Travel Journal: Day 6 (Tuesday)

Since it seems most people are uninterested in reading about my Swirly Twirly thoughts...

back to the Travel Journal!

If you forgot where you were in our journey... here is a link to Day 4: Monday

TUESDAY:
Once we got all three babies up and into our bed for morning hugs and cuddles, we decided they were probably hungry and that we should go to breakfast. 

We got them dressed and went to the potty and walked downstairs to eat. Several of our other travel group friends were there also feeding their children breakfast. They had their embassy appointments today, so they needed to be dressed, fed and ready to go by 8:30. We all talked about our first night together with our new children and joked about the “honeymoon” phase we must be in right now. 

Breakfast was not very exciting for our three. They had some porridge and the juice I gave them in the room. Once we returned upstairs, they polished off a bag of crackers and more juice.  We had a fun morning playing together, painting the girls' fingernails, playing with punch balloons, and running around the hotel room. 

Daddy's phone was the best toy for the baby boy!

Baby Boy has given me a crash refresher course in diapering babies as he has been through 6 already before lunch time! I was not prepared for the diaper thing for sure! He acts much younger than a child about to turn 3 years old, but that’s okay because I really had thought we were planning for a young baby in the beginning anyway! Now I get the best of both worlds!

We ate in the hotel lobby again at lunch and ordered potato soup and spaghetti with meat sauce for the kids. The potato soup looked like clear gravy with diced potatoes inside. The kids didn’t love it. The spaghetti was a huge mess, but a total success! They all loved it and ate almost two adult sized bowls between the three of them!
The problem with eating in the lobby is that they are not set up for children. No high chairs, no booster seats, and the girls can’t reach the table to be able to feed themselves like they did at the care center. Baby Boy is way too small to sit in a chair by himself and eat, so he sits in my lap so I can feed him. This means Paul and I are not eating meals at this point in time. We didn’t eat dinner last night, no breakfast or lunch today.  Thankfully, I have lots of food and snacks in the room, but I think Paul needs a good meal.  He said this morning that he really misses his giant cups of Folgers coffee in the mornings. (edited to say - he actually missed his giant Gas Station cups of coffee. You know it has to be bad if he is sitting in Ethiopia - land of the coffee bean - missing Shell Station coffee.)

The Ethiopian coffee is good, but inconsistent. At one location we have really wonderful coffee with steamed milk, while somewhere else we have gritty, super-strong coffee with no milk available. Don't get me wrong, it is GOOD coffee - just you never quite know what to expect!

After lunch we returned to our room and decided it was potty time, then nap time. Baby Boy went through another two diapers. At this point I am starting to get concerned about our flight home and his poop-situation. Nap time was less difficult than bedtime, but we still had to divide and conquer. Baby Boy and I laid in the girls’ room; Paul had the girls in our bed. We were able to get them to sleep fairly quickly this time and as I type this, they have been sleeping about 90 minutes.  

Their sleeping arrangements are making me a nervous wreck. All three are restless sleepers. Both girls fell off the bed last night and I jolted awake during my mini-nap with Baby Boy when I felt him starting to fall off of the bed. I moved him and made him a cocoon of pillows, but it scared me half to death! 

Later tonight we will just kill more time playing before and after dinner, then try out the bathtub. This should be interesting! 

(Later that day...)Bath time was funny! They really enjoyed being sprayed with the hand-held shower sprayer. We washed everyone well, conditioned all the hair, lotioned them all up and got them all in pajamas for bed!