Out and about!

On Sunday we left the house as a family to attend church together for the first time in a month! Woohoo! Owen still isn't feeling perfect, but he is definitely steadily improving. The sun was shining, the air was (moderately) fresh, and I think each one of us began to feel almost normal. "Normal" is a glorious feeling, especially when it dawns on you again that "normal" can be something other than the sleepless stupor and nagging worry for the health of our children which we had been feeling for the past month. We tried hard not to take Owen out and about while he was feeling ill, so all of us have been a little more than restless, ready to end our stint of house arrest. It was an extra special occasion because we visited the church of friends of ours, Uri and Carmen, for the baptism of their son, Alfonso. Alfonso is older than Owen by three months and we hope that some day in the future the boys will be friends.

(Alfonso, Carmen and Uri)

Carmen and Uri attend a small Presbyterian church next to a beautiful park that has an awesome playground. The invitation for the baptism listed the start time as 11:30 am, so we showed up at 11:30 am, give or take a few minutes. We walked into the school where the church meets and saw that, other than the pastor and Carmen, we were the only ones there! We began to sit down when Carmen looked at us with a look of "I am so sorry I didn't know you'd take the time so literally!" It turned out that the service wasn't supposed to start for another half hour at 12. We decided that our best option was to walk a block to the park and let Eliana play a bit. As we walked lazily to the park I had to laugh at this cultural moment, we are definitely still the "gringos" as far as our time orientation goes! I can't count the number of times that we headed to an event "late" knowing that no one would be there on time -- by late I am talking about a half hour, sometimes an hour or more -- yet most often we are still the first ones to arrive! Perhaps the longer we are here we will begin to synch with the local time, but my guess is that our time orientation is fairly rooted and will take some time to change. In the meantime, we will enjoy that we are rarely ever late (even if we think we are). :)