I’ve put together a small slideshow for all of you. These pictures just highlight the fun but normal life that we are living in this beautiful land. I continue to marvel at the beauty here..in architecture and nature. I am blessed to be here.
I have to say that I have not completely processed being here. I think so often as wives and mothers we tend to put ourselves aside to keep the family going. I do so much, however, miss my friends and family in the states.
So, now that we are here and fairly settled I want to really begin to focus on the things that spiritually and personally I wanted to work on during these three years. The first would be to keep our lives simple. These needs to happen in a couple of ways. Simplicity does not just mean materialistically. Although, I’m surprised at the look on people’s faces when I tell them that everything we brought we brought on the plane. So..I do not want to be sucked into materialism of things. I’m already finding the difficulty of it all. In many ways it will be easy because we are transient even while we are here (our lease is only good till June). The second area to remain simple would also be in the way or our activities. Oh, I don’t mean that we can’t have fun, but I don’t want to be so committed to extra-curricular activities for us and for the kids that we are constantly busy..and not able to really enjoy each other and this place that we get to live. The third area would be in the area of food. Now, that probaby sounds so silly to some. We don’t have much money while we are here, so I’ll need to learn to be creative with food..making it yummy and cheap. We’ve also become mostly vegetarian by nature of necessity. Meat can be very expensive here, so meat is now a luxury. I also want treats to truly be treats. I think about our lives in the states. We ate out a bunch (the locals don’t really do that here because the food is way overpriced), but we also had candy and such quite a bit. These things didn’t really feel special anymore because they happened to much. So, I want the special times of buying candy at Burns or getting ice cream at Jannetta’s to be special.
You may be asking why living a simple life is so important to me. Because I’m realizing more and more exactly how important my family and friends are. I’d rather hang out with my family and friends here and in the states than feeling like I always need to be doing some sort of housework.
So, there are my thoughts for today.
