blah!

I'm ready to share lots of things with you.

but i don't feel like it.
i feel very, very blah....
i still have my draft of insta-friday from last week {a post recaping the week in instagram pictures. i'll show you this friday}

i haven't gotten out of my yoga clothes from this morning.
good thing it was just some light yoga & stretching cause if not i'd totally stink.

but Douglas & i did run to the bank & the post office today. yes, in my yoga clothes. Billy kept an eye on Isabella for me {she was asleep the whole time}

outside the bank we saw this!

a moth.

a giant moth.

i have a very low tolerance for moths. meaning that they make me gag. they scare me. give me the hibbie jibbies.

i guess we have a knack for finding moths though. {like the one we found coming out of its cocoon a couple months back - here}

of course D had to "pet it".

that was the highlight of the day pretty much.

i think maybe i'm blah because of my grandma.

she's been living with my mom but now she's decided to go visit family in NC & Maryland for a couple of months. from there she's going back to Cali to spend time with my only aunt, her sisters & their kids.

by Christmas she wants to be in El Salvador.

she wants to stay there.

she feels like a burden.

honestly, she kind of is.

she stayed with us for a few days and it was like having another kid.. except you can't tell her no. i mean you can't get on to her.

and she doesn't speak or read english so she used my lysol wipes that were on the toilet as wet wipes for her ummm... self. lol funny & sad at the same time.

every day she wanted to be take out. to go somewhere, even if it was just for a ride.

she eats like 10 meals a day. plus snacks.

she wants to go to walmart with you. and look at every single thing! by the time you get to groceries she's tired & ready to go home. but not before she sneaks a chocolate bar into the cart.

actually.... this sounds a lot like me. well, except for the using lysol wipes on your butt part. and normally it's red bull i sneak in. not chocolate. 

she also says that she feels like her life is coming to an end and it's too expensive to be buried in the US. she doesn't want to put that on us. she wants to see the family she hasn't seen in a while. last time she was in El Salvador was about 6 years ago. that's her home. our home. 

my grandma {or abuela} & my mom came to visit last Saturday.

that might have been the last time i got to see her. the last time she saw my children, my husband, my brother. me.

though she's a handful i can't imagine life without her in it.

mi abuelita.

the woman i was named after.

no matter what i know that every morning she gets on her knees and begs God for me. to protect me, teach me, love me, take care of me and my family. i know that she names us by name before The Lord. I can't imagine her not doing that.

after she prays she "works out" she does laps around the house. {smile} she does neck exercises. look right, left, up, down, right, left... lol no stiff old lady here. then she eats an eggo waffle with banana slices & syrup on top.

maybe this is what i needed. just to reflect & share her.

thanks for reading...

home

warning: this is a long one, with lots of pictures

I'm not sure if you've heard about tropical storm Agatha. I don't like it very much. It hit El Salvador, Guatemala, & Honduras. If you know anything about those countries you know that they are like their own little community. They are even working on getting something passed to where you can go back and forth to all 3 countries without a visa or passport. (That would be awesome for missionaries!)

The tiniest of those countries is El Salvador. El Salvador is about the size of New Jersey & as of 2009 approximately 6.2 million people live there. {via wikipedia/ElSalvador}

That is where I was born. Where my family is from... where everyone in my family besides my brother was born. It's not my "home", not it the way most people think of home. When I was 2 my mom moved to California from El Salvador and left me with my grandma. She wanted a better life for me, for us. (wow did I get that & then some! I'm so grateful to her) She would send us money & other things, lets just say I was the only 3 year old in El Salvador with some pretty cool Reeboks. She got settled in & when I was almost 5 she sent for me. I flew to LAX. I didn't have to go through the hard time of walking and riding in a vehicle to the US like most immigrants from there do. A lot of them die. According to the US Border Patrol, 1,954 people died crossing the US-Mexico border between the years 1998-2004. In the fiscal year ending September 29, 2004, 460 migrants died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2005, more than 500 died across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. The number of yearly border crossing deaths has doubled since 1995. Yet the statistics cited by scholars and the media are merely the number of known deaths and do not include those who have never been found, grossly underestimating the actual number of migrants that have died attempting unauthorized border crossings. {via-wikipedia} I hadn't been to El Salvador since. My mom still hasn't been back. But in September 2008 Mathew & I made a trip. I had to go in order to be able to get my residency ( I have the best lawyer for that by the way & I did end up getting it! I am now a resident with a green card! praise the Lord!). All the news about these countries makes me ache. Stories titled " tropical storm leaves six dead in El Salvador" and "Agatha leaves 82 dead in Guatemala, El Salvador". There are some disaster relief efforts, but have you seen the pictures of the sink hole in Guatemala City? Could you imagine?! Like I said, it's not "my home", but it is. I dug up our pictures. I haven't shared these because we use a disposable camera.We weren't sure what to expect there & didn't want to risk losing our digital camera. Mathew had never been out of the country & neither had I. My scanner is broken so I just took pictures of the pictures. These aren't that great, but with some editing I made it work

This is my uncle Nelson and his family. His wife Flor and his kids are Nelson (junior), the oldest, then Ronald, and Fabiola aka Fabi. They are who showed us around & picked us up at the airport, while we were in San Salvador.

This is the view from our hotel. It was right in down town San Salvador. That mountain right behind the billboard isn't a mountain, it's a volcano. It's dormant though.

we could also walk to Burger King if we wanted to

while we were there we grew attached to my family

Mathew grew specially attached to the kids.

one in particular!

I'm pretty sure he took this picture

In town everything was very nice and looked a like some place here. But out in the "country" we saw a lot of shacks where people lived and women were washing their laundry in the river... I hate laundry anyway. I couldn't imagine washing it in the river. I'm so thankful I have a washing machine. We didn't get any pictures of all that, I'm not sure why, but I found this on flickr and it's what we saw a lot of

El Salvador is so beautiful, yet most of the people there live in poverty. no, it's beyond poverty. Flickr has some really neat pictures of all of it.

we went to Puerto La Libertad and the fish market there

in the big metal bowl to the left of this picture are sea turtle eggs

look at that huge fish!

sting rays

this guy! this guy broke my heart. he'd been out fishing ALL morning and he only caught a couple of things. this fish he said was called the devil fish and you can only eat a certain part of it. meaning he probably wasn't going to get any money for it :( his shirt was full of holes & i just wanted to take him home with us & make everything all better. 

The beaches there are beautiful. We didn't go to one of the nicest ones but we still loved it.

and there he goes with Fabi again... I can't wait to see what he'll be like with Isabella when she gets older

have you ever thought about smuggling children into the country? My husband has.

Our trip made us appreciative of what we have... then we forgot about it & went back to our day to day. I'm going to frame some of these and maybe I won't take things for granted as much. I thank my God for giving my mom the courage to come to this country. For allowing us to be here & have a good life. Now I can give my children even more. We hope to go back and visit again, maybe once our kids are older so they can go too & see how lucky they were to be born in United States.