Holy Crap!

So the doctor put Ariana on phase one Gerber juices and baby food. I was excited to be able to start giving her real food, I feel so bad eating in front of her. I gave her juice the next morning for breakfast, the whole four ounces. About an hour later, as I was talking to a neighbor, I heard and felt a BM, which is always a good thing since she had problems with constipation a lot the first few months. But she doesn´t stop, it keeps gurgling out. Then my arm was all warm. I turned her over and she had diarrhea seeping clear up her back. She gave another little pushed and it started coming out of her arm sleeves! I am totally not exaggerating! That was a surprise. I only give her half at a time now.

She hates the spoon concept. She gets pretty mad when she tries to suck on the spoon and doesn´t get the expeted results. I cut a hole in one of the nipples so I can still give her the cearal and baby food, but this way she gets to suck it up. I try it with a spoon first everytime, and I let her hold the spoon while she eats. We are getting there. That stuff stains clothes though. Both her best onsie and my favorite shirt are lost causes now. Bummer.

She weighed in at 16 lbs 11 ounces on Friday. What a chunk! She moves around a lot, I´m still not exactly sure how. She doesn´t scoot or crawl but some how she moves. I think it´s a rocking thing, just shifting her weight back and forth. She´s sneaky.

She reacts and laughs a lot now, I love it! But she is way attached to me. I tried to teach Relief Society on Sunday and the minute I handed her over to someone else she started screaming. Isaac was teaching EQ so I couldn´t have sent her with him either. I couldn´t focus, neither could anyone else. Three or four different women passed her around for about 5 minutes while I stumbled through my lesson trying to be heard over her screaming then I finally put my manual down and went to the back of the room to get her. She stopped crying the second I took her back. I finished the lesson juggling her and my manual but she was happy. Isn´t this supposed to start around 9 months old? I told the RS president that we need to make sure next time I teach that Isaac and I aren´t teaching on the same day.

Welcome to Paradise

martes, 27 de mayo de 2008

I have been highlighting alot of the icky things happening here right now. But can I just reaffirm that I really am living in a tropical paradise! We have a huge variety of beautiful beaches with bathwater warm water as close as a half hour from our house. Across from the beach are the mountains which are just as breathtaking. I could take a picture of my front yard and put it on a paradise postcard!

But my favorite thing about Panama is the fruit (and fish). Right now our neighbors are GIVING us bags full of sweet, ripe, huge mangos. They are so yummy! I have been cutting them up and freezing them so they don´t go bad and we can make shakes. We´ve also been given some papayas that I made milk shakes out of. They are so sweet I don´t even have to add sugar. And the pineapples here – amazing. 60 cents of amazing. There is a myriad of other fruits that are just so yummy and interesting but you get the idea – oh yeah – passion fruit – mmmmm. Everytime I watch Lost (we just started season one a few weeks ago, but we are on season 3 now) I totally feel like we are living in a place like that – except for being stranded on an island with crazy people – ok, it even feels like that sometimes. But the greenness, the fruit everywhere, the pretty beaches and beautiful water, the perma-sweaty clothes. That´s our life!

Nature just reminded me about my other favorite thing here – the rain. I LOVE Panama rain. It comes down hard and long. But it brings in a nice breeze and smells so good. It just started raining now and my computer is at a desk looking out my living room window. A few minutes ago I was watching these stunning little hummingbirds pick at the flowers in the front yard, but now it is a sheet of rain that makes all the greenness glisten. I love greenness.

So, yeah, there are bugs and spiders and competitions between the ants and the mosquitos (more like cohabitation) but you have to take the bad with the good. Cherish said she would rather have snow than bugs. Not me, I´ll take the bugs any day if they come with a good tropical rainstorm and a barrel of mangos!

I took all of the pictures in this collage except the one of the city. Doesn´t it look like a paradise to you?

Ants in My Pants

May 20, 2008

Ants. I am so feed up with ants. At first I felt bad killing them. But now I decided it doesn’t matter because they come back by the hundreds. They are in all of our clothes, of course the kitchen, last week I found a column of ants going from the ceiling, down the baby’s mosquito net and into her bed. Fortunately I noticed it before she got bitten (don’t know if that is the right tense). It took me an hour to shake out all of her blankets, wash the mosquito net (by hand of course, no washer or dryer here) and get all of the ants out of the little nooks in her bed. I remade her bed and hung the mosquito net in a different part of the room. In the evening when I went to put her down – they were back. I big column marching from the ceiling down the mosquito net and all over in her bed. Argh! At least that time Isaac was there to help me do the process over again. Then he put Icy/Hot sports cream all over the hanger so the ants wouldn’t climb on it again. He’s a thinker.

The ants also invaded my toothbrush. Hundreds of these little tiny ants. But it was fairly dark and I was in a hurry so I didn’t actually notice until I saw something weird on my lips as I was brushing my teeth. Yeah, ants, all over in my mouth. That day I started looking for a new place to live. We’ll move in August when our contract is up.

A few nights ago Isaac took the 4am turn with the bottle and he turned on the light in the kitchen so there was enough to see by in the living room (yeah, we sleep in the living room still). He could see a large black shape a foot or two away from the bed, and he watched it for a minute. He said he could tell by the way it moved that it was a tarantula. So he took of his flip flop and threw it at him; he’s a pretty good shot, he got it. Course the sound of the flip flop smacking the floor woke me up, and he said, “Don’t worry; it was just a little tarantula, just half the size of my palm”. Not one of the big ones. I took a picture, but since it was dead it had all its hairy legs pulled in and it’s not that impressive. I asked Isaac to let me get a picture first before he kills the next one.

Last night I was hanging clothes up on our clothes lines and I saw this huge, ugly beetle on the clothes line. I just decided to steer clear of it. They don’t scare me but I don’t like them very much. But at one point my head brushed up close enough for it to jump on. I didn’t notice till a half hour later when I scratched my head and felt this big thing on my head. I freaked out and called Isaac in to untangle it from my hair. The funny thing is that that beetle freaked me out a lot more than anything else I’ve seen so far. I guess I felt attacked.

We decided to build a house. One with windows that close and real doors, rather than the open iron gate we have for a back door. I’m so excited for that. They say it will take about three months. Not too bad.