Tres y 1/2 Puerqueños

Normally I would have waited a bit longer to put this lovely new countdown you see here, but because baby ALF is already so popular it has been requested that it go up immediately. Wish granted.

Baby ALF's gender will be confirmed in two weeks. I hope you can wait. Hey, let's do prizes again, because I love prizes. You have until midnight on the 14th to post your guess. The odds are pretty good, and you only lose your pride if you are wrong.

Labels: pregnancy

You just looked at several pictures of Harmon, but here is one more of him wearing some sweet old Nike's that were either mine or Justin's.



Month 7-8 for Harmon was quite busy. He got his passport and ventured out of the country, took a road trip to Montana and played with all his aunts and uncles and cousins on dad's side (but we missed Jayde!), went camping, moved to his second house, got his own room, learned to say "mas" & "hola" (but won't say hola now), found Ecuadorian babies bigger than him, ate lots and lots of new and delicious foods, practiced rolling from place to place, developed a new loud scream, got frustrated a lot from not crawling, flirted with lots of ladies, and much much more. Harmon loves to eat, loves to be held, and loves to laugh. And we love him. The end.

I know you probably thought we lied, because you never saw any evidence. But we did. The rest of the trip was great, except for Harmon's sleeping habits. We visited lots of orphanages, had a party with the ward, hung out with our good friends, and ate lots of tasty things. I feel like there should be something more exciting to say, but it was really a trip to go and visit people we love, not to do anything ultra amazing. We had a good time, and Harmon handled being passed around quite well. Even at the girl's orphanage being girlhandled by 30 girls aged 4-24. He was a well-loved and popular kid, and we had to make many promises to return again soon.

Here are some pictures, sadly the cutest ones seem to be at the orphanages, which I cannot post on the internet. The rest of our photos are here. Sorry for the ultimately long witheld and not very interesting post.

I just wanted to beat Aaron to the punch. So happy anniversary dearest husband. You are a wonderful man, I am so lucky to have you. xoxo, Foxfish

P.S. I knew it was 2 years the whole time, I was just testing you.

[Disclaimer: I should point out that this is my blog and these are just my interpretations of things, and you should not take my observations as fact.]

I love other countries and different ways of looking at things. And one thing I really love about Ecuador is their many superstitions.

One that we keep running into this trip is whether we are having a boy or a girl next. First our taxi driver in Quito told me that surely it is a girl, because I am still feeding Harmon without any problems. Today a teacher at the orphanage told me he was wrong, and that it was surely a boy, for the exact same reason.

If you have a cold, or sore throat, you are not allowed to have anything cold to drink, for fear you may get even worse. Pretty much cold drinks are outlawed because they could get you sick on their own.

Shots in your behind seem to be the preferred way of medicinal healing here. Maybe because it's such a big "muscle" or because any random person at the pharmacy can give you one because it's an easy target, but either way, what happened to good old shots in the arm? I don't know if that's really a superstition, but kind of.

One we learned about last year was curing sad/sick babies with eggs. Not by feeding them, but by rubbing an uncooked egg all over their body. This will draw out all the evil spirits (or something) and if you do it long enough the evil spirits will all end up in the egg and the egg will become hard boiled!!! We witnessed this and when the egg was cracked into a glass of water we were told "see, the yolk didn't crack" (it was suspended in the water, as any raw egg could be) and then told if they mom would have done it longer it would have been even harder.

I vaguely remember a way to cure fussy babies used by some in the orphanages when I was here the first time. Something along the lines of getting water in your mouth (maybe special water?) and then spitting it on the baby's face. That sounds kind of bad, but it's more like a misting of the face based on how you spit it out. This kind of startles the baby who then stops crying because they wonder what the heck is going on. There may be some more reasoning behind it, but that is all I was able to gather/remember.

I already mentioned how when the temperature drops below 70 (like 68) if you don't have a hat and sweater on your baby, and a sweater and scarf on you, you will likely die from catching a cold. This is probably more an issue of it never gets really cold here, because lots of people in lots of countries believe you will get sick from being in the cold/rain/etc.

There are lots more, and wanting to think of them prevented me from posting this blog two weeks ago when I wrote it, but it seems silly to not publish it for a couple more I won't remember.

But really slow at finishing our vacation report, posting pictures, and learning how to sleep again. But we are back. And had a wonderful time. More to come.

The first night we got here Harmon took a huge step back in sleeping. He went from sleeping to not. By the third night when he was up every 15 minutes we were more and more worried about him actually being sick instead of just not enjoying sleeping in Ecuador. We thought maybe ear infection, as he had been tugging at his ear, but he does that when his teeth are bugging him, so it was hard to say. Long story short we have a new favorite pediatrician who we wished lived closer to us, and Harmon has "gingivitis", which is apparently very common among teething babies, or another way to say he has an owie because his teeth are coming in. He was just hiding it above his upper teeth so we couldn't see it. It seems to be getting better and he enjoys the numbing medicine, although he's sleeping only slightly better.

Today is Aaron's cumpleanos, and we celebrated by making dinner for all the volunteers. Aaron made a delicious BBQ which was much loved by all. Also I made a most delicious chocolate cake from a mix that was well loved as well. But not as much as the BBQ.

We also celebrated by going to church (ok we were going to do that anyway). It was insane. Since we still knew most of the ward from living here a year ago, Harmon was mobbed. After Sacrament meeting he was stolen away from Aaron and passed around to more than a dozen people. He tolerated it well until the end, but the sadness was likely also due to sleep deprivation. We were happy to see everyone, and happy to show off our baby (we like to show him off, if you haven't noticed, we are vain, we admit it) and have a little party planned with the ward this week just to get together and visit more.

We went by the boys orphanage again today, and got to see some old friends and meet some new ones. We only stayed for a few minutes, but managed to get all the younger ones riled up to chaos by the time we left. I'm sure Sor Teresa appreciated it, she was laughing after all. Harmon and Sor Teresa love each other. He loves to reach for her glasses and face, and she loves to smile and coo at him and tell him not to take off her glasses because she won't be able to see. Sometimes I can't believe this is the same Sor Teresa from 2004. I mean, I knew this ST was under there all along, but it's crazy and wonderful to see it full time now.

Yesterday we went to OSSO's orphanage. It was SO wonderful. I loved seeing my special kids from both the old places. They are getting so big. And some of them progressing so much. But some of them regressing, which is really hard to see. There is one girl there who used to be at the girls house who has some sort of disease which slowly makes her body deteriorate while her mind stays aware of what is going on around her. Her mom also had this, and I can't imagine what it would have been like to watch her own sweet mother trapped inside a body and know it was going to happen to her soon. When I was first here in 2004 this girl, who is probably my age or perhaps a few years younger, could walk and talk. She was a little slow in speaking, and a bit off kilter when walking, but could do them. When we were here in 2007-08 she was using a walker, and had just taken a pretty big fall. She could still kind of talk, it was hard to understand her, but if you knew her and tried hard, you could still get most of what she was saying. And then this year. She is in a wheelchair. She can't talk. I was so excited to see her, and talk with her, and she seemed excited too, even though she couldn't express it verbally. Later on she was crying. I couldn't figure out why, and she couldn't tell me. And it was horrible. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like, to be trapped in a body that is shutting down. How is it that I am ever able to complain about anything?

Anyway, I love being here. I am so grateful for this opportunity to visit a place that I love so much filled with so many of my favorite people and memories. I realized I haven't taken any pictures, and I should. The end for now.