Cari and Piper studying together

I’ve been reading posts on Facebook recently about the weather back in Minnesota.  Apparently what started out as a warm and mild winter has now turned vengeful and brutal.  Tami Seibert reported negative 25 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) in Duluth, and that’s without the wind-chill.  (The people renting our house just moved from Florida. I wonder what they think about all this.)

If weather is the only factor one considers, then we truly have moved to paradise. Right now I have our dual large patio doors wide open, I’m listening to the sounds of birds chirping, and a soothing trade-winds breeze is blowing in from the crystal blue ocean.  It’s early in the morning and the kids are still asleep, but my guess is when they wake up they will eat breakfast and then head down for a swim in one of the three swimming pools.

But, of course, weather is not the only factor. Here are a few others we’re also dealing with: Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it’s the little things that make life more enjoyable, and often times we don’t know to appreciate them until they aren’t available.

Fruit smoothies for breakfast, I admit, are a little thing.  Yet we made them pretty much every morning in our previous life, and when we arrived on the island sans blender, we all agreed that we missed our smoothies.  A lot.

Sometimes, however, it’s also the big things that make life more enjoyable.  Or more challenging, depending on which side of that big thing you’re on.  This has been a week of solving a few little things, while also tackling some big ones as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Mom Studying

It’s Saturday morning. 6:55 am.  Only Tanner and I are awake. When tonight rolls around, we will have been here for a week.  And what a week it’s been!  To be honest, the kinds of things we’ve been doing are the same things anyone would do after moving to a new place and trying to settle in.  We’ve just been doing them on a Caribbean island.  And in the process we’ve been given a healthy dose of island craziness. Read the rest of this entry »

In the six days that we’ve been on the island, it’s become obvious that while we’re here we won’t ever have the “normal” to which we were accustomed in the States.  And that’s okay.  And even good.  We knew heading into this adventure that we were leaving America and heading to a foreign country.  The kind of normal I’m talking about is a routine.  A schedule.  A feeling of knowing what you’re going to do that day when you wake up in the morning.  Instead, for the first couple of days we woke up thinking “We have no car, no internet, no phone, and low prospects for getting any of them”.

We all felt the most pressing was internet access. It’s amazing how disconnected and lonely you can feel when you have no way to communicate.  But getting that connectivity was a mini-adventure of its own, and I suspect a good foreshadowing of what’s in store for the next 20 months. Read the rest of this entry »

Mommy and Piper overlooking the Caribbean Sea from the cliff tops on the grounds of our condo complex.

In an earlier post I described how our arrival at Rainbow Beach, the condo complex where we now live, was anticlimactic and even a little depressing. And it’s true that the path from the front gate to our front door is anything but flattering. Much of it is still under construction, and the rest of it looks like it was abandoned when it was about 90% complete.

Once you get past our front door and into the condo, it’s quite nice. But by bedtime our first night, Tanner had asked us ten times and in ten different ways how soon we would be able to move out of this place and into something nicer.

Then on Sunday we went and checked out the rest of the complex.  I’ll let these pictures do all the talking, but I’ll just add this:  On the way back to our condo after seeing all of this, I asked Tanner if he still wanted to move to another place as soon as we could.

“NO!” was his immediate reply. Read the rest of this entry »

We overslept on Sunday morning.  Luckily not by much.  Scurrying around prepping for church in a hurry was complicated by our unfamiliarity with our new condo and by our hasty unpacking done in a haze of fatigue the previous evening.  The Daniels picked us up about 8:20 a.m. in two different vehicles and we caravanned to church.

Welcome to the St. Martin Branch, Mon!

For friends who may read this who are not Mormon, here’s a quick crash course in Mormon vocabulary:  A congregation of Mormon’s comes in two types:  wards and branches.  Wards are big.  Branches are small.  I don’t know the definitive number where a ward becomes a branch, but I do know that the St. Martin branch is a long ways from reaching it.  Neither is better than the other, they are just different. And each has their own peculiarities and challenges.

I had no idea what to expect of the St. Martin branch. None of us did.  And yet trying to keep an open mind, it turned out, didn’t help ease the culture shock very much.

Ok, it didn’t actually help at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Our arrival at Prince Julian Internationa Airport on St. Martin... along with our mountain of luggage.

Our five hour flight out of winter and into perpetual summer was uneventful, which is good. Cheers to Sun Country for offering cheap, affordable flights direct from Minneapolis to St. Martin!  Piper was an absolute trooper and drew smiles and amiable comments from fellow passengers.

Upon disembarking, we blew through customs with a breeze, which was a relief.  With the help of some island porters (one of whom asked for a larger tip) we hauled our mini-mountain of luggage to the curb where we were picked up by our new friends, Karla Stephens and Cheyenne and Michael McGlue.  Karla and Cheyenne are fellow spouses of AUC students and the three of us have been corresponding extensively via email and Facebook the last few months.

Our Condo:

The Daniel’s and McGlue caravan drove us to our new Condo at Rainbow Beach.  It was a short drive but still long enough to introduce us to island driving.  (We also learned a new vocabulary phrase: “Island Car”.  Any vehicle that still drives but is otherwise falling apart is called an island car.  Missing a mirror or a door handle?  No problem, mon!  I think we’ll own one of these cars sometime soon.) Read the rest of this entry »