Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are out enjoying some good old Black Friday fun for me!  This year we decided to just do a little dinner with our neighbors/friends the Ellsworths so we could make sure Josh could eat everything and so we could make sure to have our favorites and skip the things that we either don't like very much or cost too much, or both.  And as blasphemous as it may be, turkey did not make the cut.  Neither did cranberry sauce at 19.50 a can (okay so that's in EC, but it's still more than 7 US dollars!  And we don't even like it!)  But what we did have was delicious!  I made homemade stuffing for the first time, with my own bread cubes and everything

and added some fresh herbs from the market

I made some red meat with gravy in the crockpot, and Ashley brought the mashed potatoes and veggies

The gang around our little table

After dinner we played a round of Catchphrase, then topped off the night with homemade pumpkin pie- I made the crust and they filled it for me.  We were all stuffed, the way Thanksgiving should be (making it ten times better than our fiasco last year!)

We are very thankful for the time we've had to spend on the island, and also very thankful that it is almost over!

Videos

It's not very often I post videos, it is kind of a pain sometimes. But I have been trying to capture a few things lately and thought I would post them. The first one is Shane doing his trademark "happy dance". The second is a little long so I won't be offended if you don't watch it- it is Shane "reading" one of his favorite books, Fidgety Fish. One of Shane's favorite pasttimes is when we say lines from his books and he fills in the blanks. Yes, sadly, Josh and I (and Shane) have pretty much all his books memorized and can do it without even having the book open. It has come in handy when we are bored or waiting in line somewhere, but let's just say we will be looking forward to being able to go to a library, or a bookstore for that matter!

Magical Moments

Sometimes being a mother is hard.  And sometimes living in Dominica is less than ideal.  But simple moments like this remind me how good my life is- watching the waves crash on the shore with my little buddy at my side. I said to him, "the waves are pretty, huh?"  And he smiled and said "Indeed."  Ha ha it is one of the words from one of his favorite books, I am fairly certain it was kind of a fluke, but a nice coincidence anyway :)  And I am grateful for friends who are so on the ball and stealthily capture moments like these without me even realizing it :)

?

That pretty much sums up my feelings right now.  So I went to Roseau today to do my big ultrasound, and now I am even more confused.  I was convinced beforehand that it was a boy- this pregnancy has been almost exactly like Shane's, and at my first ultrasound the doctor even said he thought he saw boy parts.  Of course, I was only 11 weeks and shouldn't have trusted that but I did because I was thinking boy anyway and lo and behold today, with a different ultrasound tech, we did not see any boy parts.  Don't get me wrong, we would be thrilled if it were a girl, but I don't feel like I can be 100% sure of that here.  (Our friends were told they were having a girl here only to go home and learn it was really a boy).  I feel like if it were a boy, I would know for sure and could start planning and all that, but with a girl I am left to wonder if maybe she just didn't get a good angle, and she didn't speak English very well so I was having trouble communicating with her about it.  And the pictures she gave me were microscopic, so it's not like I can go back and really look at them or even really show them to Josh, who couldn't go to either one of the ultrasounds.  Not to mention the power kept cutting out because of the construction workers next door so she had to run the machine on battery power and couldn't project it onto the larger screen like she usually does.  Anyway, sorry for the rant.  The important thing is that the baby was healthy and whether it's a boy or a girl we will love them just the same, we will just have to wait til I get to Michigan to hopefully find out for sure.   

Crescent Moon 2010

So it has become tradition (well, it would be if we were staying on the island anyway...) to go to Crescent Moon cabins at the end of the October.  We loved it last year and I was excited to go again this year and knew Shane would love it even more now that he was a little older.  He loved exploring the greenhouse,

checking out the animals and getting to feed a goat,

and there was so much explore.  And this year he could explore it on his own without holding onto my finger!

We checked out their cabins

and tried to get a picture of all the kids in the hammock- ha ha.

Shaners did cheese it up for me though

And we were so excited to have so many good friends come along this time, it was a really fun group

After some exploring, we had lunch.  Vegetable and herb fritatta with salad and homemade bread.  I think I licked my plate afterwards.

And then they brought out the cake. Yum.  We just don't get stuff like that here very often.

After lunch was a walk up to the beautiful Montessori school they built, and it was so much fun to watch Shane play and explore.

A color matching toy- I think this thing was built for my little boy.  And I think he would have sat here all day if we didn't have to leave.

It was a great day followed by a long nap on the ride home.

Showing

I'll be 19 weeks tomorrow and have definitely started to show.  Though, I feel a lot huger than this picture looks!  I am feeling great, just ready for it to cool down a little and wishing there was some good ice cream at my disposal that I didn't have to walk a mile for or pay a fortune for.  That's probably for the best, but  you might want to invest in some Dreyer's stock before I get home!  And 1 week from today we will find out whether it's a boy or a girl. 

P.S. Don't mind my nasty looking hair.  As Monica would say, "It's the humidity!!!"

The journey continues...

While our adventures in Dominica are shortly coming to an end, we are nowhere near done with our med school journey.  For these 16 months on the island Josh has been taking his basic science classes.  In January he will be starting his 5th semester, which is an introduction to clinical medicine (basically a preparation for his rotations), in....

Saginaw, Michigan.  Yep, from tropical paradise to Michigan winter.  What are we thinking?!  But we are excited to experience the whole gamut.  We actually had a couple choices and we have heard so many good things about the program there that we are really happy we got in.  5th semester is a little shorter and will end in April, then Josh will study for his first board exam and take it probably in early June, we will have a little time off in the summer while he waits for his scores and then he'll start clinical rotations at the end of the summer.  Oh yeah, and we'll have a baby somewhere in there too :).  So we'll be in Saginaw until at least August, and maybe another year or two after that if he does his rotations there.  Then will come graduation and a residency.  It seems like a crazy life at times but we feel lucky to be experiencing so many things and can't wait to see what this next step will bring! 

☑Bonfire on the Beach, ☑#1 Beach

5 weeks from tomorrow Shane and I are leaving the island!  (Josh will follow the next week).  I feel like I am checking things off my Dominican to do list.  One of the things left on my list was to have a bonfire on the beach.  Somehow I had not done that in the year+ we've been here.  I had to roast a marshmallow, even though the fire was so hot that I had to stand like 10 feet away.

Shane's first fire.  I think he enjoyed it. 

I feel like I have mostly done everything I have wanted to do here (minus seeing a sea turtle snorkelling- darn it), so mostly I have been making sure to get to all my favorites another time.  I tried counting and I think this was my seventh and probably last time to #1 Beach, one of my favorites, and it didn't disappoint.  A good hike out in nature with his best bud, life doesn't get much better for Shane.   

As usual, there's our group a ways ahead of us.  Hey, a boy's gotta stop and smell the roses sometimes, right?

Him loving the feel of the sand in his toes, me loving those cute little footprints

We made our way down to our usual spot by the river and parked it in the sand

Hmmm, I wonder just how dirty I can get myself?

There, now I look like a real explorer

Love this boy

My new favorite shot of the two of us, thanks Jessie!

Saying goodbye to one of our favorite beaches.  This picture pretty much sums up my life here.  Love it. 

Trick or Treat!

Although I think he may never get as cute as the UPS man from last year, he was a pretty darn cute, I mean tough, football player this year.

They had a little parde/trick or treating through some of the classrooms for the kids at the school.  Here's Shane with some of his little buddies.

Still didn't quite get what was going on...

You know you live in the tropics when they pass out popsicles on Halloween.

Shane was even in character, tackling some of his favorite ladies with hugs.

 

He had fun I think, but he would have had just as much fun putting dirt in his bucket as getting candy.

Best buddies

And the best part is, this outfit started as a pair of girly pants!