Pregnant bellies

I feel so much more incapacitated, heavier, and bedraggled this pregnancy compared to when I was carrying Lucas. I'm barely exercising at all because I'm so fatigued and generally feel like a big pork chop. :) With Lucas, I was doing prenatal yoga 2x a week, hiking, swimming laps, and had a great social life. However, with Lucas I was sick and nauseaus with a variety of specific food cravings/aversions whereas with this pregnancy I haven't been sick at all but have had a general aversion to food and water (ack!) and I have a severe cow dairy intolerace. It's been hard not to feel down on myself. But now that I've dug up a photo of myself 23 weeks pregnant with Lucas, and find that I'm now at 23 weeks with the Bean Sprout, I thought it would be fun to strike the same pose in the same backyard with the same outfit on. Turns out I don't look any worse- which makes me feel a whole lot better about myself. The only difference is that my belly is a bit bigger and carrying a bit higher (more like a typical boy). Pretty cool, huh? :)

......LUCAS.......................& BABY GIRL......

Grammy's Visit

Too much time has passed since Grammy's visit so I'm just going to go ahead and post the photos to encourage Laith to add some text!

Guatemala Part 4: Tikal Ruins and the Colorful City of Flores

Tikal is one of the more famous Mayan Ruins in Guatemala. It takes an entire day to walk through this former capitol of Mayan civilization and commerce but we asked our guide to keep it short and sweet (4 hours!) and utilize shortcuts. We still got to see and experience the most impressive of the temples and had time to climb around and explore on our own too. Guatemala doesn't have the same safety and preservation standards as the U.S. so we could scramble onto the terraces of the ruins and see what the Mayan sleeping quarters and hallways looked like from the inside (under-bed storage carved out of the stone)! Our guide had lots of very interesting information about the place- as he is a second-generation Tikal guide and would tag along with his father's tourist groups when he was a boy. Look at the ground in the photo of the temple below: those tombstone looking things are sacrificial altars. The sandy circle in the middle is a fire pit. For special occasions, the Mayans would sacrifice their ruling class (it was considered a privilege to be selected for such a death). Not so coincidentally, this kept the power struggles for leadership over the city in check and the population was kept relatively peaceful.


Here's a Howler Monkey. These little guys (the size of 3 year olds) have the loudest voices and they actually echo as if they are on loud speakers. Jill and I first heard them while we were using the bathrooms in the tiny tourist center. They sounded like dinosaurs and we were wondering who was playing a recording of loud roars in the middle of an otherwise quiet jungle! Turns out, the producer of Jurassic Park used the Howler Monkey's sounds for the T-Rex's voice!

That's me near the top of the temple! A very scary ascent even with wooden stairs and railings built on a scaffolding in the back!
After our Tikal tour, Jill and I strolled around the nearby town of Flores. It's the most colorful cute little city I've ever seen. I would have loved to stay maybe one more day to take a boat ride around the island (it's situated in the middle of a lake) and jump off the docks to go swimming. But taking pictures of all the color was fun too!



Here Jill shows us how to work it!









Lovely drinks at the end of the day overlooking the beach and shaded by palm trees. Ahhhh.

Guatemala Part 3: Chichicastenango

This is one of the biggest markets in the Highlands of Guatemala where Jill and I hoped to get some awesome deals on these beautiful crafts and textiles the locals are known for. I mostly hoped to get some really cool photos of indigenous people and lots of colors. Unfortunately, the people who live (and shop) here are very wary of westerners photographing them. I even had an old man yell at me for trying to photograph his bowl of beans for sale! So, every single one of these pictures was taken on the sly- without me looking through the viewfinder to aim or compose the image. I was lucky so many turned out in-focus! At the very end of our visit, while we were waiting for our shuttle to take us back to Antigua, a little girl came up to us to try and get a few more dollars out of the tourists. I bought some cute doll magnets and then asked if I could take her picture. Score! :)
Here she is: