What a difference a month makes...

Earlier this month we were doing this...

Now we're doing this!!!

Thank goodness little kids are so adaptable!

Christmas Came Early This Year

Josh is back with us and we get to all be in the states together again, but this time for good.  We loved living in Dominica, but it is so good to be back and be able to settle down with an address and phone number of our own, and all our stuff in one place.  Every time I go to the store or drive in my car or eat something really good I get almost giddy inside when I remember that this isn't temporary.  I am really proud of Josh for all his hard work.  They don't say med school is hard for no reason, and I know he still has a lot ahead of him, but it is nice to feel like we are making some progress.    

Surprise!!!

Well, we were anyway, when we found that we are indeed having a little GIRL!!!!!!  We are thrilled and so excited to figure out this whole girl thing.  Her name will be Marissa Rhae Dettinger.

How We Celebrated

Since Shane's birthday was during a crazy week of testing for all the students, packing for me, and because he's only 2- we decided to just have a small little celebration at our favorite (okay, really only...) ice cream parlor in Dominica.  We went to dinner as a family at our favorite restaurant next door, then met a few of his friends at the ice cream parlor.  Everyone got their ice cream first,

Shane requested pink and was very excited about it,

and we brought a cake and sang to him there.  He was talking about having cake for his birthday for weeks, so this was a very exciting moment for him!

I think it turned out to be pretty fun and very low stress,

and my friend Jessie even brought a banner for the occasion.

It was nice to just hang out with everyone for a little bit and because we left two days later, Shane had a good excuse to give some of his favorite ladies and friends hugs and say some goodbyes

And I couldn't resist a little squeeze from this cutie either :)  Those cheeks still get me every time! 

Here are his little friends who came (L to R: Jaz, Matix, Keira, Hawken, Shane, and Norm). 

We sure do miss all these guys!

Back in the States

Well, I made it home alive after over 24 hours of travelling by myself with a 2 year old!  It went pretty smoothly, and I kind of felt like a rockstar after successfully making my way through customs in Puerto Rico pushing a stroller with one hand and a cart with 4 bags on it with the other hand.  Since Shane was 2 but we had a roundtrip ticket and he was 1 for the first leg, he was still free but he got his own seat.  It made things so much easier!!! But I don't think I would try that trick without a travel agent, we stood at the counter at the airport for over an hour while they tried to figure out his ticket.  Good thing I have such a good little traveling companion.  Here he is briefing himself on the safety instructions ha ha.

Last view of the island...

We got into Miami after 11 pm, crashed at the hotel in the airport, then had our third and longest flight to LA in the morning.  We got pretty creative entertaining ourselves, not much coloring was done but the colored pencils themselves were a big hit.

This pregnant lady wanted a big ole salad for my first meal back (and yes, I am a nerd and took a picture of it.  I was too embarrassed to take my camera to Walmart, but I wish I had a picture of Shane's face walking down the toy aisle!  He kept saying "Bulldozer!!!  Truck!  Racecar!!  Help please!!")

so we headed to Souplantation with my fam.  Shane was pretty slap happy after so little sleep, and I was just happy to be with my fam in the good ole USA! 

Except, we miss Josh :(  Wish him luck with his final on Thursday and a safe travel home!

Goodbye Dominica

Well, I have thought a lot about what I would say to sum up my feelings about my time here, and I'm not really sure I can do it justice in one blog post, but here goes.  I definitely have mixed feelings.  Am I excited to be going back to the states?  Heck yes!!  Was living in Dominica easy?  Heck no!!  The lack or or insane pricing of many basic food items and other things we take for granted in the states, having to walk everywhere to get it and shopping almost every day because you can only get what will fit in your stroller or in your lap on a bus and you need to go to 5 different stores to get everything was probably the most difficult. Then there were of course the bugs, the sweat like you've never sweated before, the rain, and, well you get my drift.  But I have come to realize that the fact that it was so hard was also what has made it so good- made us more patient, better able to roll with the punches, laugh at ourselves (and occasionally others :) ), and realize that we don't really need much, just each other.  Things here are never reliable, and you can't really count on anything, but I have realized that it's okay and that what I can count on is my Heavenly Father and I feel like I have come closer to Him this year and a half than ever before.  I remember being crushed when Josh didn't get in to a school in the states, and a few years ago I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined we would live here.  But looking back on it, I can think of at least a dozen reasons why we were supposed to be here and why it has been so good for us and changed us in so many ways, hopefully for the better.  I hope I can remember that, and that when I feel like life is throwing me a curve ball and things aren't going the way I had planned, that my Heavenly Father knows just what I need.  Dominica is where I learned what it really means to be a mom, and I honestly think I would be a completely different mother if I hadn't have lived here.  It is Shane's real first home, and looking back I can't imagine spending this first bit of his life with him anywhere else.  It is definitely time to move on now, but Dominica will always have a little place in our hearts, and I know that it will hold some of our very dearest memories.       

Happy Birthday Shane!!!

My baby is 2 today!  Where does the time go?  This time last year I was walking around with him everywhere holding onto the tip of his finger.  Now he is running and talking up a storm.  He has truly been a delight and I think Heavenly Father sent us just the right little boy for this crazy time in our lives!
At 2 years old Shane:

-Eats 3 packets of oatmeal every morning for breakfast, hearty portions of whatever we're having for dinner, and not a whole lot in between.
-Is pretty shy around most people, until he is around you more often and then he cannot help but give you unsolicited hugs and cuddles every few minutes.
-Is into Cars, Elmo, any book, puzzles, animals, colors, shapes, and construction vehicles.
-LOVES his friends and is happiest when he's around them.  He is very tender-hearted and almost always gives up his toys without a fight if one of them wants what he is playing with.  And they are good to put up with a lot of love from him :)
-Is very meticulous and spends a lot of time arranging things a certain way or putting them inside some crevice or space, and gets very frustrated if they don't fit just the way he wants them to.
-Would usually rather play with mom than by himself.
-Is a very good boy and always wants to please us.  When he realizes he has done something naughty, he will usually say "Sorry!" without me even telling him to.
-Still hates when I try to get him to feed himself with a spoon.
-Is a very avid listener and will soak things in for awhile then all the sudden one day it will all come spitting out and you think, "wow, he really was paying attention."
-Will come up behind me when I'm doing something to give me a hug, and will often say, "Love hugs!"  Pretty much he melts my heart on a daily basis.

We love you Shane!!!  Happy birthday!

Last Week in Dominica

This is the last week in Dominica for Shane and I, so we have been spending lots of time with friends,

enjoying the sun while we still can,

and taking every chance we can to wear just a diaper out in public while it's still socially acceptable to do so.

We leave Wednesday afternoon for California, we'll spend a week there while Josh finishes up his tests and then drive to Utah to meet him and spend Christmas with his family before the big drive to Michigan. I've got a few posts coming this week so stay tuned, unless you can't handle a little sap- then you better stay away!  (My baby turns two tomorrow, I'm a little emotional about all these big changes, and, well, I'm pregnant :) )

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are out enjoying some good old Black Friday fun for me!  This year we decided to just do a little dinner with our neighbors/friends the Ellsworths so we could make sure Josh could eat everything and so we could make sure to have our favorites and skip the things that we either don't like very much or cost too much, or both.  And as blasphemous as it may be, turkey did not make the cut.  Neither did cranberry sauce at 19.50 a can (okay so that's in EC, but it's still more than 7 US dollars!  And we don't even like it!)  But what we did have was delicious!  I made homemade stuffing for the first time, with my own bread cubes and everything

and added some fresh herbs from the market

I made some red meat with gravy in the crockpot, and Ashley brought the mashed potatoes and veggies

The gang around our little table

After dinner we played a round of Catchphrase, then topped off the night with homemade pumpkin pie- I made the crust and they filled it for me.  We were all stuffed, the way Thanksgiving should be (making it ten times better than our fiasco last year!)

We are very thankful for the time we've had to spend on the island, and also very thankful that it is almost over!

Videos

It's not very often I post videos, it is kind of a pain sometimes. But I have been trying to capture a few things lately and thought I would post them. The first one is Shane doing his trademark "happy dance". The second is a little long so I won't be offended if you don't watch it- it is Shane "reading" one of his favorite books, Fidgety Fish. One of Shane's favorite pasttimes is when we say lines from his books and he fills in the blanks. Yes, sadly, Josh and I (and Shane) have pretty much all his books memorized and can do it without even having the book open. It has come in handy when we are bored or waiting in line somewhere, but let's just say we will be looking forward to being able to go to a library, or a bookstore for that matter!

Magical Moments

Sometimes being a mother is hard.  And sometimes living in Dominica is less than ideal.  But simple moments like this remind me how good my life is- watching the waves crash on the shore with my little buddy at my side. I said to him, "the waves are pretty, huh?"  And he smiled and said "Indeed."  Ha ha it is one of the words from one of his favorite books, I am fairly certain it was kind of a fluke, but a nice coincidence anyway :)  And I am grateful for friends who are so on the ball and stealthily capture moments like these without me even realizing it :)

?

That pretty much sums up my feelings right now.  So I went to Roseau today to do my big ultrasound, and now I am even more confused.  I was convinced beforehand that it was a boy- this pregnancy has been almost exactly like Shane's, and at my first ultrasound the doctor even said he thought he saw boy parts.  Of course, I was only 11 weeks and shouldn't have trusted that but I did because I was thinking boy anyway and lo and behold today, with a different ultrasound tech, we did not see any boy parts.  Don't get me wrong, we would be thrilled if it were a girl, but I don't feel like I can be 100% sure of that here.  (Our friends were told they were having a girl here only to go home and learn it was really a boy).  I feel like if it were a boy, I would know for sure and could start planning and all that, but with a girl I am left to wonder if maybe she just didn't get a good angle, and she didn't speak English very well so I was having trouble communicating with her about it.  And the pictures she gave me were microscopic, so it's not like I can go back and really look at them or even really show them to Josh, who couldn't go to either one of the ultrasounds.  Not to mention the power kept cutting out because of the construction workers next door so she had to run the machine on battery power and couldn't project it onto the larger screen like she usually does.  Anyway, sorry for the rant.  The important thing is that the baby was healthy and whether it's a boy or a girl we will love them just the same, we will just have to wait til I get to Michigan to hopefully find out for sure.   

Crescent Moon 2010

So it has become tradition (well, it would be if we were staying on the island anyway...) to go to Crescent Moon cabins at the end of the October.  We loved it last year and I was excited to go again this year and knew Shane would love it even more now that he was a little older.  He loved exploring the greenhouse,

checking out the animals and getting to feed a goat,

and there was so much explore.  And this year he could explore it on his own without holding onto my finger!

We checked out their cabins

and tried to get a picture of all the kids in the hammock- ha ha.

Shaners did cheese it up for me though

And we were so excited to have so many good friends come along this time, it was a really fun group

After some exploring, we had lunch.  Vegetable and herb fritatta with salad and homemade bread.  I think I licked my plate afterwards.

And then they brought out the cake. Yum.  We just don't get stuff like that here very often.

After lunch was a walk up to the beautiful Montessori school they built, and it was so much fun to watch Shane play and explore.

A color matching toy- I think this thing was built for my little boy.  And I think he would have sat here all day if we didn't have to leave.

It was a great day followed by a long nap on the ride home.

Showing

I'll be 19 weeks tomorrow and have definitely started to show.  Though, I feel a lot huger than this picture looks!  I am feeling great, just ready for it to cool down a little and wishing there was some good ice cream at my disposal that I didn't have to walk a mile for or pay a fortune for.  That's probably for the best, but  you might want to invest in some Dreyer's stock before I get home!  And 1 week from today we will find out whether it's a boy or a girl. 

P.S. Don't mind my nasty looking hair.  As Monica would say, "It's the humidity!!!"

The journey continues...

While our adventures in Dominica are shortly coming to an end, we are nowhere near done with our med school journey.  For these 16 months on the island Josh has been taking his basic science classes.  In January he will be starting his 5th semester, which is an introduction to clinical medicine (basically a preparation for his rotations), in....

Saginaw, Michigan.  Yep, from tropical paradise to Michigan winter.  What are we thinking?!  But we are excited to experience the whole gamut.  We actually had a couple choices and we have heard so many good things about the program there that we are really happy we got in.  5th semester is a little shorter and will end in April, then Josh will study for his first board exam and take it probably in early June, we will have a little time off in the summer while he waits for his scores and then he'll start clinical rotations at the end of the summer.  Oh yeah, and we'll have a baby somewhere in there too :).  So we'll be in Saginaw until at least August, and maybe another year or two after that if he does his rotations there.  Then will come graduation and a residency.  It seems like a crazy life at times but we feel lucky to be experiencing so many things and can't wait to see what this next step will bring! 

☑Bonfire on the Beach, ☑#1 Beach

5 weeks from tomorrow Shane and I are leaving the island!  (Josh will follow the next week).  I feel like I am checking things off my Dominican to do list.  One of the things left on my list was to have a bonfire on the beach.  Somehow I had not done that in the year+ we've been here.  I had to roast a marshmallow, even though the fire was so hot that I had to stand like 10 feet away.

Shane's first fire.  I think he enjoyed it. 

I feel like I have mostly done everything I have wanted to do here (minus seeing a sea turtle snorkelling- darn it), so mostly I have been making sure to get to all my favorites another time.  I tried counting and I think this was my seventh and probably last time to #1 Beach, one of my favorites, and it didn't disappoint.  A good hike out in nature with his best bud, life doesn't get much better for Shane.   

As usual, there's our group a ways ahead of us.  Hey, a boy's gotta stop and smell the roses sometimes, right?

Him loving the feel of the sand in his toes, me loving those cute little footprints

We made our way down to our usual spot by the river and parked it in the sand

Hmmm, I wonder just how dirty I can get myself?

There, now I look like a real explorer

Love this boy

My new favorite shot of the two of us, thanks Jessie!

Saying goodbye to one of our favorite beaches.  This picture pretty much sums up my life here.  Love it.