More happenings in India

I just had a few pictures on my camera that I had to post

These are some pictures of what Annie looked like this morning when she woke up. The picture doesn't quite do it justice. She looked like she had the chicken pox. I guess she slept with a few friends last night. I just pray that none of them carried Malaria. Needless to say her crib now sports a fashionable permethrin treated mosquito net.

Anyone who knows me knows my addiction to Diet Coke. I had to take a picture of the can here. And no, it doesn't quite taste the same, but it will do.
Annie loves the hard floors here. We put her in her walker and her favorite game is to chase you around the house, or be chased.

Sunday...

Yesterday in Primary they celebrated the July birthdays. Ellie is the only July birthday in the Primary so they sang to her. They also do a thing that they call "cutting the cake". When I took her into Primary they told me that they were going to "cut Ellie a cake" and to be back to see it 10 minutes before church got out. Luckily I had our camera there with me. She was pretty embarrassed and didn't do the whole thing herself, I think because for one she didn't really know what to do, and I think she was afraid of the sharp knife that they handed her. I taped it so you could see how they do birthdays here. Apparently every month they "cut a cake" for all of the birthdays that month and whoever has a birthday has to hold the knife to cut it.

Our house and neighborhood

Here are the pictures of our neighborhood.

This is a picture of our house.
This is a picture of our street
This is a view of our guard gate. From our side.
This is a view of the other side of the guard gate.

We're back online!!!

YEAH!!! We have Internet!!!

We finally got our Internet up and running. I was going through withdrawals not being able to talk to our families in the US.

We are now living in our house in Adarsh Vista. Our area is called Basavanagar, Bangalore, India, which interpreted, Basava means "cow" and nagar means "village", so we live in cow village. I took a few pictures of our house. It is a 3 bedroom home with a study that we converted into a 4th bedroom for Annie. It is really nice, but hopefully it will quit echoing once our furniture arrives.  I will take a video of it and post it later.

The people in the neighborhood are very welcoming and the kids have quickly made friends. Our kids are again the only white kids here. A lot of the families are American, but most of them are Indians that are Americans that have come back here for work, or they have one parent that is Indian.  Our kids now spend their days riding bikes up and down the streets of our neighborhood, another nice thing about our area is that we have been able to replace Erica's service of warning our kids when there are cars with some security guards. They are on every corner and they have loud whistles to stop the cars when there are bikes or pedestrians. They also like to go swimming at the clubhouse pool. They have a rule there that you have to have swim caps. I haven't taken any pictures of the kids in their swim caps, but I'll do that next week.

Our move was on Saturday the 18th. We packed up our hotel and headed for our house, but had to make a couple trips to get our luggage all there. We were met at the house by the moving company. The started unloading our Air Shipment and moving boxes into rooms. Once we had the boxes in the right bedrooms, they started unpacking them. I had 6 men trying to unpack all of our clothes and extra food that I had stocked up on all at once. We were also met here by Baby our maid. She is very nice and patient with our kids. Our kids have figured out that she won't say no to them. If they ask her for something she does it or gets it for them. We had to sit them down and tell them that when Mom says No, they can't go to Baby to get it. (example chocolate, cheese ball puffs, fruit roll ups, etc.) The other day, Ethan had an accident and I got mad at him. I sent him to his room to change. He was crying that he wanted help getting dressed. I told him he was a big boy and could do it. After about 5 minutes I went to go check on him, and Baby was in his room helping him get his shirt on. She heard him ask for help and was right there. We are definitely spoiled!!

Well, I'm trying to post the pictures on here of our house, but I don't know where the cable went to the camera. I'll post them as soon as I can get them on my computer. We miss you all and love to hear what's going on there.

Our Hotel Pictures

OK I finally uploaded the pictures from our first home sweet home in Bangalore. We are staying at a hotel called Mucure Homestead in Koramangala. 

As you come in the door, you are in the kitchen/living room aka Ethan's Bedroom.

We had a little kitchenette with a 2 burner gas stove, a microwave and a sink.

Then there is the hallway that leads to the bedrooms and the bathroom.

This the the girls bedroom/clubhouse/massage parlor. One funny thing about this room is that it has a sliding glass door for the door. For the first few nights the girls thought it was really neat to be able to close the door and no one could hear what they were doing until they realized in the middle of the night it hurt to run into a sliding glass door when you get up to go to the bathroom.

Here is the bathroom. It was very nice. You can never underestimate the importance of a flushing toilet here.

The Master Bedroom with the portacrib for Annie.

One of Annie's favorite things we have figured out is animals whether it is the stray dog, or cow on the side of the road or the goldfish in the lobby on the 1st floor. One night when Alan got home from work and I was trying to finish making dinner he took her for a walk and they discovered the fish. The next night when he got home she immediately went for him with her excited "I see an animal noises". She is too smart. They went to the lobby and she got to see her fish. Every time she starts to get upset, I have had one of the girls walk her down to see these fish. We may have to get a pet fish when we move.

Here are some pics of breakfast. After the first few days the chef realized that my kids were ordering the same thing every morning. Now when we go into the restaurant for breakfast he says "Two pancakes, one waffle, hash browns and bacon?"

You have your choice of eating inside or outside. I have opted to eat outside every morning because I think my kids are too noisy inside. Also, the kids love the fish that are out there.

They each have adopted their own fish. Ellie's is named Spot, you can see it in the picture, it's the only one that has black spots on it. Maddie's is named Buggsy because it has a black ring around it's eye so it makes it look like it has a big eye and Ethan named his "Yelly" because it's yellow. I'm pretty sure he picks a new one every day to be Yelly because there are about 2o yellow fish. They like to sometimes feed the fish extra bits of their pancakes or waffles, and the fish swarm over it.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is Annie is feeling much better (and so am I about staying here), the bad news is we were supposed to be moving into our house today, but it isn't quite ready. Hopefully it will be ready by Saturday and we can move in then. I took some pictures of our hotel that we are living in, but haven't downloaded them yet. I will post them as soon as I can.

A stressful day in Bangalore

Today I had the feelings of what in the heck are we doing.

Last night Annie started to come down with a fever. Sunday she had not acted herself, but I figured she is just teething. By this morning she was burning up. Unfortunately, my thermometer is still on its way here. Hopefully we get it soon. I didn't know how hot she was, just that she was hot. Before we came we were warned and warned about the dangers of Malaria, and how serious it is. The doctor told us that if we get a fever to go straight to the hospital and get checked. I was really worried so I talked to our friend that has been here for a year or so. He told me about a clinic, "The Cradle" where his wife had recently had their baby. It also has pediatricians. Alan was at work so I loaded up the 4 kids and headed out to the clinic. I figured they would check her ears, and take her temperature, and probably draw some blood for a malaria test. I was right but...I was not prepared to go to a hospital in India!

The kids and I walked into the clinic/hospital and checked Annie in and then waited for a doctor to be available. Thanks again Grandma for the Nintendo DS's they saved our lives today.  We waited there for about an hour. We went in and saw Dr. Nandini Nagar. She was very nice, but just looked at her ears and took her temperature. She then wrote up a prescription for some blood tests and urine tests, and for some Tylenol. (Her temperature was 102.9) She then told me to go to the lab and they would run the tests. I had to go pay for the tests, and then they pointed me in the direction of the lab. I ushered all the kids down to the lab and when I got there they asked me if I had gone to the pharmacy to get the urine bag and the stuff to draw the blood. (Isn't that suppose to be there job?) No, I had to take all my kids back down to the pharmacy and buy the instruments for them to run the tests. We got back into the lab and by this time Annie was really not feeling well. She was crying and laying her head on my shoulder and I could feel her burning up. I felt bad for her and I was starting to feel overwhelmed and really wanted Dr. Swensen. The 3 lab people took the stuff from me and then snatched Annie out of my arms and went into a room. I started to follow and they looked at me wondering where I was going. I asked "can't I come in?" The lady just looked at me, closed the door, and LOCKED IT!! I stood there listening to my baby screaming, not because they had poked her, but because she wanted to be held. I had a really hard time keeping it together. I started to tear up, and Ellie asked me how long they were going to take her for. All I could say was "I don't know". They came back out and gave her to me with a bag hooked up to her for a urine sample and a bandaid on her hand. They told me it would be an hour before the test was done so I took the kids back down to the pharmacy to get the Tylenol for Annie. I gave it to her and she quickly fell asleep. 45 minutes later she woke up and I took her back to give them her urine sample. Apparently the bag they hooked on didn't stick so it all leaked back into her diaper. I had to again go to the pharmacy to get another bag and back to the lab to get it hooked back on and then wait until she could fill it. By this time we had been at the clinic for about 4 hours. The older kids were starting to get board and hungry. I told them if they were good to each other and didn't complain I would stop and get them something to eat on the way home. The lab got the results back from the blood tests, and I had to go take them to the doctor. As I took them, I read them and was relieved when I saw NEGATIVE next to malaria, and NEGATIVE next to dengue fever. That's all I cared about. At that point I didn't really care whether we talked to the Dr. again or whether the urine test got done. (All it would show was if she had a bladder infection) I did meet with the doctor and she said that Annie does have an elevated level of something that meant she has a bacterial infection, possibly a bladder infection so she put her on amoxicillin and wanted to get the urine test to make sure. Annie still hadn't filled the bag so I asked what the difference would be. She said that Annie would need the medicine for 7 days instead of 5 so I just told the pharmacy to give me 7 days worth and  I was off. The whole episode took 5 hours.

When we got home I quickly made dinner and then gave her a bath. We only have showers here in the hotel, so I made her one in the sink. I think she liked the bath. She hasn't been able to splash in a tub since we left Salt Lake.

P.S. By the time we got home I was feeling much better about India. I still think we'll survive, as long as no one else gets sick. :)