Sleep Evades Us

     This is our fourth night in our new home and sleep continues to evade us. The children are all nestled snug in their beds equipped with mosquito nets…we are hoping they sleep through the night tonight.  It is nearing 2 am and Tony and I are still wide awake in our room filled with the fresh scent of our laundry drying on a rack by our bed. Throughout the night, there is a constant barrage of sounds right outside our window (dogs barking, horns beeping, people yelling, and even fireworks) that make sleep even more challenging for the time.      We arrived at our apartment Tuesday evening at about 11 pm, wide awake of course because we had slept nearly our entire flight! WooHoo! We did some exploring of our new home and some unpacking and then decided to try to get some sleep to try to acclimate ourselves to our new schedule.  Needless to say no one slept and the kids all ended up in our bed by 3 am.  That night I tried to bribe them to calm down and go to sleep saying that the first one to sleep gets $5. When it was obvious that they weren’t going to sleep, we sent the kids back to their room to play.  Well, Dylan finally won the prize as the first child to fall asleep at 8 am.  Delaney followed at about 9 am and Desirae, our little Energizer Bunny, didn’t collapse until about 10 am!  Each night since then we have all been wide awake from about 3 am until about 6 am.  We are hoping to get on a good sleep schedule soon.     We are getting accustomed to life in our new home.  Our apartment is much nicer than we imagined. Here are a few pictures of our apartment…good thing I don’t intend to spend much time in the kitchen (insert smile).  

     We have met our neighbor, she is very nice and is quite fond of our children.  We went grocery shopping at an actual grocery store (a luxury we have here that we will not have after we finish language school in six month and move up north).  There are many items from the States that we can purchase here but the prices are hefty (for example, a box of Rice Krispies is $11 US or a jar of Ragu Spaghetti Sauce is $6 US).  Our first meal was spaghetti with homemade sauce…which wasn’t too bad for our first try!     The city we live in has a population of over 16 million people (nearly twice the size of New York City).  The streets are very narrow and jammed with people, cows, cars, motorcycles, carts, and much more. The heat is pretty intense so we have only spent a few hours at a time outside trying to get everyone used to it. Delaney said yesterday after we were outside for about 3 hours that it is hard for an Ohio person to handle this heat. Over the past few days, we have explored our neighborhood markets, played at the local park and visited one of our neighborhood’s historical sites. And last night we did a load of laundry and gave the girls baths in our new bathtub - one of our Rubbermaid tubs that we used for packing.  There are no bathtubs here! Everyone is health and in good spirits! Thanks for all your love and prayers. We truly appreciate you for sharing this journey with us! Below are some pictures from our outings for your enjoyment.