La Playa

Honduras has been celebrating Independence Day for almost a week now (Officially on Sept 15). We began celebrations on Friday at school- complete with traditional dress, dances, chasing a pig covered in manteca (basically Crisco), and games involving a mud pit and students.


After the festivities at school, Tom and I started off the weekend with a relaxing day at home and a visit to the paint store. We bought the paint to turn our pepto-pink guest room into a baby boy's beach room. Today, Tom has promised me that we will start painting!

To be truly inspired, we decided to take up a friend's offer to visit her beach house for a couple days. One of the lovely ladies who works in the library with Tom offered for us to go out and use her beach house for a couple nights to get away. This house is just 20 minutes from our own front door, but just far enough out of town that the water is clean and turquoise. Besides a few cute kids from the nearby villages, or fishermen paddling by in their canoes, we don't see or hear any other people!


One highlight was bringing Ruby with us. This was her first time swimming in the ocean, and after getting over the initial fear of those crazy waves, she loved it!



Ruby and Tom spent hours playing fetch with a tennis ball. Tom would throw it out and most of the time, Ruby would go bounding into the gentle waves, doggy-paddling out to her new favorite toy. (The other times, Tom would go swim after it and bring it back) While all this was going on, I just floated and swam in the warm, Carribbean waters. It was pretty nice.



After playing in the salty water, we all came back to the house for a dip in the private pool! It was awesome to have this little pool right in front of our hammocks. Whenever we got hot, a quick dip would cool us off. Ruby liked the fact that she could drink this water. (The ocean proved to be a bit salty for her digestive system).


You might think that the green hose in the picture is filling up the pool. It is not. It is actually our makeshift "long leash" for Ruby. When we first arrived, Ruby showed us that she is not yet ready to handle being completly free, so we improvised by tying a 30 foot garden hose to her leash. This slowed her down enough that she didn't stray too far from the beach house, and still had the freedom to wander around a bit.

And here I am in my favorite outfit of the weekend. I brought all these clothes, but just wore my swimsuit the entire time. I guess that's how it goes at the beach!


The reason I'm posting a picture of myself in a swimsuit is only to show how preggo my belly is getting. This picture was taken at 19 weeks and 4 days. For those of you who don't do weeks- it's about 4 and a half months. I'm halfway there!


The other activity of the weekend was reading. We both spent hours and hours in our beachfront hammocks, reading our books. On Monday morning, I began reading Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen. This is a book all about life in the circus back in the day. We blogged about the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, WI back in July, and found out that much of the research for this book was done at the museum. I LOVED this book. I didn't put it down till I had finished the last page on Monday night. I can't remember the last book I read all in one day like that- but I'd highly recommend it- especially to anyone who liked the movie Toby Tyler when they were a kid!