Saturday, February 26, 2011

A Mixed Blessing

About a week ago I started noticing that Savannah wasn't really nursing much when she got up every three or four hours in the night. I decided to see if she was really hungry, so I started just rearranging her blankets, rubbing her tummy for a minute and giving her back her paci. Sure enough that was all she needed. So for the past five nights she's been sleeping 8 to 10 hours with 2 little mini wake ups. Last night however, was different.

After a bath, some fun calm play time and some rocking, I fed her a little after nine and put her down. I heard her once for just a minute around 3ish, but she fell back to sleep quickly so I didn't even get out of bed. Around 6:30 I woke up to the sound of her happily chirping. I was elated. An entire night without my feet hitting the floor.

As I joyfully hopped out of bed to snuggle up my baby girl my feet splashed into a puddle of water... My first thought was a very unkind one directed at our dog, Sydney. Upon further inspection I discovered that the puddle covered a good amount of floor in our room and the hallway and my anger with our dog turned into curiosity. I traced the water back to it's source - our lovely washing machine! (We haven't gotten our new machine yet because it requires a 4 hour car trip and a border crossing, but I think the events of last night might've bumped it up a few notches on our priority list!)

The washing machine and I have an interesting relationship these days. I would characterize it as love/hate. Don't get me wrong, I am super grateful for it and it's saving my bacon with these cloth diapers, but it does require a little TLC. The pump motor and the temperature gauge are broken and the filling mechanism doesn't work great. So with each load I have to manually drain and fill the machine 4 times and I never really know what temperature it is going to decide to wash the clothes in. Luckily it is super tiny so washing an all red/pink load and an all blue/green load isn't really wasting any space :-)

Back to last night. I guess even though the machine was unplugged something in it decided it would be a good time to fill up with water, which it did until the water spilled onto the floor and wended it's way throughout our house. If Savannah hadn't been so wonderful I would've been up several times in the night and I probably would've noticed the water all over the floor much sooner. Isn't that the way that it always goes :-)

Savannah hanging out with a few of her Brazilian friends

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Another Day, Another Strike

I know there are some people in the world who love the snow, but I am not one of them! I love being back in the land of perpetual summer! Second only to the wonderful warmth are the piles of fresh fruits and veggies. Yesterday we had deep red tomatoes that had just been picked off of someone's vine that morning. We got a whole bag of them for 50 cents and I think we ate half of the bag for lunch :-)

We went to a birthday party this weekend for the little girl of some other missionaries here. Her dad, Jens, is from Germany and her mom, Anna, is from Ivory Coast. While we were eating my friend Anna took Savannah in the other room for a minute. When she walked back in she turned around and this is what I saw:
Savannah looked so cute peeking out and I laughed so hard!!!!!

Cooking is always a challenge the first week back. It always takes a few days to get the dishes and the cooking stuff unpacked, washed, and put away; and it takes several trips to the market to get my kitchen stocked with all of the different ingredients I need to cook from scratch. This time I thought I had a great plan – I bought peanut butter, jelly, and tuna in Dakar on our way down. The only thing that I was missing was bread. Since there are little huts that bake bread everyday on every street, my plan was to have sandwiches for a few days until I could get the house in order. Great plan right? The only problem was when we got here all of the bread bakers in the city were on strike!

The government fixes the price of a lot of different things here and bread is one of them. A loaf of french bread is 20 cents anywhere you go in the city. The problem with that is the price of flour has risen and the bread makers haven't been making any money. The bread makers decided that they had to raise the price to 30 cents. The people refused to pay 30 cents and the bread workers went on strike. I've seen the taxi drivers strike, the rice sellers strike, the postal workers strike, and the teachers strike, but I did not anticipate a bread worker strike right when we got back! After about 4 days they did get it resolved. They bread makers decided to make slightly smaller loaves and sell them for 20 cents :-)

In the Kitchen with my darling little girl in her dress from Aunt Rachel


Savannah can sleep anywhere but she especially likes her monkey bed :-)