Summer Plans

Hi there friends and family.

It is time again to begin the planning of the summer schedule. We booked our tickets this week. We leave on June 10th from Cartagena to Saskatoon. We will go to Renee and Brent's wedding the next weekend. We'll have one more week in Saskatchewan and then are flying to Calgary on the 25th. The only other plans we have for the summer so far are for the end of July. The 22nd is Kathy and Chad's wedding in Lloydminster and the 25th-28th is the Calgary Folk Festival (this year already boasting Dan Bern, Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco).

We are scheduled to come back on August 3rd from Calgary to Cartagena in one long day. We start work the next day.

At school it is already going to be the end of the third quarter this Friday. After that there are only 12 more weeks of school left for us this year. In April we have a week off for Semana Santa (Holy Week). We are planning to go to Bogota for a few days and north to a little colonial town in the mountains. It will be cold there - down to 12 degrees at night!

Life in Cartagena has returned to normal. We have been sticking close to home and catching up on the work we should have been doing when all our visitors were here.

Aysha is walking around all by herself. She is speeding up, but still likes to be connected to something. She walks from one piece of furniture to another, or grabs a walker and really moves. If she can get a hold of a hand or handful of clothing, she can pull herself up onto the couch or bed by herself. Sometimes we call her goat-girl due to her knack for making her way to the tops of things. She can slip down backwards from both the bed and couch too. She prefers to crawl down to the foot of the bed to slide down where the foot board gives her an extra handhold.

Her communication skills are still developing. Her current philosophy seems to be that there is no problem that whining won't fix. Slowly, she is making a few more signs, some meaningfully, some randomly. She really has horse down - hands bouncing like they are holding reins (along with the clip-clop sounds, and makes it whenever she hears the sounds of horses passing by on the street. She is also making the sign for more, book, dog, and, rarely, up. She is almost forming words. She manages to almost say mom, bye, up, and, agua too. She has a special na-na-na-na when she doesn't like something.

Aysha and Karla have been sick this weekend. Aysha on Saturday and Karla on Sunday night. Monday was a holiday since several of our Colombian teachers had been recruited by for the Colombian elections on Sunday. Both had threw up for a few hours and have spent a few more hours feeling lousy. I have to hope I am not next.

Aysha's passport is finally being extended. I took advantage of the day off to go into the Canadian consulate and got everything straightened out. In January, the embassy in Bogota said that the consulate here could extend her passport (which expires next month). On Friday, the embassy changed their mind and so I had to go in to figure it out. I had sent an email to the embassy on Friday, and when I arrived at the consul this morning, we called Bogota and the person I had emailed had already figured out how to solve the problem. Both Aysha's certificate of citizenship, which has been on hold since the official photocopy of her birth certificate went lost, and passport extension are underway.

Well, Aysha is crawling all over her recovering mom so I had better go and try to entertain her until bedtime so mom can get some rest.