Walking By Faith: Moving In

Two weeks...wow we have been here two weeks. It has been a crazy two weeks. For those of you who don't know, we moved down here knowing we had no permanent housing. We had several people looking for us, hours on the Internet ourselves, and had traveled down here in April and had found nothing. We finally decided to just come anyways and stay in a short term rental, praying something would come available when we got here. He answered...one became available the day we arrived. I mean there had literally been nothing but 1 bedroom casas available and they were pricey at that. It is small at 1,000sq ft, on a nice quiet road, in a safe area, efficient, has a very generous Landlord/Property manager, and a view from the deck that will take your breath away...PERFECT. The house has been vacant ever since it was built a few years ago and had tenants move in 4 months ago but they decided to move to the beach and just vacated the home shortly after moving in. We were supposed to clean last Friday, have our few things we shipped delivered on Saturday, and move our luggage Saturday. I thought that was a pretty good plan. Tico time rerouted all my plans. We received keys, 30 minutes later shipping company said we will be at your house in 2 hours to deliver your things. Yikes...oh, no. . I wanted to sanitize and debug first. Yeah, we'll, it was all chaos in a matter of minutes. I scubbed inside and out of all cabinets, toilets, doors, and someone else had to come clean the bat poop all over the back porch. I drew the line there. I wish I had taken pictures of it, but I was so horrified at the time I didn't even think about it. I have used an entire gallon of bleach and Lysol and several cans of Raid. David bought the big gun bug exterminator stuff the other day and sprayed it all outside. The bug population is finally decreasing, now if we can get rid of the geckos and their little presents they keep leaving all over the house. But, it is all coming together. This home only had a little cooktop, about the size of a camper cooktop and washing machine (large capacity, super excited about that). But, the owner is graciously installing a dishwasher, an oven, placing weather stripping under all the doors (debugging still in process). David planning on caulking all of the windows and door frames next week. And the owner has had someone here all week fixing things, placing towel bars in bathroom, etc. We are so blessed.

These are the kid's toys in the living room.

There is no room in their room. We don't have

chester drawers for clothes, so they are in

the built in cabinets in the room, which is what

they call closets.

This is a 2BR house, so the kids got the master bedroom

since it was larger. This works though, large enough

for our bed.

This was Leia's first time in a big girl bed. We sold her crib,

she then slept in the Pack N Play at Mammaw's

before we left, then a couch at the temporary house

last week, to finally snuggling with Sissy

in the big bed.

We brought the boys' bunk beds because we knew

we would probably short on space and need them.

The cabinets directly to the left is our storage space.

This is our living room.

Kids playing Rummikub in the living room today.

Side Note: I put this shelf together all by myself

today while David was gone. I was so proud, and

he was so shocked to see it done.

Cleaning up Gecko droppings...

Guess you can tell what she thinks

about that.

Pura Vida!

So, the oven was installed yesterday morning. We officially are moved in as of last night. The first batch of cookies were baked and an entire pan consumed. Then this morning I made cinnamon streusel muffins. Oven works GREAT!!! Now obtaining those ingredients was not quite as easy. Brown sugar is like a foreign substance here. But hours later and at 9:00 last night we finally had brown sugar. All that time to find a bag that didn't hold quite 2 cups...I buy the 5lb bag at Sam's. We placed our first meat order yesterday and will get it next Thursday. Kay, the gringo restaurant owner, says this is the only place you want to eat meat from. I will take her word for it, because the meat smell in the market is enough to drop anyone to their knees. Leia walks through there pinching her nose with her fingers and forehead crinkled up.

The temperature at this house is amazing. Cannot even believe the drastic temperature difference. It is only about 5-6 miles from the other house. Does that give you an idea of how fast the elevation changes here? It gets so cool at night that I even use 2 blankets. So, finally, we are settling in here. David has some studies scheduled for Saturday. We are looking for somewhere to start having services but until then we are meeting on Myra's front porch. Rainy season is just starting to gear up and when it is going in full force it will be very difficult for us to get in and out of Myra's house due to all of the mud and rain. We are pretty sure the kids won't be able to make the trek down and up out of her house. It gets slick as snot, I can barely keep my own two feet under me...have lost them in couple times past. Now that we are settling into our home routine I can update more often. Thank you so much for all the prayers and kind words you have expressed to us.