Peru Trip! (Casa del Aguila Orphanage)

DAYS 7-9 CASA DEL AGUILA

We spent several days visiting an orphanage (one of the ones my colleague's nonprofit helps kids aging out of) outside Limatambo, which is very far flung off the beaten path. Maybe more accessible than Machu Picchu, because you could just go there by... driving on a road. But certainly more in the middle of nowhere.

The orphanage has a handful of houses where kids are grouped by age and gender, and live with a house parent. They go to school next door at an adjacent private school, where they have free tuition but kids from neighboring villages can pay to attend. Some of them walk literal hours each way to get there. (See again: far-flung.)

(Where else but Peru can you see palm trees and snow-capped mountains in the same vista?)

Wait, wait. Are you wondering if there were alpacas wandering through the orphanage? Are you??

Yes, there were alpacas wandering through the orphanage. Of course there were alpacas. There are always alpacas.

The orphanage was an excellent host, we got to stay in a little house-like dorm with bunk beds and a cozy cabin feel. It felt like family camp!

All the housing buildings look almost the same and it's hard to tell in the dark which one is which, so you have to remember by the scripture over the door, which made me smile.

Also the best showers of our whole trip were here! In the land of no water heaters! They have a wood stove out behind the house and one of our hosts would come and light the fire to heat the water at whatever time we told him we might want showers. It worked beautifully and they were so kind and helpful to do that for us! Excellent service, when service isn't even their job, they're just living their normal orphanage work life. That's some amazing hospitality right there.

We had our breakfasts and dinners prepared by a woman who specially does just that for visitors (so that everything can be washed in filtered water, etc, since our non-local stomachs couldn't do much fresh produce otherwise). Her cooking was delicious and she was warm and kind and truly made us feel like honored guests.

We had the opportunity to eat with the children in their cafeteria for lunches, so I got to do that once, and during the other lunch I was manning the work phones back in our dorm house, where there was wifi. (Our whole company was in Peru! It was a lot to keep on top of our jobs and also be so far away and so busy and so non-connected by cell and data signals.)

The orphanage has a small farm where they get milk for the kids and eventually raise meat too. It's mostly sheep and goats, and the kids learn to take care of them as part of their chores.

When we were there, there was a baby lamb who had just been born the night before! Super cool.

They also have a working farm with lucumas and avocados and all manner of fruit, which they use for food and also to sell. And bees! They keep bees!

One night when we were there, we got to go to worship with them, which was lovely. Going to church in new places is always so cool to me, to see how acts of worship and those type of practices manifest differently in different contexts. We sang a lot of songs, clapped some crazy fun patterns, and our boss preached ("preached") with our local colleague translating.

At one point we went to go play with the kids and they showed us how to make kites out of garbage bags. Which sounds... I don't know, sad? But it isn't, I mean it didn't feel sad. It felt cool and creative and industrious. I love it when little kids can teach me something I would never think of, being a boring old grownup!

I spent one afternoon walking through the school with my coworker, meeting all of his contacts there, and talking to the director and the computer lab teacher. We had a fun conversation about duolingo, which they're using for lots of English practice. I also got to spend some time in an English workshop with a lovely teenager and practice with her. Meeting people and making conversation is such a great way to learn, and I'm so glad I got to do that for a bit.

I also spent part of one afternoon doing some craft things with a few younger kids around their group houses. I wasn't sure what I would be able to do that wouldn't need a translator (the only other English speaker with me was my boss's four-year-old daughter, and she was no help) so I had brought washi tape and cardstock and we made bookmarks.

Basically if you open up a lunch box full of pretty tape, girls FLOCK to it. It transcends culture.

It was really fun to make them with them, and try to chat and learn a few spanish words. It's amazing how much you can communicate even with very little language in common.

One of my favorite creatures at the orphanage was this little dog, who apparently loves any visitors who come through. He's not really a pet and not really a stray (the "stray" dogs all over Peru looked very well loved and cared for). He stuck to my side for basically the whole time we were there. On the last night he even pushed through the screen door into our house/cabin, and climbed on my bed and took a nap while we were in our debriefing and affirmations meeting.

A few people were horrified but I did not hate it one bit.

And that's the story of how I cried some Bowden tears, all the way down in South America.

DAYS 9-10 THE LONG JOURNEY HOME

Sadly, about half our group woke up very sick on the last morning in Peru. I think something happened with the lunch the day before (when I was doing a work shift, so I missed it) (grateful in hindsight). It was a long and awkward drive back over the mountains and we had to stop several times for fresh air for our sickies.

When people had perked up, we bought a giant loaf of bread from someone on a street corner (add that to the list of things America should embrace too - I think there's a market for street corner snack sellers here, directly into car windows!) and shared it amongst ourselves. Lots of breaking bread together jokes, etc etc.

It took hours of bus riding, hours of airport waiting, many rounds of good-byes as people peeled off for their own departures home, and then three planes (including one long red-eye) - but we made it back. I made my two people on the same flight out of Lima (my favorite coworkers) (shhh don't tell the others) change into PJs to fly home, and we took one last selfie at the airport.

Bye Peru. You are beautiful. And you have excellent cocktails.

Bumgarner (Birthday!) Beach Week

With all the grandkids getting older and starting school, in a variety of school districts with varying school district schedules, we opted last year to move our family's beach week to August instead of spring break. So we had to wait several extra months this year to scratch our beach itch, but we finally made it! And celebrated Charlotte's birthday there, to boot!

(Girl's going to start thinking she gets a trip every year for her birthday.)

I made a laughably fundorable janky sunshine cake, per her beach birthday request, and it was... something. (She loved it.)

In better crafty news, I also made that shirt myself with a roll of iron on glitter paper and a blowing up a fun font and tracing it, oh yes I did, LIKE A BOSS.

Her one birthday request for the beach was to have an egg hunt. Normally we have always been there near Easter of course, and we often do a big family egg hunt outside on Easter afternoon after our beach arrival. Egg hunts aren't really part of our Easter celebration at home, so she totally associates eggs with the beach, not Easter itself. And. So. She wanted one for her birthday. At the beach. BECAUSE EGG HUNTS ARE A NORMAL BEACH ACTIVITY DUH.

After her birthday, the rest of the week was full of drinking and ice cream and watching the Olympics together, which was sort of fun since we hadn't done that together since we were kids.

We also took some of the kids to a tye dye event in the little pavilion by the town hall. Excellent activity.

We waited by a turtle nest for some turtle rescuers to shepherd some babies into the ocean (Holden Beach is a turtle sanctuary and we were there exactly the right week!) but it had already mostly hatched, so we only got to see leftover eggs, no babies.

John and Mark and the kids built a lot of sandcastles. Like, a lot. A LOT. Sometimes I think those two only pretend to be into it "for the kids" because they just legit like digging themselves.

Anneliese figured out how to ride waves in on the boogie board, and spent literal hours doing it. At one point during the week she asked me if there was an olympic medal for boogie boarding. "No reason, just curious."

We had some lovely evenings out on the beach, too. Our normal (little kid) routine had been to bring everyone in by 4 or 5 for dinner and then into bed afterwards. But this time of year, when it's hot in the day and everyone doesn't need to be in bed super early (because Olympics) (and getting older), it became easier to have some a/c time inside in the middle of the afternoon, and play to our hearts' content in the evening. Just so amazingly beautiful.

And fun uncles make things pretty fun too.

Thanks for a fun week as always, Dad and Cathy! It's so fun to see how the kids grow up all crowded around you at the beach every year. We are lucky to do this and lucky to have you.

It seems every Carolinian family has "their" beach town that they go to every year, a thing that is apparently unfamiliar outside of this part of the country. But it happens, it starts to feel like home, everyone has one, and this one is ours.

See you next year, Holden Beach.

Great Wolf Birthday

Nathan opted out of a typical birthday party this year in favor of an overnight trip to the Great Wolf Lodge, which he has been asking to do for years, and daaaaang can I just say this is a great idea? Family time? Fun. Water slides? Fun. Great room with built in cabin? FUN. And no managing rsvp's and filling favor bags and planning party games and worrying your child's friends have summer plans and are hard to catch up with and then cleaning up after them? RECOMMEND.

We woke up early to hit the road, so we had Nathan's birthday cake first thing. For breakfast dessert! (Oh, the small things that delight children.)

(I made Smitten Kitchen's Pink Lady Cake but with raspberries instead of strawberries, and you should definitely do that if you like fruity cake. I only made a third of the recipe since hers is hyuuuge.)

We went to the Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg (there are two about the same distance from us, and that one had better ratings), and we only went for one night. We weren't sure of the timing but it turns out that was a great length for us. We got there at 1, which is the earliest you can get a water park bracelet on your check-in day. Our room wasn't ready til 4, but we knew that going in, and we (I) had packed our swimsuits and stuff smartly, so we had "day at the pool" bags separate from our suitcase.

So we had several hours at the waterpark, and this was peak crowds, it turns out (which makes sense, since that day's checkout people can stay til close and people like us were there ready to play before our own checkins), but even at peak crowds it was still fine. Only the biggest baddest slide had a long line, and that was.... fifteen minutes? So, fiiiiine.

And y'all, the slides are GOOD! They say "waterpark" indoors, but people throw that term around loosely, and sometimes a "waterpark" at a hotel is like, a cool pool with several slides. So, you never know. But this was legit! They were big and fast and really fun, even for adults.

You have to be 48 inches to do most of the big ones, so Nathan and Anneliese could go on whatever they wanted. There were a handful of slides for smaller kids too, but Charlotte had zero interest. She mostly just wanted to skip through the splash pools, chicken out at the tops of even the baby splash slides, and find her zen in the wave pool.

Anneliese, meanwhile, is our adventure-seeker and waited in  line for the biggest coolest (scariest) slide a gazillion times.

We went out for a family birthday dinner, and they had a steak on the kids menu, and Nathan desperately wanted it, which is of course fine. Steak dinner!

(He needed help learning to cut it. It was adorable.)

We opened presents in our room, which was sweet.

Our room was great! It had a fireplace and a fridge and a table and couch and sitting area. Plus a balcony. And a cabin! With bunk beds!

They have several kinds of suites (tents, caves, cabins) but Nathan liked this one because it had room for a third kid in the fun part, instead of just getting stuck on a sleeper sofa. So if you have three kids, get the cabin. When you're a child (or a grownup, ha), there's nothing much cooler than a novel place to sleep in a hotel room.

The hotel has all manner of things for kids to do if you get tired of the waterpark (we didn't, really, but some people might). Like a round-the-clock schedule of included activities in the lobby, like kiddie yoga, and crafts, and button making, and character appearances, and milk/cookies at bedtime, and a PJ bubble party. (We did stop by that.) (Mark taught Charlotte the electric slide. Haaaaaaa.)

I had heard that lots of stuff at GWL would cost extra, and we would rack up room charges on all manner of things (everything goes through your room key, which is also your waterpark wristband, which is very easy and also therefore potentially dangerous), but we didn't find that to be the case at all. Everything we wanted to do was included, we went out for one dinner, we brought our own yogurt and cereal and pop tarts for breakfast (there's a fridge in every room, we'd have been dumb not to), and we used a resort credit booking promo to buy lunch and snacks and frozen drinks at the pool.

Apparently there is a magic game involving wands and extra charges that lots of kids love, but our kids were happy to chase Pokemon and no one tried to push any of those extras on us or anything. I don't think our kids even noticed they existed, which is nice. Some places market that stuff directly to kids which is so maddening, but GWL didn't, so A+ to them.

Anyway it was totally a good experience, especially for a birthday (every kid gets wolf ears at check-in, but Nathan's had a special hat on them so all the staff could see he was a special occasion kid, and treated him as such, which was very sweet -- and he also got a token for a free treat at the ice cream parlor, which is a nice touch). It felt special enough and out of the ordinary that for the kids it was a Very Big Deal, and for us it was really easy to have a night in a place that clearly knows how to cater to families.

(Well, I say easy except my broke-ass foot was really tired from walking barefoot all around the waterpark. I have been weaning off my boot cast and into sturdy hiking shoes, but all those barefoot hours were a more strenuous wean than I should have done. I'm still hoping it doesn't come back to bite me later. I feel dumb, yo.)

(Half) A Year in the Life

So. I missed this here little ol' blog, and I came over a few days ago to dust it off and get caught up, and there were gross horrible rapey comments waiting for moderation, and it momentarily upended how I felt about the internet, because amongst all the loveliness and wonderful human connection, there is apparently horrible barf-inducing assholery as well, and even though that's a thing you think you know, you don't know it til it's aimed at your own children.

So, I did what any normal person would do and I locked this sh!t down. Hello from this newly guard-railed space which can't be googled and no longer has links posted in any public profile, where people only find me if I share on a platform that's now private, because all my platforms are now private. Which means people only find me if I share myself where they can.

Hi! You found me! I shared myself to you!

Y'all, it hasn't been our best season/s in these parts. The honest but not-gritty recap:

NOVEMBER

I turned 35, Another Nathan flew in on my birthday and Mark and I had a lovely visit with him, and I felt very loved and very middle-aged.

Mark and I took a grownups-only trip to Mexico, and my dad came and stayed in our house for a week and managed everything (everything!) at home, because he is amazing. Mexico was also amazing. Mark was amazing. It was such a happy trip.

Mark turned 35. We had cake and a date and took this family picture. Yay family!

I started a new job.

!!!!!!!

I mentioned this in my year-end recap post; it's the same job I did before, but with a different company. The whole going-back-to-work thing was really fraught and stressful, half because I'm suddenly 35 and don't know what to do with my life, and half because Mark's work is so batsh!t insane that it's really difficult to piece any kind of work schedule together and balance it with also picking up the slack at home, plus all the normal stuff I do (I was already busy). And, so, things kind of came to a head around this time about the balance in our marriage and house and life, and there were ugly feelings and patterns surrounding some of that and, well, yeah.

Speaking of ugly, this laptop bag I got from my company is kind of the worst, yes?

(I got a new one to tide me over until I find The Bag, don't worry.) (Suggestions welcome, if you love your laptop bag, by the way.)

DECEMBER

It was not our best holiday season. It's kind of a blur now. But here, look at a sweet Christmas picture of the babies.

JANUARY

We got a new car! I forced Mark (forced!) to feel his feelings about his old Mazda, the first car we ever bought together, and we sold it and are now back to being an Accord family. It'll be mine when the van dies, and whatever Big Car we get to replace it will be mostly Mark's to drive around daily. SEDAN ME, YO.

Since we didn't get our traditional New Year's Eve all together, I flew to Minnesota for Another Nathan's birthday. It was -36 with the wind chill (yes that says NEGATIVE THIRTY SIX OH EM GEE) when I went to church that Sunday morning. I secretly felt like a badass and I secretly love the snow, but only because it's in a place with plows and such. Was a delightful visit and left feeling... spirit-filled. Friendship-filled. Etc.

We lost power for a night in an ice storm and the kids and I camped out by the (gas) fireplace and read books out loud. It was surprisingly sweet, in a Laura Ingalls (cussy) kind of way.

Also, Charlotte helped me with work, and it sort of delighted me, on the days it didn't exhaust me.

I'M RIGHT ON TOP OF THAT, ROSE!

And that is legit the most exciting thing to report in all of January.

FEBRUARY

Anneliese burned her hand badly on the stove while helping me make sloppy joes.

She also read Amelia Bedelia and sent funny texts about it.

And wore this great outfit.

Hmmm I'm grasping at straws. February mostly sucked.

MARCH

I went to Pawley's Island to see my friend Amy for the weekend, and play with her kids at the beach. It was cold so we didn't put the kids in swimsuits, but they got in anyway, and who couldn't have seen that coming?

Our grocery store stopped selling my favorite bread that I love for toast, so I started making my own. Because I love toast. I eat it every day. With coffee. Toast is a meal for me. Anyway.

I played with recipes until I figured out how to do it exactly how I like it, and it's a barely-changed version of Arwen's "the bread" and hey it turns out I'm not scared of yeast anymore, and it makes me feel all Laura Ingalls (the good way) to do this for myself every week.

Bowden's kidneys started to lose functioning. Our sweet girl is getting old.

March wasn't really my favorite either.

APRIL

Things started to feel a little less sucky in these parts, for a moment.

We got a new nephew! Meet baby Charlie! This is Ali's little brother. Anneliese of course always loves a new baby to hold.

We celebrated Easter, but sadly not with a beach drive, since Bumgarner Beach Week is moved to August this year. The kids looked cute though.

We went camping as a family. It was pretty, the kids loved it, it was fine. No one sleeps well when camping, right? But campfire food is always delicious.

I went to Las Vegas for the Blathering, and it turns out Vegas is nothing like I was picturing, in all the best ways. It was clean and fun and lively and beautiful, and I tell you what, people in Vegas know how to commit to a theme. It's just all very... well done.

This is my favorite picture with Sarah that we have ever taken.
Every time I look at it I feel happy.
I legit keep it in an album on my phone of things to look at on crappy days.
I love her.

And it was wonderful to be with amazing ladies who are good for my heart and make me laugh til I cry, and love me even in hard seasons, and do not hate my life even when I hate it, and to hug Another Nathan on the way home via MSP.

Basically re-entry sucked, after a happy laughy weekend away from real life. Suuuuuucked. On many levels, but not the least of which was Charlotte getting terribly sick with a chest infection (shocker) (asthma baby) and that bled into a vom bug, and it was generally  miserable.

MAY

Anneliese got a grade-level responsibility award at school, and we about burst with pride.

She also sang an adorable solo in her chorus concert at school.

Everything's coming up Anneliese!

We all (well, except Charlotte, but she was there, listening) sang/played together in a music festival at church. A seriously lovely family moment after lots of hard months.

Nathan got big kid teeth! And had several teeth pulled in preparation for braces, sometime... sometime. Who knows exactly when. Braces! They are coming!

He also played delightfully in his orchestra concert and is vying for a spot in the advanced group next fall. (Is maybe a long shot? I can't tell.)

My work got completely insane and busy, and I needed to do it full time, which we had expected for spring, but we didn't know what that would feel like on the home front til I was doing it. Working full time from home with only a few hours of childcare a day is NO JOKE, especially when May is too much anyway. Just... too much. People of the world: May is too much. Please spread the schedule around a bit. COME ON.

I laughed-to-keep-from-crying by singing into my phone headset like Britney, basically every day. (I cried too, because obviously.) (Mark's job continued/continues to be also insane.) (SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE.)

Charlotte finished her last day of preschool, ever. Here she is starting 2's in 2013, and finishing 4's this spring.

Lest you think she is always this beautiful, you should know she smiled like this on the first attempt:

I don't even know.

At some point in May, Mark went to Seattle for a week and kicked off a long several weeks/months of us like ships passing in the night. Trips backing up to each other, and work schedules, and yeah.

We needed the space but then also missed each other, which is a really nice feeling when you think about it.

JUNE

I started the month with a Memorial Day road trip with Another Nathan, from Minnesota down to North Carolina, kinda reversed from what we did when we moved him up there two summers ago. Turns out, we're still great at road trips.

Then I spent two weeks and change at Montreat, where he had asked me to be the office manager for the first several weeks of youth conference, which he DIRECTED this year, and did amazingly well.

Montreat was wonderful and spirit-filling as always. My heart has a whole blog post stirring about just this, but not today.

Oh and also I broke my foot there. *cringe face emoji*

After the conference, we had a few days of all of us at home for a moment, and Another Nathan and Mr David visiting. and we celebrated our 13th anniversary and the success of the youth conference and David's new book (!!) and all was well.

Mark went on ASP and I missed him, again. Re-entry sucked, again.

At some point we went on a date and I ordered this drink with a flower in it and we took this picture together and it makes me smile to look at it, so I am posting it here.

Marriage is hard work but sometimes you look cute, so.