This bread is sold all over the city. There's a little spot just down the street that we get bread from all the time. I need to take a picture of it. It's technically in a building, but it's all open. It's more like a counter attached to the building. There's this HUGE hole/stove/thing and this sweaty guy makes and bakes bread all day long. It tastes like pretzel bread. I didn't like it at first. It's starting to become a staple. It's less than 50 cents and when we buy it, it's still warm, most of the time.

One time I went to get a loaf and there was only one left, sitting all alone on the counter with this guy smoking right by it. I was planning on it for part of our meal, so even though I didn't know how fresh it was, I told him I wanted it. He just grabbed it with his dirty smoky hands and put it in a bag for me. You just have no idea how dirty and sweaty this guy looked. He's usually there helping the baker, but the baker was gone.

The other week or so Brighton was acting like he wanted a fork. So I gave him one and he LOVED it. He actually scooped up a hefty bite and put it in his mouth on the first try! I couldn't believe it! I don't know how many bites he's had since, maybe two? But all the same, I thought it was so much fun and really quite amazing!

Forks are too much fun to bang than to actually eat with, so I've only given him a fork a few times since.

I'm pretty excited that I have basil growing! I grew it from seed and in the past, everything I've tried from STARTS has died a very sad death. The little one is Thai basil. I'm pretty excited we'll have basil to add to our dishes all year!

The other day Scarlet found this on our flowers. Then it jumped onto her and I flicked it off, for it to make it's way up our front door. I was really quite thrilled about it! I'd never seen one! I kept running back and forth with the camera, trying to get a good shot with Scarlet and then I came back and she'd stepped on it, saying she didn't like it. I felt bad.

Things are going really well. We both feel like we're finally settled. I've said from the beginning that I'll know we're settled when I start making side dishes and using cloth diapers again. Well, I feel ready for both! I've been making sides a bit and I'm just waiting for Greg to hook up the sprayer for the diapers. I was really afraid for all our HHE to get here (all the rest of our stuff), but now I can't wait! I feel like all will be well when it gets to us. All our FOOD is in there. I've basically been making the same 5 dishes every week and I have NOT been liking that. Not at all. It has been SO boring.

We finally made it to the mountains!

This is Alla Archa. It's a little drive up there, but very pretty. It starts out a nice paved path. When we first got out of the car, I already felt tired and out of breath. And within 10 feet I was like, "I don't know if I can do this!" We're pretty sure we were just getting used to the elevation. It was really intense at first. I was surprised.

Soon you get to these roaring rapids that are just right there! They were so loud! Greg kept saying how he couldn't believe how fast the water was going. I was so glad the kids were strapped in.

We kept on walking and suddenly this bridge appears and Greg just jumps right on it and I was so mad! It's right over the water. If it broke you would definitely get swept away, never to be seen again. Along with Scarlet on his back. I was really ticked. But then he seemed pretty stable and when he came back I said I wanted a picture of him, now that he survived. So I got on. The steel frame is pretty sturdy, but those wooden logs are pretty loose.

All the white is the water.

Then we found the best little spot. All this shallow water and rocks. It was so beautiful and we stayed there a very long time.

The water is COLD!!!!! It's melted glacial water.

 The mountains were huge. Our necks were literally hurting because we kept looking up.

The kids had a blast throwing rocks. We could have stayed there all day.

I could not believe this girl. She just trekked all over by herself. That water was COLD. I never got used to it. She just marched all around and was so stable. I was so impressed. She is so much braver than I.

And just behind us was a yurt.

So we checked it out. 

They are a lot nicer inside, than I expected! I could totally camp out in one of these. We probably will. Camping in yurts is pretty big out here. A lot of people live in yurts, out here.

We took a little break and had some snacks. A guy that lived there (I think in a yurt) came up to us and tried to talk to us. He seemed really nice. We gave him a cookie. He only had three teeth.

On for more. Every time we'd turn a bend, we would just be in awe. It was so beautiful, everywhere you looked. It was incredible.

It was really hard to get the mountains in the pictures because they were so tall. We always had to squat down and shoot really high. 

There were little runs of water all over the place that we crossed. Greg thought it was so much fun, but I thought the cold was so painful. Every time we crossed, I had to run and then I had to stop and "recover". It was horrible. 

It was really cool, because I thought it was a man made path, the whole time, but it was in fact rock bed. Just natural! How amazing is that?!!!

We came across another yurt. They were here and there, all along the way.

It was really neat, because everywhere we went, there were mountains on this side . . .

and mountains on that side. And we just walked the middle the whole time. 

It was the first weekend we did something we would normally do as a family. It was simply wonderful! Tomorrow marks for our 2 month anniversary of living here and this kinda sealed in that we're finally happily living here!

As I said before, the path we followed was just rock bed from glacial rivers, so there would be water here and there flowing through.

So beautiful.

The whole experience was a little unreal. I finally grasped why people like to backpack in the mountains. It was the most amazing feeling being out there. I hate to camp. Absolute hate. But I feel like I could do it to be in something like THIS. Thank goodness all I have to do is take a little drive! Save the camping for another day!

It was nice though, because the path was really clear. Everything was short where we were walking so I wasn't worried about ticks or other bugs at all. Such a relief. At the very end, where we decided to turn around, I REALLY wanted to keep going, but I could see suddenly the grass was getting longer as the path was less and less a path. So we won't be going any farther than we did that day.

Heading back . . . there were these beautiful purple wild flowers all along the way. Greg DID get off the path to take this picture and I was REALLY mad at him. Besides our obvious fear of lyme, there is this NASTY disease you get from ticks out here that more often than not ends in DEATH. 

This is Greg taking pictures of me as I'm kind of screaming through the cold water and Greg is just laughing at me.

Greg picked Scarlet a cool flower, even though we were NOT supposed to pick anything.

This was cool. There were butterflies. It was really neat to see.

And right towards the end, we turn a bend and I see the mountain side and this woman, sitting alone on a bench. It looked straight out of a tourist book. I had to take a picture. Greg asked using motions and she was so nice and said yes.

She loved Brighton, of course. She didn't have any teeth.

We hiked for four hours and the drive was at least an hour and a half. The kids did amazing. I was worried they wouldn't last and we all just had a blast the whole time. Right when we got in the car it started raining pretty good. Good timing.

When all is said and done, we're doing great! We've found our rhythm in things. It seems like everything we've been trying to do, trying to find, trying to buy while figuring things out here, is finally done. At least the big stuff that we had to do immediately. I've figured out how to shop and clean my veggies. We've found some friends. Life is suddenly a lot less stressful. We always said that the first two months would be crazy, and we are about to hit our two month mark and I'm really happy that things have settled! I can handle 2 months of stress for 2 years of living in a new country. That seems manageable. 

Going to church at the military base has been really nice. We suspect another mormon family is moving into the community! We'll see when they arrive! That would be pretty awesome.

Brighton turned 1, and poor boy, we never celebrated! We will, we just sort of haven't gotten to it. He's gotten some pretty cool presents though!

Brighton loves chocolate. I mean LOVES. He is WAY worse than Scarlet. He is obsessed. 

Scarlet however, is always telling me how much she loves chocolate. She has been so much fun. She loves to be told stories at night about crazy thing. Her getting eaten by a hippo and then it spitting her out. A sneaky elf that stole her blanket, that turned out to be Brighton. She's often helping rescue people like Diego does.

I'm trying to establish a 'read scriptures and pray as a family every night' routine. Our schedule has been everything random as far as the evenings go. I'm trying to remember. It needs to happen.

Brighton is a dancer. Like he'll stop whatever he is doing and dance if music suddenly comes on. And he gets SO HAPPY. It's crazy. The one trait he's inherited from me. And the chocolate addiction.

He's starting to sign on a regular basis, which is pretty exciting! More and all done. We think he might be starting to talk a little now too. He says Dada more than anything, but I'm pretty sure he said Grandma when I was facetiming my mom and Greg swears he said All Done tonight and woof yesterday! Pretty exciting! It's becoming obvious that he's understanding things now. It's exciting.

I have decided to wean him. I woke up Sunday and decided, "I'm ready." And like clockwork, that day he skipped two feeds without my encouraging. What was that about? He literally refused me at lunch time. He's never done that. It was so weird. It was just that day. I'm just skipping the 4 o clock, this week, which has been pretty smooth and after this week, I want to skip lunch, then the evening feed and we'll see about the morning. The morning is just so much easier. I get to lay in bed longer if I nurse him when he gets up. I don't really want to let go of THAT ONE yet. I finally got around to looking up how much he's "supposed" to be nursing and oh my gosh, I have been nursing him WAYYYYY more. When Scarlet was this age she was down to two bottles a day, maybe three. I'm still nursing Brighton 4 day sessions along with a early morning/sort of still night time feed occasionally. He's been smacking me in the face quite a lot lately, during the feeds, so it's helped the decision along.

This week has been so HOT. It's like we can't cool the house down. 

Project Runway suddenly appeared on Hulu and it has long been Greg and I's favorite show to watch together. We picked back up at season 9 and oh man, so good. We also started Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls and oh man it's been so much fun! I love that show! So sad, I was looking at the computer and Scarlet asks me, "Are you watching MasterChef?" Pretty sad that even my two year old knows my shows.

I read Bringing Up Bebe and pretty much hated it. Some parts were fun, some parts were good for me, but a lot of the book I couldn't even stand. I'm slightly mystified why my sister in laws love it so much. I'll have to ask them why later. It wasn't all bad, by any means. I just kind of couldn't stand the writer. She was so "praise the french" and would say a few things that she never backed up- like that the french love their kids like we do. But all she ever talked about was how their own personal lives were so much more priority than their kids having the right to disrupt it in any way, shape or form. I also hated how she acted like some things were so mind blowing and I would just think, "Really, that's not a french thing. Americans do that too." Lots of things bothered me. But it gave me the final push I needed to wean Brighton at night. Which obviously benefitted me. I thought the whole French way of parenting was interesting, most definitely, and I love learning of differences. I loved and thought it was so funny learning about the french and their food, but at the same time thought to myself, "Who has time to puree and talk about texture, taste and blah blah blah to your 6 month old?" I don't. It may be realistic in France, but it isn't so much in America. I couldn't help thinking that french kids are so well behaved because they're being raised by "professionals" at the creche and the parents are just reaping their rewards and ignoring their kids the rest of the time. It was an interesting read for sure, and it made me think, but I would never say the French have it all right and we have it all wrong. I think we both have our strengths and weaknesses and clearly there are many kinds of parents in America.

I'm now reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. Oh man. Lots of info. It's good. I'll probably talk about that one when I'm finished. I think it's going to be very helpful to me. It's definitely fascinating. I'm on a reading kick again. I realize I can't read fiction. I do so much better with interesting facts that stun or fascinate me.

Alright, I'm going to watch the Bachelorette Finale! Booyah!