Insomnia + Pink Eye + Water Damage + Sinus Infection = Time For Complaining

This post is not for the faint of heart, or for those who will be offended by my complaining. Okay, so it's not really all that dramatic, nor is it disgusting, but it's 5:30 am here and I haven't gone to bed, so I'm going to complain a little bit about a few things. I get to do that occasionally, right?

Carnaval is over, and as you may have seen on my facebook update, I finally managed to get pegged by a water balloon. This was frustrating on many levels, especially considering I had worked so diligently to avoid the silly string spraying, water bazooka toting, tightly wrapped tiny water balloon throwing festivities. They wrap the water balloons intentionally to make it hurt and then throw them from anywhere, including moving cars. That's how I got hit, and Micah's face was very close to getting hit, and that really made me mad. I don't want to feel like I have to baricade myself in my home in order to protect my children during the week-long free-for-all.

And speaking of being baricaded in our house, we are STILL trying to get in touch with the owner about some issues. It took us weeks to find her about some things (she was in Disneyworld apparently), but the guy to fix stuff hasn't shown up twice and then either didn't fix things at all or things are still broken. The big problem, though, that we have been trying to talk to her about for a week, is that with all the rain, there is suddenly some significant water damage to the walls where windows are. And it's bad in places, like bubbling paint and chips falling off, and I'm really afraid mold is going to start growing. This is bad news and is going to require some significant repairs on her part, and I don't know how that's going to be accomplished. There's a small part of me that is really afraid that we're going to have to move, and if that happens, I might cry harder than when I had packed all of my boxes for shipping and two hours later had to unpack and then repack them. I don't want to move. At all. But water damage is seriosu stuff for a number of reasons.

Alex got pink eye last Friday. Thankfully we caught it pretty early, but the problem is that it was the Friday afternoon before a major four-day holiday, and no one was around to look at her. Fortunately Jason was at a dinner that night with one of the doctor's who used to work for SP, and she told him what we needed, which was a huge help. But she was pretty much out of commission for a few days during the vacation, which really stunk. Oh, and then I started not feeling the best and went to the doctor this morning (first visit free!) and am on a series of shots for antibiotics, which is new for me. But when I woke up this morning and my face was hurting, I knew I couldn't deny the inevitable. They gave me a double shot today (and that one hurt and bruised, I think because it was such a long shot), and I have to go back tomorrow (which is actually today now - all of the other stuff happened yesterday), and then again on Friday. That's kind of a pain, especially when you don't feel good, but at least it will help me get better.

And I could recover much more quickly if I was not closing in on week two of some insomnia. I keep having a really hard time getting to sleep and then waking up every hour or two until about three, and then I basically just doze for the rest of the morning. Except for when I didn't sleep at all tonight. I don't know if it's stress of compounded fear of sleeping because I keep not being able to sleep or what, but I can tell you that I'm actually really, really tired. Something to pray about, right? Maybe I could give up insomnia for Lent...

So that's my grumbling. I'll try not to do it often because, honestly, life is really great here in so many ways. But sometimes a girl just has to air the crap.

The End of the Beginning

I've included a few pictures of the apartment. It's not totally put together, but this gives a better idea.

We are finally, truly starting to settle in La Paz. We've been back for almost a month now, which has been great. The kids have their own beds, and we've put their rooms together and have some storage for their stuff and a wooden storage thing for the playroom. And we have couches and a dining room table and we bought a rug and a television (thanks to the family for that awesome gift) and everything feels like it's actually real.

Alexis has loved being back at school, and it was really cool to see her with her classmates at a birthday party last week and how much they enjoyed having her around. (I don't know what I'll do if I end up having a popular kid since I never was in the least.) She's been working a lot on writing her numbers so that they're neater. Maybe she can have better writing than her mother, and by better I mean at least somewhat legible. She gets up every morning and plays quietly in her room until the rest of the family is up, and she comes home from school every day very happy and excited. Except for one day, when she "broke" something on the bus and another kid threatened her with the office, which terrified her. Other than that, she still loves school and her teacher, and she loves seeing the other teachers outside of school, too.

Micah is his same euphoric, miserable self. Ecstatic one moment, writhing in agony the next. He is getting pretty good at counting, and we're still working on his colors. He has a number of them but still gets the basics confused a lot. He goes out with me a lot in the mornings and is getting more used to being without a stroller, although he still frequently wants to be held. He loves having the car shopping carts to himself when we go to the grocery store, though. His favorite new thing is Blue's Clues; he gets REALLY into answering the questions. His talking has just exploded recently, too. It kept feeling like he was going through growth spurts for a few months, but now it seems like he's going through talking spurts and is forming so many long, complete sentences now. It's always fascinating to listen to him bust out with a word I've never heard him use.

Everyone has been fighting colds on and off, but I'm hoping that we've all recovered for the most part. It has been rainy, rainy, rainy here, making it a bit difficult to get laundry to dry. We have an enclosed laundry area in our apartment, which is wonderful, but when it's wet, it takes longer. Plus I haven't been able to wash sheets because I can't find a sunny day for them to dry outside. I've loved the rain, though, and it's especially nice that if I have to go out, we're in a garage and there's a grocery store that has garage parking. If I need food, the rain isn't even a worry.

I still go to the market a few blocks away frequently, but I think I'm going to stop going as much for a few reasons. First, they're typically more expensive than the grocery stores. Two, I never know what I'm going to find or if they're going to have it. I went yesterday primarily looking for cherries but had about a dozen other things on the list and walked out with only two items purchased. I then proceeded to go to the grocery store. I wonder if the grocery stores are at some point going to put the markets out of business because the stores can buy in such bulk. (I imagine that's why most prices are lower, but I could be wrong about that.)

It's also CARNAVAL this long weekend, so my plan is to avoid going places where my children might be in danger of being pelted with water balloons. That's how they have fun here. I can just imagine Micah's reaction to that, and I'd rather keep that in my imagination instead of my reality.