Adventures in losing things.
It might be a two cups of coffee kind of morning. Usually I'm pretty strict at sticking with just the one, but this morning... well. Yes, I'm headed to put the kettle on. Be right back.
Okay, here I am. It's still cold here, though not storming the way I hear it is in parts of the world. I hope you're all keeping warm. Here it gets hot in the middle of the day. Near 30 degrees celcius hot, which is a big difference from the 10 degrees or so it is in the morning. 10 degrees isn't that cold, but we don't have heat and our kitchen is outside, so it feels chilly.
The past week has been beautiful and wild with a tinge of annoyance or sadness depending on how you look at it. We took a really quick trip to the big city to extend our visas, which is an all day event that started at 4:30, when I got up and shivered myself across the city on my motorbike to sit in a line for two hours, waiting for my first queue number that would enable me to get my real queue number and so on. We had rented two motorbikes to make things smoother and faster, and drove around, back and forth, picking up documents, visiting the doctor for Chinua's check up, buying our bus tickets back to Pai, sitting in line at the visa office. It was a full day, and successful, as we left the office with visas. The kids were great. They sat, and rode, and sat again, and rode again with expert patience. Even Isaac did pretty well.
The tinge of annoyance or sadness came when I discovered that my iPod touch (very similar to an iPhone without the phone part) had most likely fallen out of my bag while I was driving the motorbike on the last drive to catch our bus. I had pulled it out to check the time at a stoplight and not pushed it back down enough I suppose. Bad mistake. For the last two years I have been using it to take every single photo you see. I read on it. It is the device for me. I have thought about upgrading to an iPhone, but it will be a couple months before that can happen. Oh well. Tears may have been shed but I remembered that it is just a thing. A very useful thing for art, but just a thing.
I had just edited a photo of Leafy, our family's newest nine-year-old, for you, and hadn't been able to upload it yet. Bummer. You'll have to take my word for it: he's gorgeous. The sweetest, most imaginative boy, the one who always gets my heart in a different place than any other. How can Leafy be nine? Time, that's how. Also, Isaac turned two yesterday. Two!
Birthday parties have been postponed due to wall building. We put our first mud up yesterday and it was a lot of fun. It's a big learning process, and I'll have some photos to show you once I get them from others.
It's a full, strong, wild time! I have to prepare for meditation this morning as well as get the groceries for the day and prepare for another day of building. Definitely a two cups of coffee morning.