Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Welcome Home!

We had a lot of luggage flying back. We bought 3 seats since you can only have one person holding a baby per row, so that we could all sit together. (We used sky miles for 2 of them.) That gave us 6 bags plus we cashed in some of our sky miles for 2 more.
We always fly Taca out of Miami because it's the cheapest and a straight shot to Guatemala City so we were going to have to either rent a very large van to get all of our luggage to Miami or ask my parents to drive 2 vehicles 6 hours there and back.
My home church, Trinity Baptist Church, was so nice and let us use one of their vans to get to Miami. It was a fun road trip. Both my parents went with us and Becca too!
See our wagon box?! The boys loved the wagons here so much that we decided to take one back with us. Jimmy is putting it together today and we are going to take it to Flores and walk around the island after we go grocery shopping.
{Miami airport}
We flew into Guatemala City Friday afternoon.
We had a great flight. Silas slept in my arms for almost 2 hours. He is not much of a snuggler most of the time, so I absolutely loved that! All 8 checked bags and 6 carry-ons plus a double stroller made it in tacked.

For some reason any time we enter or leave the country of Guatemala things start going wrong for us. Here what happened this time:

1. The boys' dvd player broke that their Papa had gotten them about 10 minutes into our 6.5 hour drive to Petén. Nothing happened to it, I carry it in its own padded bag if we ever take it anywhere. No one touched it, it just broke.

2. On our drive home we started smelling paint fumes. We had brought back some magnetic paint to use in our forever house. All the way home I was picturing it spilled out all over the boys' 2T clothes that I was bringing back for them. When we unloaded the micro it had spilled out on the floor and on our stroller. Somehow the only casualty inside the piece of luggage it was in was a hand towel... not bad.

3. My backpack fell over on the drive (are you sensing some crazy driving going on?) bending our one working internet modem. It's a first generation and works so much better than any of the new ones that have come out since then and you can't get another one like it... sad.

4. When we got home we found out that an entire rat family had been living in our house. (It was about 8:15pm by that time.) There was rat poo all over our entire house... on everything.
I can not exaggerate how much of it there was. This is Silas' crib. I have no idea why they went into the boys' room. There was nothing in there for them to eat, so they chewed up some of their wooden blocks. There was poo on all of our beds. We found out why there was so much feces because there were entire shelves in our pantry that were completely empty. They ate all of the contents... even the packaging, entire bags of crackers, boxes of cereal, packages of beaf jerky.

5. Next, while I was cleaning, the kitchen sink started leaking all over the kitchen floor. I cleaned it up with all of my towels. It didn't matter anyway, it wasn't like they were clean since all of our linens had been covered in rat poo.

6. When I went to go wash all of our dirty linens, I realized that the rats had eaten something important in my washing machine. They broke it. I didn't want to be in the laundry room anyway since I could still hear the rats moving around in there and it smelled like rat pee.

7. The dogs were very happy to see us and us them, but they were so nasty I didn't want to touch them. Our poor dogs have mange, worms, ticks, and Lucha has a cough so bad I didn't recognize her bark.

8. Before we left we had closed all the doors inside our house hoping that if a rat got in, it couldn't scavenge from room to room... silly us. Somehow rats had gotten into every room, but we thought the office/bathroom was safe. Hahaha! Our bathroom is very tiny, even tinier when a rat makes his presence known when you are in there. Its so small that if you sit down, your knees hit the door. So that's how we knew there were rats in the office. One of us made contact with their little beady eyes while we were doing our business. It peaked its little head under the door. Those office/bathroom rats were aggressive little suckers. It took us 2 days to kill them all and until then whenever we took our showers or used the bathroom the other person was on rat watch. Which basically means you stand in the doorway with a broom or for Jimmy it meant playing games on his phone and yelling periodically, "Still no rat".
I have no idea how they got into the office, but we did see how they tried to leave. They chewed through the door.

So we are slowly taking back our house... from the rats. We have killed 5 so far, 6 if you count the one that we caught while we were gone, that the other rats ate. I know there is at least 1 more left, maybe more. We have shop vacced up most of the droppings, that's how we killed 1 of them. Do you know what a rat sounds like being shop vacced up a tube... lovely! Sort of like Silas when you tickle his feet. I have Lysoled almost every square inch of my house including all of our belongings. I plan on doing the rest over the next 2 days.
These were the droppings I swept up into a pile inside my washing machine. Why would it be in there and how did they get out? We were really worried that we were going to have to buy a new washer and they are very expensive here. I love my washer too. It is simple and reliable, I always miss it when we are in the States. This was a big blessing - Jimmy took our washer to the city and got it fixed for $20! My clothes line is full now, that is super comforting.

So we have had a couple crazy days since we have been back. We are so thankful though that all of it is really nothing in the grand scheme of things. First, we are so happy to be back. All 3 of our dogs are alive, no matter how bad they look and smell! I have a washing machine, an indoor sink, and a modem that could break in the first place. No one had broken into our house. Our friend Luis had our micro cleaned while we were gone and even repaired a couple things. Then had it waiting in Guatemala City for us to drive back to Petén. We are so blessed! God is taking good care of us and providing us with a lot of laughter along the way.

As soon as the boys heard Jimmy opening the gate, they recognized this place as being familiar. They greeted the dogs and ran inside and hopped on their firetrucks. All their toys are like new again since they haven't seen them in 3 months. They were vey happy to be back in their cribs after we cleaned them up! We are doing great and are excited about jumping back in as soon as possible. Domingo came over for breakfast this morning and we are already making plans for our next outreach and for KBI!

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