Thanksgiving trip.

Well, here I am again with only a couple minutes to blog!  I'll give a whirlwind wrap-up of our first road trip with Moses at Thanksgiving.  Hop over to FB to see the pics.

The girls so rarely get to take baths!  3 in a tub.

We were so excited to go with our friends Zack and Carolyn and their baby Henry to visit my old roommate, Timara, who now runs the SIM guesthouse in Cochabamba with her family.  Road trips from La Paz always include a beautiful drive on the 13,000ft. high altiplano.  There's rural villages, llamas, breathtaking mountainscapes, and a painful lack of bathrooms.  Can you believe we didn't stop for a potty break the entire 6 1/2 hour drive there??  I set the girls up with worksheets I had downloaded from the internet and a short audible book.  Moses had a couple toys, books and food which managed to keep him happy in between a short nap for the long haul.  We arrived around bedtime, which was a bit stressful for Mo since he thought the apartment where we were staying for those 3 nights was the most interesting place he had ever been and he wanted to crawl every inch and grab everything within reach.  After getting his crib set up and enduring a long session of screaming, I started to wonder if we had made a mistake taking him on a trip like this so early into his transition into our family.  However, he proved himself by taking his normal naps and sleeping just as well at night as he does at home!  Good job, buddy!

The girls woke up each morning and went straight downstairs to run around the expansive living areas, kitchen and yard.  They feasted on fruit loops, a delicacy found rarely in our house, and generally ran themselves silly.  There are swings and a slide and two dogs and grass and blackberries and all manner of simple pleasures that the girls can't get enough of.  Moses crawled and crawled and ate leaves and petted the dogs and crawled some more.  They took baths and we walked around town and mostly we just hung out with Timara and her family and Zack and Carolyn.  Visiting Cochabamba is such a restful activity for us!  Thanksgiving day was a blast as we shared traditional American fare with old friends, new friends and in between.  We always remember that special Thanksgiving meal many moons ago when Scotty and I met and started a friendship that would quickly become much more.

After two quick days, we were back on the road again to start the home stretch before Christmas break. And here we are!  One half day more of school and my in-laws arrive and the festivities can really begin.  Our house won't be done like we were so sure it would, but we expect to enjoy a lot of time together as a a family, which is what we are all longing for in this busy season.