A beast of a blog post.

I apologize in advance for the lengthy blog post you're embarked on. I feel like I have nothing new to update, and our routine seems pretty similar every week, and then I realize while looking through my pictures that I have a lot of things to post about! Luckily I have great friends (Thea) to text and yell at me about my laziness of blogging lately.

First and foremost I want to start out the blog by saying we finally bought a car! After a month of not having full time access to a car, and having to mooch off of our friends for their cars, and taking advantage of the shuttle from the med school, we got hooked up with a friend to a mechanic named Eddy who sold us a 2004 White Isuzu Trooper. It was weird to drive again even after only a month. Not to mention how different it is to drive here than flat Minnesota. There are a bunch of very steep hills here, it resembles San Francisco to me sometimes, especially with the ocean off to the side. There are speed bumps here every 50-75 feet, so you're constantly slowing down and speeding up, not so great for gas mileage, not to mention gas here costs twice as much as it does in the states...so good thing we bought a gas efficient SUV...haha not. But it fits us all comfortably and it will be wonderful for the rainy season when it floods a lot and we're high enough up we don't drown in our own car ;) Here are some pics of the car, its been named "Moby Dick," after the great white sperm whale. (Surprisingly enough, I wasn't responsible for its name)




Now that we have a car we can explore the island much more. We've found a sailing club that Andi will start on Tuesday which seems awesome, and Tanner is playing baseball on a team here now, too.

Piper and I are staying busy with our daily naps, walks, swims, and baby einstein videos, plus shes recently discovered YouTube, and all of the nursery rhyme videos on there to watch over, and over, and over, and over...


Piper and I also have a weekly play group we've been going to. We're starting little outings with our other baby friends, this week we're going to the library in Phillipsburg which is the capital, its about half an hour away. It's so funny how much my daily life has changed now that I'm doting a two year old constantly. Piper is so fun to play with, though. Here's some pics of Piper with her new friends. She's still pretty shy, she stays pretty close to my lap, but as the weeks go on, and the more we see the same kids I'm hoping she'll come around.








Piper enjoying a smoothie at the local coffee shop after a long day of swimming and napping.

This is a random stray dog I saw by the coffee shop that totally reminded me of my best friends dog, Cleo. Makes me homesick.

Piper checking her "Baby Emma" for lice...?

Last Friday my sister Carina decided she wanted to take a night off of studying (which is SUCH a rarity--they weren't exaggerating in the least when they said med school is like drinking from a fire hose, because man, that lady works HARD) to go on a date with her husband, my brother in law, Casey. When they left I was in the bathroom peeling the sunburned skin off of my nose (cute, I know) Andi was taking a shower to get all the sand off of her from a day at the beach, and Tanner was listening to a movie on the laptop with headphones in. I came out of the bathroom and started looking for Piper. I should mention that in our apartment we have a screen door that we just picked up at a hardware store, its put up with hooks on the inside and a bungee cord, and that lets in an awesome cross breeze with the screen doors in the kitchen, and it really makes it a lot more comfortable in the apartment.




So the screen door needs to be put up from the inside of the apartment, whenever anyone leaves they just yell "screen door" and someone goes and puts it back up (this has relevance, I PROMISE) So Friday night I come out of the bathroom, and Cari and Casey have left for their date night out to dinner, and I'm looking for Piper. I start yelling her name, I don't hear her, I'm looking in the bedrooms, I don't see her. I ask Andi if she's in the bathroom with her, Andi says no. I ask Tanner if she's under the blanket watching a movie with him, he says no. Then I see the screen door is wide open because Cari and Casey have left and nobody put it back up. Holy. Crap. Piper. Is. Gone. I start to freak out. I yell for Andi to quick get dressed and help me look, I yell for Tanner to come help us find Piper, he asks, "where is she?" I shout back, "I DON'T KNOW!!" We grab the keys, quickly shut the door, and leave the apartment to go searching for Piper around the resort. Piper LOVES riding in the elevator, she knows which buttons to push to get to the pool, and which to push to get to the apartment, so I send Tanner to the elevator to wait for it and see if she's in there. Piper also loves to climb up and down stairs, so Andi and I run and check the stairs at both ends of the resort. We're running up the stairs, down the stairs, yelling Piper's name, praying to God that she didn't get kidnapped, or fall off a banister and die, just anything. I have the worst thoughts going through my mind this entire time, too. Like complete conspiracy theories. I was Liam Neeson in "Taken" and brainstorming the conversation I'd have with her abductors on the phone if they wanted ransom money, and how I was going to relentlessly threaten to kill them. I mean, it was an intense thought process, I'm not going to lie, my head was a mess. After 5-6 minutes of running up and down the stairs, not seeing Piper, I decide to go back to the apartment, try and get on skype, and have one of our island friends call our one cell phone that Cari and Casey have to tell them to come home ASAP and help us find their lost toddler. I get to the laptop that Skype is always logged into, and its password protected. I'm trying to brainstorm password ideas, no luck. So safe to say if Casey's laptop ever gets stolen and people try and break in and retrieve valuable information, they're screwed, there's no hacking into that thing. I look up from the laptop and to the kitchen counter and see the cell phone plugged into the wall charging, and I was completely done. Oh my gosh, the cell phone is here, we can't get a hold of Cari and Casey if we wanted to, I lost the baby, I'm going to die. I had a full on panic attack in the kitchen. Before Friday I thought I'd had a panic attack before, I was wrong, this was so different. My arms went numb in under two seconds, I couldn't breathe, my hands started seizing, I was completely destroyed and so scared. I started to cry hysterically and after a couple of minutes when I could feel my body enough again to start running to look for Piper some more I went down to the garage by the pool and saw Tanner with the guard also looking for Piper, and still no luck. I went back to the stairs running up and down the six levels just praying we find her, I pass Andi who sees that I'm completely hysterical and she tries to calm me down, tells me we'll find her, but I see in her face too that she's just as scared as I am. I go back up to our level and I'm running back and forth on our floor and all of a sudden I hear her crying.

Never before has a cry been such an amazing sound. Cari and Casey had taken something to drop off at our neighbors house before they left for their date, and they had taken Piper with her. Apparently Cari yelled in the house before she left telling us this, but with our being in the bathroom/watching movies, nobody heard her. I walked up to the neighbors door just completely sobbing and Cari gave me the saddest look and said, "OH NO! Did you think she was lost? I'm so sorry!" I just bent down and gave Piper the biggest hug ever, I was so incredibly relieved. It was the scariest 15-20 minutes of my life, BY FAR. The entire night Cari kept apologizing, they brought us home ice cream trying to make restitution, and now everything is good. Right after it happened I literally just sat Piper down on the counter starting at her for like twenty minutes, still crying and shaky, she was looking at me like a psycho probably wondering why I was such a hot mess. I also took the screen door down and locked the door almost imprisoning everyone in the apartment, I wasn't going to risk anyone else getting out. Also, I'm buying a leash for Piper.

So when I'm not losing babies, or having panic attacks, I've been doing some hair lately. I'm starting to miss it, which I swore would never happen. After a brutal year at Aveda and hours upon hours of what seemed like slave work, I have indeed started to miss it. Even the smell of my Aveda products I missed. I don't do my hair here, it just doesn't happen. People ask me how a hairdresser does their hair with all this humidity, and I just point to my messy bun on the top of my head, or my side fishtail braid, and say, "I don't." I took my second client this week. I've just been doing bang trims, and haircuts, I desperately need to see about buying color. My own hair is such a mess. It's like half grown out hair dye, half sun lightening, and half nasty blonde roots. PUKE. I wash my clients hair in the sink and then take them out on the deck to cut, its oh so professional...




But yes, I'll scrunch in some Aveda products after I'm done and reminisce on what it was like to shower and do my hair ;)

The island has a bunch of beaches, which I guess makes total sense considering we're completely surrounded by water. We've been branching out on different beaches to go to, Casey has declared every Friday as "explore the island day" which sounds great to me, since this place never ceases to amaze me. So many different weird and fun places. Andi and Tanner just got their own boogie boards last week, so we tested those out.

We all get a little better at boogie boarding (say that ten times fast) each time we go. Now we just need to work on our surfing/wind surfing/sailing skills :)

Another cool beach we found this week is right next to the airport, the giant planes land literally right across the fence from the beach, so you can go up to the fence when planes are taking off, and it'll blow you away. Literally. I think you can YouTube "Princess Juiliana Airport Planes Beach SXM" or something along those lines, and some awesome videos will pop up, I have a video on my facebook page, too. A family that left right before we got there were super nice and gave us their chairs, they also left us a bucket of empty beer bottles, I got some nice pics with that, my mom will love it ;)

Enjoying the Caribbean sea.

See how low the plane gets!

I'm trying to do that "bottoms up" hand expression, but I kind of just look like an idiot...



I tried taking a picture with Piper, and she wasn't having it.

Pipes maxin' and relaxin'


The wrap up of our week every Sunday is church. I always considered Sunday to be the end of the week, even though technically its the beginning, oh well. As I mentioned before I'm in charge of teaching the 4-7 year old kids, so I wanted to take some pictures of them. They all have a lot of enthusiasm, and a lot of energy, but they're also really funny, and they say the cutest things.





This is Zhoja (zoy-uhh) once I started taking pictures of her, she kept asking me to do it again and again, and then she started doing a tiger pose and I couldn't stop laughing, it was SO funny. I probably have ten pictures of her doing tiger claws on my camera.

Some post-church pictures. Piper is always quite exhausted after three hours of Sunday School, these pictures depict it perfectly, her energy is non existent. It looks like Andi sucked all of Piper's energy out because Andi looks crazy and Piper looks dead.



I came home and had a nice relaxing Sunday. Caught up with some siblings and my parents on the phone, spent what seems like days on this blog, and didn't get to watch the super bowl, which is kind of a bummer. I'm just glad I didn't really care about either team playing, had my Vikes been in the superbowl, I'd have spared no expense to watch.

Hope all my friends and family are well! Miss you!

The Carousel

It may seem lame, actually, yes, it is lame that I'm going to create a post designated only for an ice cream shop, but seriously, this place was insane. Like the Daddy Warbucks of ice cream stores. It makes any DQ or Coldstone look like a secondhand store that got bombed.


This is the main entrance to "Carousel" the funniest thing about this place is that it's located in the middle of a totally dump street. Definitely not what you'd expect to find considering its surroundings.
When you walk in you see this giant chandelier, giant white pillars, and marble everything, it was insane.
They had a little store off to the right when you first come in, and its filled with homemade dishes and different carousels, which I of course took pictures of...


I love the garbage cans, and the awesome floor with stars all over it.


Their selection of ice cream was overwhelming, and it all looked so pretty. The big hits were "Nutella" which is just as it sounds. That awesome hazelnut mocha spread made into an ice cream, it was so good.

Then when you walk out back there's a carousel, hence the name! Casey and I were laughing at the sign next to it that's pictured here. Basically their eloquent way of saying that retarded people and little kids needed to be accompanied, that was kind of interesting.

The carousel itself is kind of like a dome, encircling the entire thing on the outside wall are pictures of people eating ice cream. I took a couple pictures of them, but there were literally hundreds.

I feel like a loser for posting about ice cream, but I just thought this was such a cute place, and I've never seen anything quite like it. I'm excited to explore more of the island and find more cute places like this. Everyone come visit, i'll buy you an ice cream!

The island is starting to feel like home.

I can't believe I've already been in St. Maarten for almost a month, the weeks are just cruising by so quickly. I'm already wishing it would slow down, I don't want my eight months here to pass too quickly. The slower paced life, and friendly people, and beautiful weather and views are definitely starting to grow on me.

This week was a lot of fun! We went without water for the beginning part of the week, as the days went on we slowly sat further and further apart from each other as to not offend anyone with our smelliness from lack of showering ;) Apparently a water mane burst and they turned the water off as a precaution to avoid flooding. Tenants in our building were threatening to go into the pool with a bar of soap to bathe if our water wasn't turned on soon. It's a bummer when you forget your water's off when you go work out and then realize there's no way to take a shower--thank goodness for pools! We've made sure to store a bunch of water in the cupboards as emergency drinking water, as well as putting a giant tub on the porch to collect rain water to use to fill the toilets so that we can still go to the bathroom. You know you're adjusting to a new way of life when being able to flush a toilet seems like a highlight to the day.

After the water got turned on I spent the rest of my week anxious about the talk I was asked to give in church on Sunday. Public speaking both does and doesn't freak me out. I enjoy being able to talk and introduce myself to those who don't know me, like my church here, but I also get really nervous and red in the face and I talk too fast, and I forget things I was going to say, or say things out of order, etc. My dad is an AMAZING public speaker, every time I watch him do his training for work, or talk in church, or in other meetings, I always get really jealous. But the talk went well! I wasn't too nervous this time, I was praying for my nerves to ease so I could just get out what I wanted to say. This week I also was asked to be an instructor in the Primary at church which means that I'll be teaching/helping all of the 2-12 year olds at church. I was in Primary for the first time this last Sunday, and I was quite intimidated. The kids are really cute, and really innocent and sweet, but man do they get hyper. I'm excited about this calling, though. I think it'll be fun to be around the little kids, growing up with so many siblings, being around little kids is second nature.

Other highlights of the week included boogie boarding at Mullet Beach (we renamed the beach "Jared Allen Beach" since we all know how much I love Jared, and Jared had a mullet) which is a five minute walk from the apartment. The sand is so soft and the water is crystal clear, it was amazing. Andi and Tanner are slowly getting more acquainted with the ocean, and they're more confident in swimming and playing in it, whereas before it was a "I'm going to wear my clothes to the beach, and just get my feet wet" type of thing.

Carina had her first round of tests this morning, they're called "blocks." They're almost like mid terms, or unit tests, but they account for 12% of your grade, so they're pretty stinking important. This entire weekend she had her face in her laptop, or in a textbook, so we tried to steer clear of her. The med school campus plays a movie in one of the lecture halls on a projector for free every Friday and Saturday night. So Saturday night Andi and I went and saw "The Help." We both love that movie, we've seen it before, and we own it. But we love free activities so we decided to go anyways. The lecture hall was FREEZING. It's such a weird sensation here to be cold even after only three weeks of being gone from Minnesota. It's so hot all the time that to feel cold kind of seems alien. We walked in and saw people cuddled up with blankets and sweatshirts and Andi and I looked at them dumb like, "uhh...we're in the Caribbean, have fun sweating your face off back here in your blanket." Half an hour into the movie I swear mine and Andi's teeth were chattering.

There's a shuttle service at Carina's school that will take you from campus to your apt, or to the grocery store, or the airport, it's awesome. It's not safe here to walk after dark, and it gets dark at 630 or so, so we rely on the shuttle quite a bit. The drivers name is Michael, and he's awesome. Every time he drives us we get a history lesson about the island, or the newest gossip about upcoming stores to open, or scandals with rental managers of different rental units, he's pretty much our eyes and ears to the island, we love him. He also repeats everything a couple of times, which I've found is fairly common for islanders to do. Shuttle drivers can't take tips, but Michael took us to the grocery store last week, so we bought him a thing of Rolo's and asked if he liked Rolo's and he says, "Yes I do, Yes I do, Yes I do." Then later on in the car ride he was talking about a mall here called "Blue Mall," which always seems under construction and it's never going to finish and we commented that was very weird and he says, "Very weird, very weird, very weird." Love it.

I don't know if I've mentioned before that the gym in our apt building costs about 50 dollars a month per person, so we've scrapped that idea and we just use the gym for free at Carina's school, and it's really nice and heavily air conditioned which is awesome because the air conditioning in the gym in our apt is only on three or four hours a day, and even when it's on it's super hot in there, and it smells a bit funky. There's this guy named Marcus who works out in the same gym and he's such a fine specimen of man, so I always work out extra hard or extra long when he's there, just to soak up our time together ;) This is going to be awkward once Marcus and I actually start talking more consistently, and then get married and he reads this blog! Ha! Today when I was walking back to the apt from the gym I took this shortcut that was slightly more shady than the regular way home, and this creepy guy started walking behind me and gradually kept getting closer and closer to me so I decided to just run home. I probably looked ridiculous going from a walk to a full on sprint to escape a guy who hasn't done anything to me, but you hear horror stories, and I decided you can't ever be too careful.

After Carina's blocks were done today we decided to celebrate by going out to dinner and ice cream and a movie and I took SO many pictures. I'm literally going to post a separate blog about the ice cream place we went to, because it was so pretty in there, I couldn't believe it. The movies here are American which is awesome so I can keep up on 'em. I'd have flown back to the US just to see "Hunger Games" if they hadn't have had that here, so dodged a bullet on that one. The theater is a lot more strict here than back home. Employees walked into the theater tonight while we were watching "We bought a Zoo" which was my second time seeing it, and they asked us to put our feet down off the chair, and told us Piper had to be sitting in a chair, it was funny. It was definitely a fun night. The woman who owned the restaurant we went to offered Andi and I a job serving there on Wednesday nights for their all you can eat ribs when they're super swamped, so that's something we'll look into as a fun thing for her and I to do together. We're meeting a lot of cool people who live right by us, and the island network of friends is getting better, it's starting to feel like a home. Tomorrow Piper and I have a play group so we can get her some baby friends, so that'll be nice.

Life is good here, I'm loving all of the family time, and all the laughs. Kids are so easily amused. Piper has this baby doll that makes possessed sounding noises every so often randomly when people accidentally step on it or something, and the doll drives us all nuts! I decided it'd be fun to launch the baby doll off of our porch and into the pool, I told Piper that "baby was going to go swimming." At first she seemed thrilled with the idea, Piper loves swimming, and so will her "baby kate." My first attempt at throwing it into the pool, the doll hit a retaining wall and bounced back about twenty feet. When I went down to get it its eye had fallen out, it was so funny. The second attempt we got baby kate into the pool, and Piper started screaming, she didn't like this idea anymore. All's well that ends well, though. Thanks to "Baby Kate's" swim, her sound box is broken, and her creepy laugh doesn't work anymore. So we're keeping ourselves heavily amused at home. Here's some miscellaneous pictures of the restaurant/us at dinner...