Update and Travels
Jun. 11th, 2006 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ste_noni[cross-post with Ellie's blog. I will get back to original content eventually!]
I’m back! Online, that is. I managed to last a whole 12 hours without immediate internet access before I caved and signed up for *shudder* dial-up. It’s super slow, but at least I can check mail and post. We are in a room on Ft. Buchanan and we will be here until July 7th. It’s the dog-friendly room and the dogs arrived yesterday.
We seem to be settling in better. Ellie is eating slightly better. This morning she had maybe 4-5 grapes and some Cheerios. She will eat yogurt if I’m “sharing” mine with her, so I’ve been doing that. She is still nursing maybe every 2-3 hours at night, especially as it gets closer to morning. This is hard on me, but I am thrilled to have figured out why my back was aching so much. My back had been hurting ever since we started sleeping on the air mattress back in our house. Well, two nights ago, half asleep, I put one of my pillows between my legs (I sleep on my side all the time) and when I woke up the next morning, my back felt great. I feel kind of dumb that I didn’t put this together sooner, but at least now I know. So, all the nursing isn’t very restful but waking up without the aching back is wonderful.
Ellie rolled off the bed last night for the first time ever. She was fine – she landed on her butt and I actually caught her under the arm as she rolled. Usually I’m faster than that but I guess I was sleeping soundly due to my back not hurting. The bed here is a double and is sort of small for the three of us. I’d been thinking about putting Ellie in the other bed, but all the transition seems to have her wanting to nurse a lot and I was too tired going back and forth. So, she’s in the small bed with us. The Lending Closet (Army place on every post where you can get the basics until your stuff arrives) has a bed rail that I will get on Monday.
Ellie is now walking all over the place. She doesn’t do it all the time and sometimes she prefers to scoot still. However, she has been having a great time walking around the room, going from furniture to furniture. Yesterday she did a fair amount of walking in the pool, in chest deep water. She would take off and I would follow about an inch behind until, eventually, she would fall and I would scoop her up. She doesn’t mind going under the water and she still loves to jump in, as long as I’m holding her hands.
So that’s what Ellie’s been up to for the last few days. Now here’s what the family has been up to. Joe woke me up yesterday morning and asked me if I wanted to see the sunrise over the ocean. We took off along the coast until we got to Isla Verde, just outside San Juan. This is an area with lots of little stores and restaurants on the beach. It’s very rustic looking, but cute. They have a boardwalk that runs along the beach and we walked along for a while, watching the sun. We then drove along the beach for a while more just enjoying the view. We drove past this large mountain, part of a national park, and then headed to the Westin Rio Mar Resort. The grounds of the resort were beautiful and we thought about having breakfast, but it looked like it would be another $50 breakfast and we were tired of spending so much money on food, so we kept on driving. Just before we got back to the main road, we found a really nice local bakery. We had orange juice and fresh baked bread toasted with butter. It was perfect for what we wanted. We then kept going to Loquillo. Once we got there, we got out of the beach and dipped our toes in the water. It was about 7:30am so the beach was almost completely deserted and very quiet. Once we had enough of that, we headed back for home.
After resting and swimming yesterday afternoon, we headed out to Old San Juan. There was a food festival going on and it sounded perfect. We managed to find a place to park pretty easily (and Joe did a great job parallel parking on the left side of the street with all of 6 inches to spare in front and back). The streets in Old San Juan are cobblestone and very narrow. For the festival, they had blocked off the streets themselves and placed table with umbrellas out in the street. We had some wonderful ahi tuna tortillas and goat cheese/mango empanadas. That plus four beers for Joe and Walter. Total cost - $50! Not bad, I guess, but it just proves that we can’t go a day without spending $50 on some meal. After we got out snacks, we walked around the streets some more. There was at least half a dozen live bands. We stopped and listened to some Cuban music for a while – Ellie loved it and had a great time dancing with Walter. We also listened to reggae and some classical music. We had more to eat (tostones and chicharrones) and some ice cream. We walked around until Ellie got tired and then headed home. It was a really fun evening – Old San Juan is so beautiful. It reminds me of how I’ve always pictured classical Spain or Italy – cute little plazas, bit trees, cobblestones streets, and tall buildings with narrow doors.
I almost forgot to mention that we got the dogs back yesterday. They were very happy to see us and Ellie was so happy to see them (we were too). Ellie has spent a lot of time climbing all over Toby and grabbing various body parts (tail, nose, paws, etc.). Toby has been great with her, as usual. Sebastian is still a bit skittish around Ellie but he seems happy to be here.
Because of the dial-up connection, it would take to much time to upload pictures from yesterday. However, you can see them all over at my Flickr site..
I’m back! Online, that is. I managed to last a whole 12 hours without immediate internet access before I caved and signed up for *shudder* dial-up. It’s super slow, but at least I can check mail and post. We are in a room on Ft. Buchanan and we will be here until July 7th. It’s the dog-friendly room and the dogs arrived yesterday.
We seem to be settling in better. Ellie is eating slightly better. This morning she had maybe 4-5 grapes and some Cheerios. She will eat yogurt if I’m “sharing” mine with her, so I’ve been doing that. She is still nursing maybe every 2-3 hours at night, especially as it gets closer to morning. This is hard on me, but I am thrilled to have figured out why my back was aching so much. My back had been hurting ever since we started sleeping on the air mattress back in our house. Well, two nights ago, half asleep, I put one of my pillows between my legs (I sleep on my side all the time) and when I woke up the next morning, my back felt great. I feel kind of dumb that I didn’t put this together sooner, but at least now I know. So, all the nursing isn’t very restful but waking up without the aching back is wonderful.
Ellie rolled off the bed last night for the first time ever. She was fine – she landed on her butt and I actually caught her under the arm as she rolled. Usually I’m faster than that but I guess I was sleeping soundly due to my back not hurting. The bed here is a double and is sort of small for the three of us. I’d been thinking about putting Ellie in the other bed, but all the transition seems to have her wanting to nurse a lot and I was too tired going back and forth. So, she’s in the small bed with us. The Lending Closet (Army place on every post where you can get the basics until your stuff arrives) has a bed rail that I will get on Monday.
Ellie is now walking all over the place. She doesn’t do it all the time and sometimes she prefers to scoot still. However, she has been having a great time walking around the room, going from furniture to furniture. Yesterday she did a fair amount of walking in the pool, in chest deep water. She would take off and I would follow about an inch behind until, eventually, she would fall and I would scoop her up. She doesn’t mind going under the water and she still loves to jump in, as long as I’m holding her hands.
So that’s what Ellie’s been up to for the last few days. Now here’s what the family has been up to. Joe woke me up yesterday morning and asked me if I wanted to see the sunrise over the ocean. We took off along the coast until we got to Isla Verde, just outside San Juan. This is an area with lots of little stores and restaurants on the beach. It’s very rustic looking, but cute. They have a boardwalk that runs along the beach and we walked along for a while, watching the sun. We then drove along the beach for a while more just enjoying the view. We drove past this large mountain, part of a national park, and then headed to the Westin Rio Mar Resort. The grounds of the resort were beautiful and we thought about having breakfast, but it looked like it would be another $50 breakfast and we were tired of spending so much money on food, so we kept on driving. Just before we got back to the main road, we found a really nice local bakery. We had orange juice and fresh baked bread toasted with butter. It was perfect for what we wanted. We then kept going to Loquillo. Once we got there, we got out of the beach and dipped our toes in the water. It was about 7:30am so the beach was almost completely deserted and very quiet. Once we had enough of that, we headed back for home.
After resting and swimming yesterday afternoon, we headed out to Old San Juan. There was a food festival going on and it sounded perfect. We managed to find a place to park pretty easily (and Joe did a great job parallel parking on the left side of the street with all of 6 inches to spare in front and back). The streets in Old San Juan are cobblestone and very narrow. For the festival, they had blocked off the streets themselves and placed table with umbrellas out in the street. We had some wonderful ahi tuna tortillas and goat cheese/mango empanadas. That plus four beers for Joe and Walter. Total cost - $50! Not bad, I guess, but it just proves that we can’t go a day without spending $50 on some meal. After we got out snacks, we walked around the streets some more. There was at least half a dozen live bands. We stopped and listened to some Cuban music for a while – Ellie loved it and had a great time dancing with Walter. We also listened to reggae and some classical music. We had more to eat (tostones and chicharrones) and some ice cream. We walked around until Ellie got tired and then headed home. It was a really fun evening – Old San Juan is so beautiful. It reminds me of how I’ve always pictured classical Spain or Italy – cute little plazas, bit trees, cobblestones streets, and tall buildings with narrow doors.
I almost forgot to mention that we got the dogs back yesterday. They were very happy to see us and Ellie was so happy to see them (we were too). Ellie has spent a lot of time climbing all over Toby and grabbing various body parts (tail, nose, paws, etc.). Toby has been great with her, as usual. Sebastian is still a bit skittish around Ellie but he seems happy to be here.
Because of the dial-up connection, it would take to much time to upload pictures from yesterday. However, you can see them all over at my Flickr site..