he has learned so much!!  Of course he's nervous about using it with all of you one day, but I told him he just needs to keep practicing and he'll get there.  Between the two of us we fight over what language to use as I need to practice my Spanish for work and he needs to practice his English for just life in general.  :)  I don't know how we have been able to make this work for almost four years now (five if you count the time before we were married), but somehow it works for us.  :)  Maybe we're just so stubborn that we're going to make it work no matter what.  :)  I think that's how we're going to make this new life in Costa Rica work too.  Being so stubborn that it just has to work, no matter what!  There are no other options at this point.  :)

Welcome to crazy town

Things here are going well, but man they are crazy too.  :)  We've had lots of "incidents" as we try to figure out how to work things like the oven and the washing machine and trying to find an A/C option that will work for us.  Eduardo had to run and get the security guard / maintenance man this morning because we tried washing towels and ended up with water pouring out of the laundry room.  Oops.  :)  Good thing the room is outside the house and not inside!  I knew there was a reason I've been afraid to try to wash clothes.  :) 

We spent an hour yesterday morning at Eduardo's future school getting him enrolled.  He's all ready to start school now, but his teacher is currently on strike, so we're not sure when he'll actually go for his first day.  We're supposed to watch the news to learn when the teachers are back at work.  Which wouldn't be an issue if we had TV, but we don't yet.  :P  We also went yesterday and cancelled the cable option we had originally signed up for and signed up for a different option that our landlord uses and we should have TV in the next day or so.  We'll see.  Hopefully Eduardo will start school soon!  Until then, we're going to try to work on his English some every day.  I like the school we signed him up at - I guess it's not technically the one he should be going to as there is one closer that is for our "province", but the other kids in the condo complex go to this school because it's supposed to be better and it has English lessons three times a week, so that makes me very happy!  He's starting in first grade, when he was in second grade in Nicaragua, but I feel like he's probably closer to first grade than second grade and I don't want him so behind that he can't catch up!  Especially if they teach English, it's better that he be in first grade I feel.  He also only started reading a few months ago, so I don't think he's quite at the second grade level.  Of course I really have no idea and I'm completely just guessing.  :)  We'll see how it all works out!  Also, for those of you who are parents, is 6 almost 7 too old to take a nap in the afternoon??  Eduardo ends up exhausted by the end of the day and yesterday fell asleep on the couch at 6:30 and then went up and went to bed!  He ends up waking up extremely early since he goes to bed so early, and I'm wondering if a nap around 2 or 3 in the afternoon would help him stay up a bit later?  Does it even matter?  Davie gets up with him in the morning so I can sleep for a while longer, so I can't complain about him getting up early, I just worry about how tired he gets by 6 or 7 at night.  Yesterday he also fell asleep in the car in the early afternoon, so I feel like he could nap in the afternoon without any problem.  Of course our schedule lately has been so crazy, it's no wonder the kid is exhausted, and we've had no set schedule for him to get used to.  I just want to do the best thing for him!  School for him will start at 7am and get out around 2pm, so maybe he can do an hour or so of "rest" time when he gets back from school and maybe nap or just spend quiet time in his room and that would help?  I have no idea.  I've been a "parent" for six days and I'm already lost.  :)

I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon with an OGBYN here so I'm excited to meet the doctor and hopefully we'll like her and we can feel good about using her going forward.  I'm also hoping for an ultrasound so Davie can see baby!!  :)  It'll be his first ultrasound experience as either Maria never went with Eduardo or Davie never went when she did. 

Tomorrow we have an appointment at 10am with a lawyer to talk about residency options for us.  Currently we are all here on tourist visas.  Which is how it works here - I know it sounds weird for us to be living here on a tourist visa, but that's how it's supposed to start.  I've got a 90 day visa and Eduardo and Davie are both on 30 day visas.  My understanding of how the process works is that the lawyer will apply for Davie and Eduardo to have 90 day visas and after 90 days we'll either have to leave the country for 3 days and go to Nicaragua or Panama or something, or we'll have been able to do a different application to get residency / work permits.  If I can get a job before the 90 days, then I can stay on a work permit and Davie and Eduardo can stay as my relatives and we won't be on tourist visas anymore.  I don't think a work permit gives us all of the same rights as residency though, but I'm not 100% sure about that, we'll have to see.  When baby is born, we can apply for residency as her parents, so we'll either be on tourist visas or work permits / relative visas until she's born and we can apply for residency through her.  I know it sounds complicated and weird, but it's just the way it's done here.  At least, it's my understanding of how it's done.  I could be totally wrong, I seem to be wrong about a lot of things quite often :), but that's why we're going to the lawyer tomorrow so they can better explain to us our options and how things should work.  Our condo complex seems to be all people who have come here from other countries, and they all had similar understandings as me as far as how the process goes.  There's a woman from Italy who had a baby here about 15 months ago and she's still on a tourist visa as she didn't want to hassle with the paperwork to apply for residency when the baby was born and she was already planning trips to leave the country for various reasons so she could renew her tourist visa at that time.  I'm not sure about her husband's status (he's from England), but I think he may be here on a work permit.  They are actually moving to Ecuador soon - she's leaving Saturday and he and the baby are following in a few weeks - so I guess it makes sense that they never did the residency process.  She did say she had a friend who applied for residency without a baby and got it within a few months, so that's encouraging too.  I'm not really worried about us getting a permanent status here.  We just have to stay on top of it and make sure we don't do anything we aren't supposed to during the interim time that could prevent us from getting residency.  It'll be nice when we have residency, as I ended up spending $1,000 on a return ticket home last Thursday because Costa Rica wants proof that you are leaving the country when you are on a tourist visa and I couldn't check into my flight without a return flight home.  When we have residency, we won't have to worry about things like that!  Thankfully it's a refundable ticket, so I think I should be able to use it pretty easily for my trip home in November.  But it was a surprise purchase last week!  I had read that they would want proof of leaving the country, but I had hoped I could just tell them I was renting a car and driving with Davie to Nicaragua.  Turns out that didn't work as they wanted proof of the car rental.  :P  Oh well.  It all ended up working out, even if it wasn't quite as I had planned!  We all made it and that's really all that matters.

We're still looking at cars to buy.  So far we're just renting.  I'm not sure how I ever thought we could make it without a car.  It's just not who I am.  Driving here and being able to get around and knowing we can go whenever and wherever we want helps me feel so much more comfortable and confident here.  There's no way I could rely on public transportation only!  Maybe if we were someplace like New York that has the subway right outside your door and lots of cabs and buses, but we aren't in a place like that and buses aren't convenient and cabs add up fast!  It was $120 for the cab on Thursday that picked us up from the airport and took Davie back to the airport to pick up the other two animals and took him to a pet store to get supplies we still needed.  Which it was around 3 or so hours of his time, so I don't feel like $120 is all that much, but considering we spent 10 hours yesterday running errands, I can't even imagine how much we would have spent had we taken cabs everywhere!  The realtor we used who found us the house told us about a GPS app called Waze that we use to get around and it is awesome.  It's not perfect, but it makes a huge difference in us being able to get places as everything here is so confusing.  I'm very glad we have it! 

I think I'll stop for now, as this has already become a book.  Overall, despite all the hiccups, we're just very glad to be together and things really are going well.  We're hot and tired and on the verge of being overwhelmed with it all, but at night when we lay down to sleep and Eduardo is there and the animals are around we're just very, very happy to finally be all together and making this work.  It's going to be great.  :) 

We have internet!!!

Man the past few days have been crazy!!  The condo complex had a cookout last night but we didn't get back to the house until after it had already started and we were all exhausted beyond belief, so we didn't end up going.  Well, except Davie had to go down and find our next door neighbor to tell him he could no longer park in the middle of the driveway because we have a car now and have to get through.  :P  It's just a rental car for now, but hopefully we'll have bought something early next week.  We'll see - if the last few days have been any indication, we'll spend lots of time getting not much accomplished.  It took over an hour this afternoon to get internet and cable!  And it's not really internet that I would prefer to have - it's just one of the USB sticks that will get me internet on my computer versus WiFi for the whole house - and we won't have cable for 10ish days because they have to come set it up.  But at least it's a start! 

I'll write more later.  I had started a post on the plane on Thursday, but I don't know if I'll ever get that posted.  It's on my iPhone and we currently haven't been able to find someone who can convert the phone to be used in Costa Rica.  Well, we did find someone but it was going to cost $200 and take a month.  :P  I'm not so opposed to the $200, but the month part wasn't ideal to say the least.  I'm thinking I may try to Google how to do it tomorrow and see if I can figure it out myself!  :)

Tomorrow our plan is to be lazy around the house so I can rest and prepare for my interview with Walmart Monday morning at 8am.  I cannot have a day like we've had the last few days - running around like crazy and getting back to the house exhausted!  I need to be rested and ready so I can nail this interview and get a job!!  :)  I do have to say, I am glad I don't have a job to go to Monday like I had originally hoped for - there's still so much to do to get settled in, it's nice to have some time to get everything done in!  That being said, I would like a job sooner rather than later, so positive thoughts my way would be appreciated.  :)

Oh, one other thing, I'm beginning to be afraid that we've already adopted an outside cat!  :P  He/she is outside right now meowing his head off to be let in.  I'm hoping maybe he just got lost and will find his way back home soon.  Of course the leftover hamburger bun and fries that Eduardo put out for him probably won't help us get rid of him anytime soon.  :)  He is a pretty guy, but I firmly believe that three cats and a dog is enough!!!!  :)  (Which, everyone made it here okay, thank goodness!  Maybe tomorrow I'll write more about the trip.)

It never fails

Things never work out as planned.  :)  Davie and Eduardo didn't end up making it to Costa Rica yesterday.  They had to get additional paperwork for Eduardo before they could leave, so they should be on a bus at 10am (11am our time) headed that way.  Let's hope it works today!  And that my travel day tomorrow goes much smoother!  :)  It's going to be a busy day tomorrow - after my flight gets in, I have to pick up Tiger from the cargo area then go to their equivalent of the USDA to pick up import permits for Sammie and Bella, then we'll take Tiger and Sweet Pea to the house if we have time, then go back to the airport to pick up Sammie and Bella when their flight comes in 2 and a half hours after mine.  Since they aren't on the same flight as me, they need import permits.  I spoke with the vet Monday who will issue the import permits and he kept telling me not to worry.  Which of course just makes me feel like I should be worrying!!!  We'll see how it all goes.  My hope is that by 3pm tomorrow afternoon we are all at the new house safe and sound.  Let's hope that's how it works!!

Dad and I and the animals will leave AR for Houston around 10am.  It's supposed to be rainy the whole way.  Yuck!!

On Their Way!!!

Davie and Eduardo are almost to Managua as I write this. They are taking an 11am bus out of Managua to Costa Rica and should be there this afternoon late. It's crazy to me to think this is really happening. I know we've been planning it now for months, but it still feels weird now that all of our plans are coming to fruition. I've got a few more errands to run today and then Dad and I head to Houston tomorrow. Just a few more days and Davie and Eduardo and the animals and I will be together!!!