What a long strange trip it has been!  I am borrowing some crappy dial up internet today so I can at least get you SOMETHING to read, LOL.  For you faithful followers, I wanted to let you know that we are no longer homeless and everything is OK.  For those new to the blog, let me sum up as quickly as I can, where we are and how we got here.

Rick and I decided over a year ago that we needed to escape the materialism and hectic lifestyle that we were eyeball deep in, and take our kids somewhere slower and cheaper.  We settled on Belize (sorry, for specifics you will have to go read all the old posts!) and the island of Caye Caulker in particular, which is where we now reside.  Next Thursday will be one month, which means it is time to head to the big island of Ambergris Caye and get our passports stamped again.  I am a little excited about this, because we have not been there yet, but I  am bit hesitant too because we have to take Bridget and all the kids with us.  Everyone must be present for Passport Day!

Ok, the sum up is pretty much finished, wow, I have been blogging for months and I could sum it all up that quickly?  Yikes, I AM long-winded!  Now for the good stuff, the new updates!  I think I left off right after we arrived and we were staying at Ignacio's Beach Cabins, so we will just start there today.  All six of us were jammed up in that one little cabin with one dangling light bulb, one crappy fan, two really uncomfortable beds and no hot water.  You might think I am complaining here, but I am absolutely doing no such thing.  We were right on the beach, with a pier to walk out on, and hey, we are IN BELIZE!  No complaints.  Had I mentioned that it was less than $20 a night for all SIX of us???  Oh yeah it was, so no complaints!  Any way, we started house hunting right away, (I think we have decided to become permanent renters) and wanted to get Bridget situated somewhere first.  Those of you who know my mother-in-law know that her health isn't great, and she's crazy as a 'coon in summer.  (Love her anyway.)  Most of the houses here are built on stilts because, well, because it's a damned island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for pete's sake.  Bridget decided that she couldn't take the stairs on a regular basis, so we had to find her something on ground level.  Hmm.  Okay, so we go looking.  It has to be with in a few blocks of a grocery store too.  Hmm, okay, doable right?  It has to be furnished.  That one isn't so bad, a lot of rentals here are furnished because they rent to tourists.  It has to have air conditioning.  Crap.    We have to be able to afford it.  Double crap.  One of our main goals here was to be able to give Bridget her own place where she could escape us and the kids.  Well folks, we did the impossible, we found a ground level two bedroom house about five blocks from the grocery store, fully furnished!  It was about $200 more a month than we really wanted to pay, and didn't have air conditioning, but hey, you take what you can get right?  Since then we bought Bridget a small air conditioner to put in her room.  It only cools her bedroom, but with the windows open and the fans going, the rest of the house isn't bad (except possibly in the mid-day heat.)  Ok, so we had a place for Bridget, but what about the rest of us?!  Well we moved on in with Bridget of course!  LOL, only for a few days while we were house hunting for ourselves.

We looked at a lot of possibilities, (we are much more flexible in housing options!) and by chance were eating lunch at Syd's, when the waitress told us to go across the street and ask for Lili DeValle.  We will have a whole section devoted to Lili later.  Lili showed us an upstairs two bedroom apartment that had nothing in it but a kitchen sink, a little one bedroom house, and I can't remember now if she showed us that other house on Back Street or not.  Not important though, because we settled on the two bedroom empty apartment.  It was just being finished and no one had ever lived there before.  Rent is $450 a month, which is less than Bridget's, but there was NOTHING in there!  Lili loaned us a set of bunk beds so we could at least have something to sleep on, and took us into Belize City to get appliances and other necessities.  We spent way too much money, but we got a small refrigerator, a stove, a propane tank for the stove, a tiny little washing machine (another section on laundry will be coming soon, I promise!) and some pots, pans, plastic dishes etc.  There were some hiccups along the way, all of those things have to be brought over by barge, and they did bring some of them, and sent some other over by water taxi, but when we got the propane tank, it was empty, so we had to pay to send it back and get it filled and pay to have them send it back again.  All this time we were having to eat out because we couldn't cook and our money was going FAST!  We have ordered some furniture from the Mennonite's, and again, we will talk about that later and we are currently waiting on it to come in.  So now we have a kitchen (kind of) and are learning to cook.  “Learning?!” you ask incredulously.  Yes, learning.  There was cooking at home, which we did well, and there is cooking HERE, which was, to pardon the term, foreign.  We have learned to make our own tortillas, and are now the proud owners of our very own comal, we can now make the local beans and rice (which is different than rice and beans, but I will explain that to anyone who comes to visit,) stew chicken, oh, and I made some amazing pork in the pressure cooker!  I have never had a pressure cooker before, and now I don't know WHY I never had one!  They are wonderful contraptions.  The kids are still having a hard time with the food situation.  They do have a lot better selection at the grocery store than I had anticipated, happy surprise!  And some old favorites too, like peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, and Ramen noodles.  Peanut butter and jelly are pretty expensive, while macaroni and cheese is a LOT cheaper here.  Ramen noodles are about 35 cents a pack, so not too bad.  Other than that we buy local bread at the bakery (50 cents a loaf,) five pound bags of flour, rice and beans, and water.  Oh yes, let us digress into the water SITUATION.  So the tap water here is potable, but comes from wells and smells a little, and no one drinks it, not even the locals.  Everyone here uses bottled water, and it is REALLY cheap!  It is $2 for a five gallon jug, and we just fill up our 1 liter water bottles and stick them in the fridge.  We only use pipe water (tap water) for cooking and washing (but I admit to using bottled water in my coffee, don't tell Rick!)  We drink a LOT of water.  I think I just heard several of you hit the floor as you fell out of your chairs.  Yes, I just told you that we (I) drink a LOT of water.  Sodas here are not as expensive as I had been led to believe, you buy them by the case down at Back Bridge from Bowen and Bowen, and they come in glass bottles which you return when you get your next case and they are cheaper than back in the States.  I do still drink soda, but not many (as compared to before) and mainly drink water.  I probably drink three or four liters of water a day.  If we didn't drink so much water we would become seriously dehydrated from sweating.  I understand this, I accept this, hell, I even EMBRACE this, but I am a reasonably intelligent, rational creature who does not want to be hospitalized for dehydration.  The SITUATION comes from my three spoiled children, who are used to Gatorade, KoolAid, juice, milk, chocolate milk and other such types of drinks.  At first they were cool with the water, heck, when we were at Ignacio's we were filling water bottles with rain water and they were drinking it no problem.  That was when it was new and different.  A month later, when there is little else, it has become a SITUATION.  We do buy a little bit of juice, and milk (although it tastes weird here and we don't know why) and even a little bottle of chocolate syrup, but have found that they will drink it all up in one day if they are not watched closely.  That stuff is expensive, and we can't afford to keep it stocked all the time.  Water is cheaper, healthier, and JUST BECAUSE I SAID SO DAMNIT!  Chandler is the most accepting of the three, Sierra doesn't grumble too loud for too long, but Trey?  Trey has decided that we are trying to kill him with water torture.  He is having the hardest time with the food and drink here.  They are all tired of beans and rice, and even Daddy's awesome tortillas and my killer pork aren't hiding that fact any more.  Oh well, they will either eat or go hungry, their choice.

Well, since I started typing this yesterday, the Mennonite's called and they are putting our furniture on the barge today, so it will be here tomorrow.  They are sending everything except Sierra's bed, which will come on Wednesday's barge.  The boys are going to have regular bunk beds, and Sierra is going to have a top bunk type bed with built in dressers under it for all of the kids.  I thought it was pretty neat.  Anyway, I painted the kids room this morning in preparation for furniture tomorrow.  I still haven't cut in around the ceilings in either bedroom because I can't reach, and there doesn't seem to be a ladder anywhere on this island.  My apartment is so pretty and GREEN now!  It was just builder's white, and bare before, it seemed very blah.  I picked a very nice tropical green for the living room/kitchen and a much mellower mint for the bedrooms.  I think the tropical will end up in the bathroom too (because I let Rick estimate how much of each color we needed and I guess he thought we needed an extra gallon of the darker green.)  I am going to try and get pictures for you, I wish I had taken some “before shots,” but was so anxious to get started that I forgot.  LOL  With the pretty green paint and the beautiful wooden furniture that the Mennonite's make, I can throw in some colorful curtains and cushions, and voila!  Instant tropical paradise!  If we end up staying in the apartment for over a year, I may stencil some flowers on the walls too.  Depends on how bored I get, haha!

Ok, kids will be home from school any minute for lunch so I had better go get them some lunch started.  I was feeling very loving and spent the $2.00 to buy them hot dogs, they will feel so special!  They are going to drink water though!