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 »