Ouch!

So now he's got his top front teeth and man, can he chomp! At this rate his voice will drop before we bring hime home!

No, things actually look quite good, and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We met friday morning with Sonia, the friend our agency has down here. She'll be going with us to the visa meeting to help us with the procedure and bureaocracy, and we went over all our documents with her. Now that we have a definite finish time, everything feels much more relaxed, and we can focus entirely on bonding and having a good time as a family.
And of course, watching our son grow! His top toofers just began poking out yesterday, and while he's a bit more fussy, his general good nature and baby anbesol are making it not too traumatic an experience on us newby parents.

Saturday, we went for dinner at the home of our friend Elsi's cousin, Christian. He lives about 40 minutes out of town, up another thousand or two feet of elevation (much more fog and afternoon rain than down in the city) We had a great time with Christian and his family. They served killer tamales and hot coffee and we got to talk about each others lives, cultures and families, and of course dote on the baby! We also got to practice a lot of spanish. That's Christian holding Mateo in the close-up picture and the group shot has Christian, his expecting wife, his sister, kids from both of the siblings, and his mom and grandmom.

The next day Christian was kind enough to drive us and our several bags to Antigua. He's a butcher and delivers meat daily to restaurants in the area. When we tried to decline his too-generous offer, he pointed out that he had to make a delivery to Antigua that day anyway. Though when he showed up, there was no meat to be seen in the back of his pickup. A good thing afterall, since being new parents, we are traveling with an enormous amount of stuff, and we had to fit a lot of bags, pack 'n' play stroller, in the truck. True to our luck recently, the afternoon rains had started. It took creative use of raincoats to protect everything on the 1 hour ride.