Bienvenidos a Chile!

Welcome (us) to Chile!  We arrived safely Friday morning at 6:40am local time (which is 5 hours ahead of CA), glad to finally be here, thankful for the flights going as well as they did, but completely exhausted!  It is now 11pm on Friday here, we've been awake for 36 hours and have probably slept a total of 2.5 hours.  Yikes.

So far we are seeing a lot of blessings and answered prayer, though it has only been one day.  Overall the flights went very well, the kids did great, were happy, entertained, slept, and we felt pretty under control of it all and not too stressed out.

The first people we met once to our apartment were another apparent blessing.  A Cuban couple with two boys, 6 yrs old and 1 year old, who live in our building and were downstairs playing in the 'yard' (Our building has a huge grass area with a big pool and the best surprise was that there is kids jungle gym area that is like having a park on the premises!).  Turns out that they are both family practice doctors who said that if we ever need anything for the kids, medicine, have questions, etc, they are more than glad to help and do whatever they can.  This is so great because we didn't really have a plan for if the kids get a cold or something, other than knowing where the major hospitals are in our neighborhood.  Now we have two doctors living three floors below us!

Also across the hall from us is a couple with an 8 month old son - the father is Canadian and the mother is Chilean (So far the only actual Chilean we have had any length of conversation with...).  Nice to be getting to know a few people in our building already.

Aside from doing the not-so-fun stuff upon arrival like going to buy groceries and basic necessities, we took a break to sit out on a patio at a cafe near our house for a snack and something to drink.  This is something Jimmy and I used to do often when we lived in Madrid, and we miss it because we don't get to do it much in Lodi since so few places have outdoor seating (such a bummer!).  We will hopefully get to incorporate this frequently into our weekend routine while here in Santiago!

Caleb said something that cracked us up today. We headed out after a morning nap to get some groceries, with Landon in the stroller and Caleb wearing a new little monkey backpack with one of those 'leashes' on it to keep him from wandering or bolting off away from us with so much city traffic around.  He was totally fine wearing it, but as we started walking, he was somewhat distracted looking at all the new things around us, so he was walking slightly behind us, causing us to be tugging a bit on the backpack string.  Caleb says "Your pulling me like a dog."  Didn't seem to bother him too much though!  He kept walking without any protest.

Thanks so much to everyone for the prayers that have come thus far, and for those that are yet to come!