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!
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