Caribbean Pictures - The Bottom

I know I promised pictures of Windwardside for this post but I had a chance to go down to The Bottom today so I figured I'd take the time to take some pictures and post them.

So The Bottom is the home of...Jaron's school!  The place where Jaron spends almost everyday from approximately 3:30 AM to 5:00 PM. 

This is the main building of the school. 

I love this bush in front of the school.  Wouldn't you just love to know how to do this?  The best part is, it's in this fenced off area full of wild chickens and mango trees.  Awesome.

The school lunchroom.  It's super cool because it only has two walls.  The other two sides are completely open.  Ahhh, the Caribbean.

The Police Station.  And look!  Notice that sign? "Join the Police Force!"  Any takers?

This is all the government offices rolled into one.  Citizenship & Immigration, the Governor's office, the "DMV," etc.

The dispensary, aka the pharmacy.  I took the boys to the dentist when we were in Idaho and he gave us a prescription for fluoride multivitamins and gave us enough refills for a year.  I had a hard time convincing him that there was no Walgreen's or Wal-mart pharmacy where I could transfer the prescription to. :-)

The Catholic church in The Bottom.  I can't remember the exact year, but I think this church was built in the 1870's.  I'll have to confirm that....  Anyway, I told my friend, Lucia, I was going to take pictures in The Bottom this morning and she told me I absolutely had to go inside this church.  So I did, and this is what was inside:

Amazing, huh?  And this is the best part:

It was done by a local artist so it's this beautiful religious scene and there's a cute little island cottage tucked into it. 

The Hospital, aka "Gracen's almost birthplace." 

Our ambulance.  The whole island is like a small town so whenever you hear the siren, the whole island knows why within a few minutes.

A view of the street just to get a "feel" of The Bottom.

The view up the other side of the street.

The grocery store in The Bottom.  Hot dogs, fruit and chicken drumsticks are cheapest here.  In case you're ever in the neighborhood.

Next post - Windwardside!  I promise!

Caribbean Pictures - The Level

So I've been thinking that I live in the Caribbean but I don't post many Caribbean pictures.  I'm realizing that all these things that are "normal" to me now are not going to be normal for very much longer.  So I've decided I'm going to do a picture tour of the island, village by village.  These first pictures are of The Level, the neighborhood our house is in.  The Level is the highest neighborhood on Saba.

We'll start with the view from our front door! All the trees are our neighbor, Lloyd's, banana trees.  Lloyd reminds me of my father-in-law.  He's got banana trees, 9 different mango trees, oranges, tangeloes, tangerines, grapefruits and lemons growing in his yard.  Not to mention the vegetable garden he started about a month ago that is already flourishing.  Lloyd is also raising Hungarian pheasants (?) and bunnies for food.  On the left of the picture is Donna's house.  She's got a 6 year old boy, Shaliq, that Alden loves to play with.  My friend Lucia and her 1 year old daughter, Harlow, live in the apartment attached to Donna's house.  It's nice to have neighbors!

 

Here is Alden standing by our banana/fig trees.  Can you tell which is which?  Apparently the banana trees are shorter and stalkier and produce a longer, thinner fruit.  I didn't learn the difference until I made 36 muffins and 9 loaves of what I thought was banana bread and turned out to be fig bread.  Fig bread, anyone?

A close up of the fruit from our soursop tree.  Donna brought us some soursop juice once.  It was milky and kind of had a woody taste (if that makes any sense).  Donna also once brought us some fresh-squeezed tangerine juice.  YUMMMMMY!!

 

Our lemon tree.  It's kind of a bad picture, sorry.  It was bright and hard to see what I was taking a picture of!

Flowers.  Are.  EVERYWHERE.  I could dedicate a whole blog to pictures of flowers.  They are so beautiful!!

And another flower.

And another flower.

Our SWEET Saba car.  It is tiny and I love it.  It is a good car to drive on Saba's VERY, VERY NARROW roads.  The roads are so steep you wouldn't believe it.  But because of them, I am now an expert stick-shift driver.

Our cute little house.  I counted the tiles once and it is 525 square feet.  By far the smallest place we've lived in since having kids.  But it works for us.  Someday I'll pick up all the clutter and take pictures of the inside for you. Someday... ;-)

A view of the road.  I don't know, I thought this gave a good idea of what Saba "feels" like.

Alden in front of our neighborhood.  Our house is the one back on the hill.

Me and Eli in front of the 'hood.

 

This is what the jungle looks like from the side of the road.  Every inch of Saba that is not cliff, road or someone's yard is covered in jungle, all the way to the tip of Mount Scenery.

Another view down an incredibly steep road.  This road leads down to Booby Hill, where our last house was, and to Windwardside, the main "commerce" village.  Do you notice the ocean in the background?  Isn't it interesting how the ocean just blends in with the sky?  Most days it's too humid to be able to see the horizon between the ocean and the sky.  If you look closely, you can see the ocean skyline goes all the way up to just under that cloud (the ocean is a little bit darker blue).

The view of Upper Hell's Gate, another village, from our friend Rachel's porch.

This is how far back from the road our house is.  We, of course, have to park our car on the road then walk through a path to get to our house.  Making it back to the house with all my kids and all my groceries is no small feat!

Rachel's pineapple.

The plants that grow wild here are so cool!

This is the community garden.  You can buy organically grown vegetables here for a little cheaper than the grocery store.  And it's right across the street from my house!

So that's a little taste of our neighborhood!  Hope you enjoyed it!  Next post...Windwardside.

I can't get enough of this girl!

I'll be honest, with my first two kids I often wished away their babyhood.  It was always, "I can't wait until he's sleeping through the night."  "I can't wait until he can sit up."  "I can't wait until he can feed himself."  It's ironic because I'm really enjoying Gracen's babyness and our life has never been crazier or busier! (Jaron says it's because I know deep down that it's my last baby.  We'll see!! ;-D)

Gracen is a talker.  She has become so vocal in the last few weeks.  When she isn't just enthralled by whatever it is her brothers are doing (which is much of the time), she is just yabber-jabbering away.  She has also started voicing her demands.  Instead of her sweet little "come and get me" coo, she now hollars a really demanding "COME AND GET ME!" when she's done napping.  She also often voices her discontent at being put to bed.  When this girl is mad, she is MAD!  It makes me a little nervous - are girls really so much more moody that I can already tell the difference in my 3 month old??

Gracen has abs of steal.  Ever since she was a few weeks old, she has been practicing flexing her muscles like she's trying to sit up.  She does it in her bouncer all the time, as you can see here.  I put her down in the bouncer once "just for a quick second"before she was 2 months old and she sat herself up and out of the bouncer and flat onto the floor.

Gracen is a super happy baby, just like Eli was.  She smiles ALL THE TIME!  Well, almost all the time.  I love how her eyes follow me around the room and when I get close, she pulls out the grins.  She greets Jaron and I with BIG grins when we get her up from a nap. 

I can't believe that in one more week Gracen will be 4 months old.  Where has the time gone?!

Mothers Who Know

Okay, some might say I "preach" about motherhood a lot on this blog. And "some" would probably be right! :-D  But it's where I'm at in life and what's often on my mind.  So here's another "motherhood" post!


Last night I went out to "cooking night" with the women of SOS (Significant Others of Saba), a group for the significant others of professors and students.  One of the women asked me and the other moms if having kids is really worth it.  I hate that I can't answer that question well enough.  I wanted to communicate her the joy I get out of motherhood, truer and purer than joy I had ever experienced before becoming a mother.  I wanted to describe to her the incredible growth I've had as a person in the 3 short years I've been a mom.  Sure, I'm like anybody else.  More often than not, life as a mother of babies and toddlers and preschoolers (and adolescents and teenagers and adults as well, I would assume,) involves craziness or mundane tasks.  I once had a friend who put up a quote on her wall and that's when something clicked for me.  The quote read, "It's not the days we remember but the moments." Moments.  Motherhood is in the moments. 

Another great friend of mine has this video up on her blog (Thanks Christal!).  Our internet connection can't seem to handle downloading videos very well so I'm posting the link to YouTube instead.  It is from a talk given to members of our church by the president of our church's women's group, Julie Beck.  It sums up perfectly why we as LDS women cherish motherhood so much:

Mothers Who Know

If you've ever gotten the itch...

...to make your own furniture, this is the blog for you.  Even if you've ever just wished you could make your own, this is the blog for you.  This gal is fantastic.  She takes whatever she likes out of furniture mags (i.e. Pottery Barn, etc.) and designs plans to make them herself.  Then she posts the plans (and pictures!) on her blog for us to use!  The pluses are: 1.  She has a house full of great furniture that cost her very little. 2.  She can "tweak" things herself - choose the color, change the dimensions, etc.  3. YOU CAN DO IT TOO! 

UGHHHH....I am enjoying Saba but I can't wait to get back to the States to be able to scratch my crafty itch.  I may not be very good at it, but I enjoy it anyway!  No more of this crafting vicariously by reading other peoples' crafting blogs.  There's just something about creating that is good for the soul.

Happy furniture making!!


P.S.  Does anyone have a great chocolate chip oatmeal cookies recipe?  I love to make them because it's easy to tell myself the oatmeal makes them "healthy" but I just can't seem to pull off a decent batch.  If you've got a great recipe, please share!

Our Goings On

We haven't been up to much, but here's what we have been up to:

...sittin' around.

None of us look stunning in this picture but since I rarely get a picture of me and all my kiddos, I posted it anyway.

...talking with this gorgeous girl.

...watching her get bigger and bigger.  Now that she's three months old, she is a PURE JOY.  If all my babies are like Gracen, I will have ten...maybe.

...lying around.

...making life-size drawings.

...making playhouses.  Alden has already proposed to Chloe.  This is their first house together. :-D

...and drawing on ourselves.  I left them outside alone with the markers to color their playhouse for 5 MINUTES!

I must apologize...

...to any of you who are getting sick of my never-changing playlist that plays automatically.  I can't access it from where I am because of some "licensing laws" or something.  Sorry!  Looks like it's going to be playing the same old songs for the next 6 months or so...