The world is better in Antigua

(2nd post of the day - see below)

It is so beautiful here in Antigua. The colonial city is surrounded by three volcanos that are covered with lush green flora. The streets are cobblestoned and there are many recovered ruins right next to new generation places (like McDonald's). The first picture shows Matt holding Mateo Guatemalan style in front of the ruins of a Jesuit church. The second picture is another ruin from a church built many centuries ago and repeatedly damaged and repaired through the many earthquakes that have occurred here over the centuries.

Friday, Guatemala celebrates the 185th anniversary of their Independence from colonial Spain. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala/most of Central America in the colonial times. It has been crazy as they have been having parades, fireworks, torch relays with kids running for most of the week. Who knows what Friday will hold!?!

In the meantime, we are staying on the grounds of the Spanish School that we are taking classes from...well Matt is mostly taking classes, while I care for Mateo. Today though, I spent about 90 minutes with Xiomara (Cio-mara) just having conversation & of course, playing with Mateo. It is amazing how much I understand from my two years of high school Spanish in St. Maries...of course, I understand much more than I can speak...which makes conversation a bit challenging to say the least.

The grounds of the school are meticulous and well groomed gardens...our gardening friends would be amazed! Our room(s) at the school are very nice...we have a bedroom, bathroom, a kitchen & a living room which gives us a bit more space to spread out. Matt went to the market today and bought stuff to make spaghetti for dinner...if I had only known how much I would crave a dinner so simple!! We are generally staying in for breakfast as Matt has to be at class by 8AM and then we head out for lunch to experience some local cuisine...then it is home (well in our room) for dinner. It has become a fairly nice routine. If only we could increase the temperature by 10 degrees and decrease the humidity by say 100%, we would be doing wonderfully!!

Guess that's all for now...hugs from we THREE Millers in Guatemala. We'll try to post more pictures soon! Sarah & Matt & Mateo

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.

Learning Lots

He still hasn´t cut those top teeth, but a week and a half in, he´s learning lots of new stuff. Thanks to a musical book from Shannon Kelly, he´s beginning to absorb the concept that we in the science center business live by: Push a button / Make something happen. We´re regularly serenaded by whiny electronic versions of ¨Twinkle Twinkle Little Star¨ and Ïf You´re Happy and You Know It¨.

He´s also learning to stand and hold himself up really well, even though forward crawling is still a challenge. He responds, when he´s lying on his back, to ¨grab my hands!¨or ¨¡Coges las manos!¨ by grabbing my fingers, then scruches up his face and strains to hold on while I lift him upright (picture three). This morning for a picture he said ¨Look Ma: one hand¨ (pic 4) he can even stay unassisted for a couple of seconds. When he´s on his back and frustrated, wanting to be lifted up, he bends his arms into a pull-up position, clenches his fists, and grunts like he´s being pulled up until Dad gets the message.
Matt´s college friend Todd is married to a Guatemalteca, who´s really excited about the adoption and has family living in Guatemala City. Tonight her cousin Christian is coming by to bring us to his house for a visit. We´re looking forward to making new friends.
Tomorow it´s off to Antigua.

If anyone has an overseas phone plan that´s affordable, you can feel free to try our new cell phone:

011-502-5356-1285 We´ve been able to call the US (cheap), though evenings the lines are frequently busy. So far a couple attempts to reach us have yielded busy tones, but that may be clogged lines too.....

-Matt

A quick one

Yikes, the upload took so long I don´t have much time for a message......
Pics: Of course there´s a new one of the Miller Three, plus one of us with our new friends from Michigan, Kevin Nikkie and Isabella Heil. They went home today without Isabella, We´ll be having dinner tonight with another couple that had to hand off their son today too. We can sure empathize...
Then there´s a picturee of Mateo carefully studying a book with pictures of his relatives - Poppa take note! Finally, Mateo prepares himslelf for the cursory embassy pediatrician exam we took him to yesterday. Passed with flying colors!

Pink Slip Drama

Hi friends,

Well, we got good news yesterday...Matt went to the embassy with someone from our lawyer´s office and he was able to pick up our pink slip for our final visa appointment. Now for the bad news...our appointment isn´t until the morning of Monday, September 18th which means we won´t be able to pick up his visa until the afternoon of Tuesday, September 19th. Which means we won´t be coming home until Wednesday, September 20th. Turns out that the US Embassy has the luxury of taking off both American and Guatemalan holidays and next Friday is Guatamala´s independence day, so we have to wait until Monday for our appointment.

First came tears of sorrow for having to wait so long to bring him home. Then came tears of frustration because it means we won´t be making the Boise trip as planned that following weekend. Then came tears of anger at how ridiculously difficult it was to get a hold of Alaska Airlines to change our flight home. We had some angels (Matt´s mom and our friends Shannon Kelley & Sarah Fronza) working on our behalf.

When we finally got ahold of someone at Alaska, I cried tears of desperation when they suggested that we fly home going from Guatemala City to Miami to LA to Portland. When I had meltdown on the customer service representative about that itinerary, she said ¨Let me see what else I can find for you.¨ Sure enough, it worked. We will leave Guatemala City at 9:45AM on 9/20 and go through customs at Dallas/Fort Worth but then get back on the same plane to go to Denver where we will connect with an Alaska flight home to Portland. We are scheduled to arrive there just after 7PM that night.

Once we had finalized the plane arrangements, it became clear that I (Sarah) was going to have a mental health episode if I didn´t get a change of scenery. So Matt proposed that we go to Antigua for a week for some vacation and to take some Spanish classes. We will make the arrangements today, but expect to go from Sunday to Sunday, then back into Guatemala City for the visa appointments.

Of course, there was always the possibility of wrestling the immigration bureaocracy for an earlier appointment - not officially possible but in reality, perhaps, maybe, at some point and under some conditions possible - but we decided to enjoy some time with our son in the country of his birth. We had spent the last week tied to our room and our phone while clearing one official hurdle, and did not want to waste more time doing the same when the end result may have been close to the same return date anyway.

The good news about being in the country during this time, in addition to the bonding time it allows us with Mateo, is that we get to accompany him to see the Embassy approved doctor today for his final medical clearance. We will post some pictures tonight or tomorrow from that visit so you can see him interact with a medical provider.

We tried to load some pictures with this blog, but blogger.com is having issues (confounded by trying to do it from this fairly fast (by Guatemalan standards) internet...so we´re off to get some lunch now, and will try to upload some photos a bit later this afternoon.

Love from all THREE of us (it is so fun to write that!!) in Guatemala...Sarah, Matt, Mateo