Life is busy (and I seem to be just noticing).

I've been in denial for a while now, but I think I'm finally starting to come to terms with my life getting busier.  I love down-time.  I love having space in my day when the house is quiet and I can read my Bible or sew or look at blogs.  I love feeling like things happen in an orderly way and I can get home in time to feed the girls before it's late and give Jubilee a bath and leisurely put them to bed without rushing.  This doesn't happen like it used to.  There's more to do.  There's so much to do that I can't keep it all straight in my head, which makes it seem more stressful than it is because I haven't figured out how to make it all happen.  A lot of life here is vague and uncertain and a lot of things don't turn out how you expect them to or are as straight-forward as you would like.  For a long time we raged and fumed and got terribly judgmental and impatient about this, but we are starting to come to expect it and roll with it.  However, sometimes it is just annoying.  All that to say, we are in a busy "phase" (see, I'm still staying "phase" as though it's going to pass soon) right now and I haven't been blogging much.  We spent last week in Cochabamba, which was fun, but a lot of hard work for me since I wasn't in my own space and spent pretty much the entire day hanging out with/entertaining the girls.  Scotty took one extra day so that he could spend it with us, which turned out to be fantastic and just enough time to see the highlights of the city together.  We got home and launched into a full week of activities- a good friend having her baby, which included visits to the hospital and meal planning, Natty's last week of preschool (which included one of those vague, frustrating searches for a specific costume that her teacher had asked for), Thanksgiving prep and cooking, having 15 people over to our house yesterday to celebrate the big day, lots of phone calls to make to figure out other pending things that I haven't been able to resolve and then being left with unanswered questions relating to some of that.  Then, I started Christmas shopping today.  I don't have a list.  I don't have the first idea what to buy my little ones or the big one.  But, I managed to score a few good finds and feel good about that.  I'd love to knock it out and just focus on the important bits of the season, including the next 2 months that Natty is out of school and will be wanting much more of my attention that she has for the last year.  Suddenly, I think my days are going to get even busier.

We got a call from our lawyer yesterday who set up December 13th for our interviews with child and family services.  Whoa!  The whole adoption thing just kicked it up a notch.  A little scary and a lot exciting.  We're probably going to squeeze in a much-needed beach vacation right after that since we shouldn't be leaving the city once we have our final interviews and the hunt for Baby Boy Miser begins.  We've decided for lots of reasons to put the house building on hold until the rainy season is over.  I think that will remove some of the pressure that trying to start it soon was creating and there are still a lot of details to work out before we're even ready.  Scotty is probably 5 times busier than I am and I think we're both feeling like the relational part of our ministry is suffering.  But, that's a whole other blog...  

Imports.

Bolivia has a good deal of American imports.  I appreciate this, at times.  Especially when it comes to food.  La Paz, being the capitol, is getting an impressive amount of American food items and British, too.  We also have what I would consider more and more American-style restaurants, coffee shops and clothing stores.  Some of them I ignore because they are United Colors of Benetton, and I can't afford them.  However, I appreciate Magic Time's Krispy Rice cereal, even though it's an X-brand, so that I can make rice krispy treats from time to time.  However, having just passed Halloween, I can say that that is an import I do not appreciate.  A decade ago, Halloween wasn't a word people knew around here.  It's an American import, but Bolivia only got the nastiest side of it.  It's all witches, goblins, dead guys, blood and guts all the time.  You won't see cute little princesses or doctors or toy story characters or cans of soup (my brother dressed up like Campbell's cream of tomato one year) around here.  But, you will see a lot of nastiness and stuff that scares Natty and keeps her from wanting to even enter the grocery store.  Not cool.  Another import I saw today that will be arriving...Hooters.  Seriously?  We don't have a Starbucks or McDonalds but we'll have a Hooters??  I suppose for the country that downloads more porn than any other Latin American country, this should not surprise me.  But, I don't have to like it.

Did I mention we started work on our property?  There is finally movement up there after 6 years of owning and dreaming.  However, because our land and house paperwork has not been processed yet (after 3 years in the government offices), we can't actually build our house.  What we're working on are retaining walls, leveling of ground, etc...  It's enough to keep a team of builders busy for a while and get the money starting to flow out of our pockets.  But, since rainy season started early, I don't think we'll see activity on a foundation until March.  However, we're excited to see something going on and incredibly thankful for God's amazing generosity in allowing us to do this.