Sunny Days

The weather has been absolutely amazing this week! We went to the zoo on Tuesday with our friends Julie and Channing, and we've been playing outside a lot. Not related to the weather, I got some henna on my belly. We're having my friend take some professional maternity portraits this weekend, but I couldn't resist and had to show off the artwork early. It does fade over time so I hope it's still strong enough to get some good pics this weekend, too.

Third Trimester

So I am officially in the third trimester of pregnancy. I'm still feeling pretty good overall, though it is getting harder and harder to sleep at night (just finding a comfortable position). Plus this baby kicks (hard!) and squirms a lot more than I remember Laina doing.

I feel like I'm already as big as I was the day Laina was born. I haven't compared pics yet though.

Laina is getting so cute and sweet and asks frequently to touch the baby (put her hands on my belly). She also talks about singing to the baby and putting the baby in the cradle. I hope she continues to be so sweet and loving towards her new sibling once they actually arrive.

Today we are having the most amazing February weather - it feels like summer outside so Laina, Ella and I went on a nice long walk and played at the park for quite a while before it was nap time. I wish I could say spring is here, but I know there is bound to be another snow storm or two before winter is truly over. I am anxious to get my little vegetable garden going again this year and Laina seems excited to help. She wants to grow tomatoes and I think I'm willing to give them a shot. Probably just the little grape ones, since those are her favorite. I'm hoping Jay will be willing to pretty much double the size of the garden so we can have a lot more variety this year (the squash dominated last year).

I think that's all the random news for the third trimester. Hopefully I'll get in another post or two before the end of April.

Antigua

After a great week in Tizate helping Global Shores, we presented our work, packed up, and headed to Antigua for a celebratory dinner and a day of being touristas. Below is the dinner with our team and the staff from Global Shores/Colegio Cristiano.

 

We stayed in an awkwardly romantic hotel, made even more awkward by the fact that a) it was Valentine's weekend, and b) I scored the upgrade room in a random pick. Dan and I had the extra extravagant room with a tiny jacuzzi for two, skylight over the tub/shower, and romantic music playing through hidden speakers.  Would have been awesome if Jenna was with me instead of Dan (no offense, Dan).

The next day we had a choice of hitting up one of the volcanos or seeing Antigua. It was a tough call with only one day, so it was about half and half. I had already seen a volcano in Hawaii, so I opted to sleep in, have a lazy breakfast, and see the sights with Tim, Dan, Richal, and Tom.We started out down the street, and came across the Public Pilas (Pila is a traditional washbasin, and there were public ones around town, this is a particularly famous one). There were cars there, we just snapped this shot with the horse because it looked cool.

We walked around Antigua down the cobblestone streets with Richal, the structural engineer who has been coming and doing projects in Guatemala for many years. He knows the place very well, and made for a great tour guide. He took us to Iglesia y Convento de San Francisco (Church & Convent of Saint Francis). This was a church originally built around 1525, which had some run-ins with some earthquakes and floods over the years (apparently the Volcano nearby, when it erupts, sends a lake-full of water into the city). It was in the process of being restored. Hopefully 'restored' does not include reconstructing, as the ruins in their current state are fascinating to walk through. At 75 cents it was an unbelievably affordable stop.We spent a solid hour and a half there wandering around the ruins, above and below. Truly gorgeous.

Then we went and checked out Richal's favorite hotel to stay at, called Quinta de las Flores. I can see why he likes it, it is a gorgeous place, lusciously landscaped, fountains, great outdoor spaces and patios, and this playground with concrete slides (can't figure out what you're supposed to do on a concrete slide) and a sweet teeter totter.

We headed back toward the hotel, split up to go grab lunch, do some souvenier shopping, etc., and later Michael and I hit up the Convento de Capuchinas across the street from our hotel. It was also an amazing historic piece of architecture. This was a church and convent built in the 1700s, and is said to be the first 'apartment' building in the Americas, with a bathroom in every room. See if you can spot me in the photo below and to the left for scale. Nun 'apartments' on the bottom right.

There were some unconfirmed rumors of human sacrifice having occurred back in the day down in a lower chambers, where there was a creepy nun mannequin laying on a table with candles next to it. I don't know about that, but there was another eerie underground chamber below the nun chambers, shaped like a giant donut with a huge center column and vaulted in a circle around it. The acoustics and reverberation in this chamber was unbelievable. Apparently its kind of a mystery what the room was for, but here's a video of me demonstrating the echo with the only thing I could think to say.... "Luuuke, I am your Faaaaather"...

And we visited the well photographed yellow arch where I had a long debate with a street vendor in Spanish about how I really didn't want to buy a necklace. Tom (civil engineer) took the gorgeous photo to the right from the front door of our hotel (Las Capuchinas ruins are on the right).

Antigua was a great visit. I can see Guatemala being a good vacation spot for the slightly adventurous traveler. I would have loved to have had the time to see the Mayan ruins in Tikal and Lake Atitlan, which is supposed to be breathtaking. It was also a good way to begin the transition back to our relatively wealthy gringo lifestyles.

Audio picture

Here's a bonus post, some audio I recorded during the morning worship at the existing school.

Guatemala in a nutshell

This is the short version of my Guatemala trip. There will probably never be a long version, because I could go on for hours about it and you will probably regret asking...

As I mentioned in the post I couple of months ago, I felt called to go on a trip with Engineering Ministries International (eMi) to Guatemala with a team of volunteers to design a school for a group of missionaries that chose to invest in a small town called El Tizate. That was about all I knew about what I was about to get myself into.

I got on a plane a Saturday the 6th and flew to Dallas, where I met the rest of the volunteers for the first time, and we continued on to Guatemala city, where we met the eMi staff, interns, and the missionaries we were serving at the airport. Our first meal in Guatemala was genuine authentic McDonalds. I learned quickly trying to order some nuggets that my Spanish was no bueno.

I can already tell this is going to be too long to read... so I'll move along a little quicker. After our van breaking down, we made it to our hotel in Jocotenango (Hotel Cuscutlan) and cashed out for the night (a few details about Guatemala - no flushing TP, and no drinking or brushing with the tap water - also apparently hotels are allowed to have no windows in the rooms).

Daily walk to the bus stop

We visited the site the next day, heard the story of how Global Shores got started and ended up in El Tizate (which isn't on any maps, and most people down the road in Antigua have never heard of), and visited their church (which was awesome). We got back and caught the end of the Superbowl at the hotel in Espanol.


Over the next 4 days we worked with the ministry to determine what they needed, then put together 3 design options and moved ahead with the preferred option to design a building and site. Never have I been part of such an accelerated design process, but by Friday's presentation, we had ourselves a pretty solid design. We still need to tweak some things, but everyone was happy with the design, and the ministry got to be heavily involved in its inception. A rendering of the courtyard is below. We had to make a few concessions from what we would have really liked to to, but that's always the case. The kids will have a quality school, and that's what matters most.

Playing with programming blocks to design the building.

Team in action. They had both electricity and satellite wifi at the existing school (another eMi project), so our team was able to work in a pretty similar way as home.

 Teacher's reacting to the presentation

View of the courtyard portion of the future building

Speaking of the kids... The kids of El Tizate are adorable. I had no idea how friendly and warm the people would be there. When the missionaries told the story of arriving in Tizate, they talked about another humanitarian guy nearby who warned them to stay away from Tizate, that Tizate is a dysfunctional town, is hopeless, and they should put their efforts somewhere else. They've been in operation as a school for only 5 years, but that description did not fit at all, at least anymore. Walking around sketchy alleys among tin-roofed shacks, you would feel as safe as anywhere. Everyone would say "hola", and were genuinely happy to see us.

Every morning, after riding the school bus with the kids, we went to the morning worship with them (christian school), and afterward the kids would run up and hug us. All of the kids. Literally, 5-10 minutes of kid after kid running up to hug you. Starting every morning like this was one of my favorite parts: I recorded some audio of it, but unfortunately I can't upload that.

"Una Foto! Una Foto!"

We had 11 people with us: Me, Tim (project leader), Michael (Architectural Intern), Amos (Structural Intern), Richal (structural engineer) and his grandson Elliot, Jim (surveyor) and his son Zach, Ralph and Tom (civil engineers), and Dan (drafter). The two teenage guys were good to have with us, because we were all working so much we didn't have a lot of time to hang out with the kids. They were kind of our representatives to the kids in the town, playing soccer, etc. with them. One of the best things about this trip was that our whole team gelled instantly. None of us knew each other beforehand, but all of us being united for a common purpose kept us acting as a solid team. We all got to know each other pretty well over the week, and still got along great. I'd love to have a reunion someday.

For meals we all were split up and paired with another group of canadians who were there to do some construction work, and assigned to host families (the ministry gives them funds to cover meal expenses). Most of the food consisted of a black bean paste, rice, and Guatemalan tortillas, which are a blander version of Mexican tortillas (just corn and water - no salt or anything). We did get a lot of fresh fruit and various egg-battered veggies. I definitely felt like we were eating well relative to the average meal around there, so no complaints here. My host family was Marianna, her brother Factore, and Factore's children Freddie and Karen.

Me, Marianna, Factore, and Hans

My Spanish improved exponentially over the week because of the meals at their house (they speak zero english). By the end of the week I was having conversations with people in Spanish. At the week-end pizza party, I was even joking with some Guatemalan construction workers about this canadian guy's beard (apparently beards are not cool to Guatemalans, who prefer the 'stache look). I also taught them the word 'soul patch'. (Soul patches are still cool, I was reassured).

After a life-affirming and fullfilling week of serving the missionaries in Tizate, we packed up for a recovery day in Antigua down the road. I'll do another post about Antigua next.

Team Photo in Antigua (Zach and Elliot were MIA)

It was a great trip. I made some good friends and we accomplished quite a bit in one week's time. It was by far the most spiritually and vocationally fullfilling thing I've ever been involved in.

I've heard heaven described not as a place where you just sit in an eternal state of ethereal bliss, but where everyone has work to do, and that work is not a burden, but a true joy, and is exactly tuned to how you were designed by your Creator, similar to when you get lost in something you love to do and lose track of time. And of course there will be endless worship and endless amounts of joy. While the exact nature of life in heaven is not something any of us can fully grasp, I have always liked that image. I truly feel like I was given a taste of that in Tizate. I felt literally lighter the whole time, in spite of the stress of a 1-week building design with multiple complications. If that's what it feels like to live in step with God's will, I'm all in.

One of my goals when I left was to come back changed, if only slightly, to live life more missionally here at home, and I think that may have been successful.

Laina's First Haircut

Laina got her first real haircut on Tuesday. I trimmed her "mullet" once or twice when she was a baby, but haven't touched it in at least a year. She went to the lady who does my hair which is really ideal because she has a salon in her basement at home and then when her haircut was over she got to play with all the toys while I got my hair cut. She sat in the big chair and did really well. She was nervous at first, but settled right in and did great! It's obviously nothing drastic, just a trim in the back and a little face-framing in the front. What a big girl!!

Updates

This is long overdue, but here's another belly shot of baby #2 (taken at 25 weeks). I am almost to the third trimester (don't even remember exactly when it starts) and am already feeling that uncomfortableness that comes along with the last stage of pregnancy. I know I don't look that huge yet, but I certainly feel huge. It seems every move I make is cumbersome. I really don't remember feeling this way with Laina, but maybe I've just forgotten. I am taking prenatal yoga again which does help, and is really a nice preparation for labor. The one thing I am very excited about this time is actually labor and delivery. I know that sounds weird, but everything is going to be sooo different this time around and I know it's going to be better. I love having a midwife and feel she is so attentive to me and in tune with pregnancy.

And just for good measure, below is a picture of Laina playing with her kitchen. Jay took a few pictures to try and capture how cute her hair looks when it's wavy after being in braids. She is so much fun and she loves for me to put her hair in braids.


We also had a terrific visit with my parents earlier this month. Unfortunately, all the pictures were taken with their camera, so, Mom and Dad, send those pics on over and I'll do a proper post!