Goodies From Guate

First, thank you to everyone who prayed for Candelaria's finger. It has finally started to improve!

We will have to make periodic trips to the capital from now until our baby comes for my doctors appointments. It is a 7 hour drive, so normally we don't go very often. It is perfect timing though now as we are finishing up our forever house. By "finishing up" I mean coming down to the last couple months. If we come across something we need, we can have a much better quality selection in Guate.

Another serious plus is that in Guatemala City there are restaurants full of my pregnancy cravings!

This past trip we had a couple things on our list. The main one for me was my kitchen sink. I have put off purchasing one because I had my heart set on a farmhouse apron front sink. Unfortunately I did not realize how crazy expensive those things are. Beyond that, they do not even exist in this country... I have searched high and low. This is probably a blessing because we ended up finding a metal sink much cheaper. My second choice was a stainless steel deep symmetrical double bowl under mount. We came pretty close! I am very thankful for it. When you make 3 meals a day, your kitchen sink is a big deal. I didn't take a photo in the store and ours is all wrapped up, but it looks sort of like the the photo below. The right side is shallow and smaller than the left. That probably will end up saving us water, which we seem to always be short of.

{Photo found on CSN stores website}

The boys' birthday is coming up, so we wanted to look for their presents. Unless it is Christmas time, there aren't many good/safe toys in Petén, so it's best to plan ahead. In one hardware store we came across a bright yellow slide and some swings. Immediately Jimmy decided he wanted to build the boys a swing set at our forever house. It will look something like this:

Hope he has time to get it done by the middle of October!

I made a joke about Jimmy going to the market in zone 1 for me. He wouldn't ever let us all go because it is dangerous for foreigners. I have only ever been once and that was for only a couple of minutes. I hear it is full of beautiful inexpensive handmade things that aren't sold in the typical tourist areas. Well Jimmy did it! These are the goodies he picked out all by himself to bring back for me!

These are handmade planters. The terra-cotta one is for hanging.

The other items are all light fixtures. We still have lots of naked bulbs hanging from our ceiling since we hadn't found any fixtures we liked. I don't think we will have that problem in our forever house.

{This is a pile of 3}
These are baskets, but I think we will use them as lights.
These are my favorite. They were $5. This is definitely a perk of living here.