One year in....

So, we've been here a year now.  We have gone from two completely exhausted adults on a 30 hour itinerary with two small children to two not so exhausted adults (still with two small children, they may be the source of a lot of current tiredness).

Me and the girls, on the ground in Arequipa, I think I had about 3 hours sleep in 48 hours here.  I felt like I look.

Just as pretty now as when we arrived.  I got over feeling like it's a movie set, though, and now it seems kind of normal.

Dave told me yesterday that he wanted me to go on a 24 hour retreat for myself since I haven't had serious time alone since we came and that kind of thing recharges me.  He had scoped out four nice hotel options and today we went out for Wednesday lunch as is our norm (we tried Ceviche here for the first time at a recommended restaurant...interesting taste but not one I will be making a favorite anytime soon) and then he dropped me and my stuff off at the hotel.  And I've had a few blissful hours to myself.  The things that I count as worth doing now are perhaps a bit different than they would have been in the past.  But I put a henna conditioning treatment on my hair, took a long HOT shower (with water that seemed like it was genuinely heated by a hot water tank, not just from a solar tank or an electric shower head....until you've lived without this you have no real idea what a luxury you have, US dwellers), finished up my work hours for the week, caught up on Facebook, Pinterest, and email, and ate a gourmet dinner of PBJ sandwiches, an orange, and a little custard cup.  Yum.  I have some books to read and will probably go to bed early.  Because I am a mom and that's the way I roll now that I'm sort-of old.

When we were trying to figure out the right amount of time for our sabbatical, we quickly dismissed anything less than a year.  Some people that we read about when doing research talked about taking 6 months off and that just seemed way too short.  It would have been, too.  We took 3 months just to figure out the basics of life, and then it would have been time to plan our reentry.  We thought a year might be ok, but that it might seem a little short in the long run.  Really, think over the last year. Any single year seems to blip by and we wanted to have a long enough time to really make an impact.  So, we settled on about 21 months.  No magic to this except that it was just under two years and allowed us to leave at the end of a summer and come back at the beginning of a summer (because, really- missing the summer in Minnesota or coming back to winter-as-it-happens?  No thanks.)   It also lets us work within the confines of the US school year without being pressured and rushed to get ready for school right after we return. And I continue to think that the overall timeframe has been a good one.  We're in a groove, we both took a year off of work (and that probably won't happen again until we're retired), and Miss M is going to get some great language acquisition.

Our first visitors!

Sometimes I feel like we are living in Europe.

That isn't to say it's all been simple.  There have been a lot of highs and great things.  But I've had my low points, too, and I'm realizing I am perhaps not quite as adaptable as I thought myself to be.  I am feeling much more positive and like my regular self now, but I'm realizing looking back how draining and hard it's been for me to be around people all of the time, away from my normal support networks, and away from "regular" life.  We like our Minnesota life and coming here had nothing to do with getting away from anything.  We wanted an adventure and in some ways I have been up to the challenge but in other ways it has been difficult for me.  Dave has really picked up the slack and he does so much around our house to help keep the day-to-day things running and also trying to make sure he's looking out for what each of us need that I owe him a debt of gratitude. (Thanks, DP!)

My rescuing, problem-solving husband, recreating us locking ourselves out of the house on our second day in and breaking into the gate with the assistance of our neighbors.

I feel like I'm making progress in little things, like organization.  Did you know that even when you own just a portion of the stuff you owned before that you can still have a cluttered house?  I've never had a dirty house, but I have lived with clutter for most of my life.  Maybe all of my life.  Dave is not a cluttered person.  He is more along the German lines of "a place for everything and everything in its place."  I thought when we came here it would be so easy to keep everything cleaned up because we would have so much less stuff.  Which is true to a point, but it's still plenty easy to be cluttered when you drop your things on the floor and don't put them away or don't truly finish a project.  So, for the last little bit, I've been working hard to first create a place that everything belongs (e.g. little storage bins and containers- and many of them are just free cardboard boxes from the grocery store) and then being thoughtful about where things go and then actually putting them there.  I have read in many organization books over the years that this is a good strategy and also that if you start a project you need to stop the project in time to clean up after it instead of rushing to the next thing.  Another tip is that when something is in your hand, take the time to put it away instead of throwing it on the ground and that approach will actually save you time over the long run. That seems like logical advice but I have never really followed it before.  I always felt like there would be more time later or that I wanted to work on whatever I had until the very last second before going to something else.  Well, what do you know.  When you have a place for things to go and you actually put them away in that place, the house stays cleaner.  Woo-hoo.  I'm hoping when we come back to our house in the States that I will do a better job of having a place for all my personal things (we really did have a place for most family things before, like the kitchen stuff and that was always pretty good) and maybe that part of life will get a little easier.

A year of mixing old traditions with new situations (still had a Thanksgiving pie spread!)

A year of exploring new foods!  (This one is maracuya aka passion fruit.  You usually see it as juice or flavor because the fruit consistency is like snot.  Sweet, tart snot.)

Here the girls are enjoying another January afternoon.  In years to come, we'll probably have to ask ourselves if we were in Minnesota or Peru.  ;)

I'm curious to see what other kind of long lasting impacts occur from our time here, I think there will probably be many.  Some will be easy to see and some might be a little more buried.  Feel free to psycho-analyze us from afar and when we get back.  :)

We still have both girls.

They seem to be thriving.

And even when we leave Arequipa, I think a part of us will always be here.