Green is in the air - literally!

It's amazing how much things can change in one week of being away! I feel like when I left last Saturday, the trees were just beginning to bud, the grass didn't need mowing, and now everything is green and certainly in need of mowing. When I write everything, I meant it! There is pollen on literally everything! My car has turned a shade of green and since everyone has green cars too, I don't feel as inclined to clean it! If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!! A few other changes in just one week is that my mailbox door is completely broken off and now resides inside the mailbox and the bottom drawer of my oven is no longer attached to the hinges. When I tried to put it back, I found 6 cat play toys and a shopping list I looked for EVERYWHERE a few weeks ago (I obviously didn't look under the oven...obvious place of course!).

My trip to Colombia was absolutely wonderful, until around 1 AM on Friday morning when I woke up with a fever, shaking from being cold, in a room with a temperature of 93 degrees! Mentally, I knew I shouldn't feel cold but since I was cold, I packed on clothes until I lay there without the fan blowing on me, wearing long pants, a long sleeved shirt, a sweater, warm socks and two blankets. After some evaluation, I decided the best plan was to call my mother in Canada at 2 AM her time. This is the second time I've called her out of bed in the middle of the night in a foreign country thinking she could help me (the first was in Cambodia). Since she didn't really know how to help, I called my nurse friend Beth! She was more resourceful than my mother for sure and after following her advice, I felt a little better in the morning.

Today, 4 days later, I still have a parasite that I'm trying to get out of my body, but I feel much better than I did. I haven't been able to eat more than a few crackers each day but I don't feel quite as weak as I did. Being sick is no fun, but it's even less fun when you're in another country sleeping on a hard bed using a shower without hot water and having to use toilet paper that feels more like newspaper!

I am now trying to get back into "life" here including going to Bible Study last night. I almost threw up in class last night because one of my kids pulled her teeth out while I was doing their discussion of the previous week's lesson. In many ways, I feel ready to be a parent but the thought of their little teeth coming out of their mouth sort of makes me feel queezy! As a kid it seemed cool but as an adult, the "coolness" fact has somewhat dimished. The obvious cool part was putting it under your pillow and getting money. In my house, the tooth fairy must have worked at the Christian bookstore where my mother worked because we always got Christian tapes. Assuming the toothfairy threw out the teeth after collecting them from under our pillows, I was shocked a few years ago to stumble across a little container filled with baby teeth! I'm not sure if my mother was planning to make a necklace with them one day or just couldn't help parting with them, but I certainly feel that once a tooth falls out, it should be disposed of. I suggested to my kid last night that she just throw the bloody tooth out and draw a picture of it to put under her pillow but she kept the tooth.

On a lighter note, I saw my first hummingbird today! I can't wait until they are swarming the feeder outside my window! Gotta love Spring!