I'm Out of Gas.

On Friday, I went down to get gas.  The one and only gas station's pump wasn't working so they referred me to the quarry, where they have an industrial pump for their work vehicles that they sometimes sell gas from when the gas station's in a "pinch."  6 other people and I waited for half an hour and no one showed up.  I bailed when my kids were just too far past the start of naptime.  Thank goodness our neighbor lent us the extra gas he keeps on hand to run his generator he uses during power outages!

Today I ran out of cooking gas, which comes in a portable tank under our house.  Looks like we'll be cooking dinner in the microwave for the next few days!

God bless America.  Happy Memorial Day!

The Things We Do

Isn't Gracen the cutest box of Ting you've ever seen?  Ting is a Caribbean drink that's similar to Grapefruit pop but muuuuuuuch better.  I brought my groceries home in one of their boxes and thought it would make the perfect place to sit Gracen in until she is completely steady sitting up by herself.  It's a great way to prevent her from tipping over and bonking her head on our hard tile floors.  I threw in a 10 lb dumbell to steady her and, voila, a homemade Bumbo.

Gracen just always has to be upright, watching the action!  The toys on the exercauser are wonderful, but all the action going on beyond the exersaucer is SO much better!

Gracen loves to play peek-a-boo.  I know it's a little early but she's been doing it for a couple of months now and it is so funny.  When I leave her on the bed, I come back and find her like this:

Face hidden by a corner of the blanket.  Then she'll pull it on and off again and again, thinking it's hilarious if someone calls "boo!" to her each time.  Cute, cute girly!

Yesterday we made bubble pipes out of plastic cups, straws, dish detergent and water.  Here's my tutorial: Just cut a hole in the cup halfway down and insert a straw.  Fill with equal parts dish soap and water and get ready for minutes and minutes of entertainment.  Warning: do not do with kids young enough to confuse blowing out of the straw with sucking up from a straw.  The first time we did this a couple of months ago, Eli threw up 4 times after sucking up a small amount of bubble solution!

There are two things that get dumped on my floor EVERYDAY.  1. The bucket of cars. 2. The bucket of train tracks.

One of our favorite things to do with cars is to cut up construction paper squares and make a color-coded "parking lot."  I read the idea in a book.  I get all my playtime ideas from books - Gracen has been getting up consistently at 5:30 and I am WAY too tired for originality!

Ooo, except for when boxes come home from the grocery store.  The more we get, the more creative we get.  This airplane comes complete with moveable propeller, steering wheel and "shifter thing" that makes the airplane go up and down.  Come on, you know the lever-thing I'm talking about!

We have also been making trips down to the gas station.  Several, actually, since the one and only gas station on the island has been without gas a few times in the last week.  But you never know that until you drive all the way down there.  This is a couple of the switchbacks we maneuver to get down there:

CRAZY, eh?!?

Also, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this but I have become obsessed with the clouds since we've been here.  They just look so cool and it took me awhile to figure out that its because we're the same level as the clouds!!  They seem to float low over the ocean and since our island is so small and so steep and since our house is so high up on that small, steep island, we are often in the clouds.  When we're not, they're floating by pretty parallel to our line of sight.  Doesn't it look cool to be looking at clouds from the side instead of from the bottom?!

No pictures of me because I'm the woman behind the camera.  No pictures of Jaron because he's pulling 14 hour days at the school EVERY DAY.  When we started this adventure, we assumed it'd be similar to chiropractic school but it is SO NOT!  It is hard stuff!!!  But "they" keep telling us it'll pay off some day.  Thanks for listening to my rant!

I Love Friends With Nice Cameras

Our great friend Amanda came over today to take some pictures of the kids.  She does a great job getting candid shots.  Here are just a few of my favorites.  Okay, I couldn't choose just a few!

OH how I want a good camera!

THANKS Amanda!!

The Man in the Middle

Meet the man in the middle.  Sometimes I worry that he gets lost, sandwiched between a talkative and inquisitive big brother and a baby.

This shirt is Eli to a T (Thanks Danielle!).  He is ALWAYS covered in dirt!  I joke that his skin is like a lint roller - he just attracts dirt!  I can't hardly keep his face clean.

Eli loves his trains.  LOVES them.  He also loves cars and trucks. Every morning Eli comes and dumps his wooden train tracks set out on our bed, before Jaron and I are even up.  The other toy that is out every day? The Rugged Rigz garbage truck that Rachel gave us.  He loves stuffing that full of his wooden train tracks and duplos lego.

Eli is a pretty sensitive kid.  Loud noises bother him.  He is always saying, "Too loud, mommy, too loud!" and plugging his ears.  Eli is also very sensitive to being with me.  The poor kid hasn't lived anywhere longer than 10 months in his life.  In a month he'll be two and a half and he's lived in 3 states and two countries.  He's never really had babysitters so he's very attached to mommy.

Eli loves to give us "dirty looks."

But it always ends up cracking him up.  He has such a great sense of humor and has had it since he was a baby.  He is definitely a comedian - loves to perform to make others laugh.

Eli's coolest talent?  He can triple roll his tongue!  Sorry this is a bad picture, but I think it is just so funny to see a kid this small doing this!

Eli has just recently become very comfortable at the cove, without hanging onto me.  He loves the water!

Eli idolizes Jaron.  I don't have a picture of this, but Eli likes to do yoga with me in the morning.  His best move is downward facing dog.  Hilarious!

Boy are we ever glad to have Eli in our family!  He brings so much laughter and love into our home!

We like food!

Baby girl has hit food full-swing.  She seems hungry and has more nightwakings now when she doesn't get it at least at one point through the course of the day. 

Gracie Goo likes her cereal:

And she likes her beets:

And she really likes her peas:

And as a side note, OH how we can't wait to own our own furniture again some day.  We have one small "couch-futon-thingy" that is less comfortable than a church pew.  Jaron often resorts to this:

Yes, that is a BABY BOUNCER.

Mt. Scenery - Come Climb 1064 Steps With Me

Saba has one giant mountain at its center and I've been wanting to hike it for awhile now.  I didn't get a chance over Jaron's semester break because Mt. Scenery had its head in the clouds everyday (like it does 90% of the time).  I really wanted to climb it soon, though, before the heat-that-feels-like-summer becomes the heat-that-no-one-should-have-to-endure.  So when Jaron came home yesterday at 4:00 and the mountain was clear, I took my chance!

Mt. Scenery's welcome sign has one small misprint.  When it says 1064 steps, it really means 1064 huge, cut-from-jagged-rock, moss-covered STAIRS.

Because I was hiking by myself and because I knew I had to be back to feed my baby and only had a few hours until sunset, I started off flying up the mountain as fast as I could.  But after awhile I grew tired of stairs...

...and stairs...

...and stairs...

...and stairs.  Get the idea?

It's funny that whenever something becomes difficult, my mind starts spinning these crazy symbolic metaphors.  It seemed like as I was digging up all my perseverence reserves, I could liken hiking to just about any tough thing in life.  But of coarse, now that the moment has passed, I can't remember any of the earth-shattering wisdom that was coming to my realization.

As I got higher, I could no longer hear the tropical birds singing and the smell of the tropical rainforest became different - mustier, I guess.  I started to wonder if Saba's wildlife was really limited to lizards, wild chickens and wild goats.  It was a little too easy to let my imagination run wild climbing through the dark rainforest by myself!  For example, what do you imagine lives in HERE:

Hahaha.  But the view, especially as I got higher up, was PHENOMENAL.  I began to feel like everyone who comes to Saba and doesn't hike the mountain doesn't really experience Saba.  It's probably the only time in my life that I'm going to get to hike a mountain with tropical rainforest and oceanic views as my backdrop.

It was amazing to me that as I got higher up, I could see St. Johns and The Bottom at the same time.

The first 600 "steps" flew by but the last 400 or so were a challenge.  It didn't help that the stairs got bigger the higher I climbed. To me it seems like if I stop, it's a lot harder to keep going so I just slowed up some.

And I was awarded with this at the top:

The promise of two beautiful scenic views!  Here is the first, a complete view of Windwardside and the Level.  Our house is near the top of the hill in this picture, on the lefthand side.  The only downside was that the horizon was fuzzied by the humidity fog, like it almost always is.  My neighbor says he's been up there and seen as far as Montserrat before!  I could see a foggy Statia but could barely make out Nevis behind it.

Proof that I made it:

I headed in the direction of the second scenic view, but this was definitely a path less trodden.

When I reached this, my thoughts were, "You've got to be kidding."

I pulled myself up to the first ledge of rock in the picture but it only seemed to get worse from there.  With a sunset threatening to make a dark rainforest path even darker and for the sake of my husband and children, I decided not to proceed up the crazy-rock-climb and instead just snapped a photo of the ocean view and called it good.

This is the view of Mt. Scenery and the radio tower on top that we can see from our backyard:

This is the view I got of it yesterday.  Awesome.

P.S.  I think I could easily get addicted to hiking.