Party Time

Today was Alice and Claire's 5th birthday. Since we have no family around to celebrate the girl's special day we did our first friend birthday. The day started good with the girls enjoying an Anderson Family tradition, birthday cereal!

We then quickly moved to opening presents.

We went with a superhero theme and asked the kids to come dressed up if they wanted. We ended up with 12 kids total, some kids from church and a couple of kids from a girl in Marc's program.

Alice's favorite part of the party was making superhero masks

Claire's favorite party games, shooting webs at Spiderman

We finished off the day at Taylor Grocery, a southern restaurant that has live music. The girls love this place because they get to dance.

According to Claire "This was the best birthday EVER!"

Child directed crafting

We are doing preschool at home this year. One of the girls favorite things to do is make crafts and they constantly bug me about it. Today we made paper purses, nothing special.

What was hilarious to me was that they took all of the scraps from the purses and made robots. They were interested in the purses for about 5 minutes, they made robots all morning.

Our new home

I feel like I chronicled our journey to Mississippi sufficiently on Facebook, so I won't go into detail here. It is sufficient to say we just moved to Oxford, Mississippi so Marc can pursue an MFA in creative writing at Ole Miss. I have been hemming and hawing about when to do this post because we moved in about 2 weeks ago and it has been a whirlwind of unpacking and organizing. The house is nowhere near where I want it to be but I thought I would post a few pictures of the new house. I feel very fortunate to be in this house, we have a lot of space and a big yard for the girls. It is an older home and needs some work. My parents will be coming in about a month to do some renovations with us. But here are a few pics.

The great room

The girls are loving their new bunkbeds

This is a mess but the girls have a dedicated playroom, pure bliss!

The rest of the house is too embarrassing at this point to post pictures, maybe later.

Home

We got in to Salt Lake yesterday and we so happy to see our girls! I was espeicially happy that 1) They had a great time while we were gone, 2) They missed us, and 3) They really wanted to go home. We were wondering if they had been so spoiled with their Rara and Papa that they wouldn't want to come home. The best part for them was obviously the presents.

I am just happy to be home. I haven't slept so well in a long time.

Almost Home

On Monday we took a flight back to Lima, had a few hours to do last minute shopping, and had our farewell dinner. For dinner we went to a restaurant in Lima that was operated by a famous Peruvian chef. As much as I liked the trip, the food overall was not my favorite and I will probably not seek our Peruvian food in the future. Corn and potatoes can only take me so far. We said our goodbyes to the group and our guide and went to bed early. We had to get up quite early for our flight out of Lima to Miami which was about 7 hours long. Luckily there were lots of movies to entertain us, so it was OK. When we got to Miami we picked up to the rental car and headed straight to Denny's for some American food! My grilled cheese sandwich was sooooo good :). We slept overnight in Fort Lauderdale and are currently sitting in the airport waiting for our flight home.
We had such a fun time. It was great to spend time with my parents and to see such a beautiful country full of history. My favorite part of the trip was Machu Picchu. Marc's favorite part was going into regular Peruvian houses to see how people lived. My mom's favorite part was the salt mines. I forgot to ask my dad what his favorite part was. This was definitely a trip of a lifetime and I highly recommend it to anyone who isn't afraid of a little altitude :).
I am looking forward to being home, sleeping in my own bed, and especially getting back to my girls.

Uros Island and more

In case you heard about the bus accident, we were not involved. That said, today we headed off to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. Long ago, the Inca were taking over every tribe they could. The people who lived around Lake Titicaca decided they didn't want to join the Inca so they took the the lake by building islands out of the reeds. They have been living the same way (basically) ever since. The modern additions are synthetic rope, solar panels, and TV. Some things you just can't live without. We were able to learn about how these people live and how they build the islands, apparently they need to be replaced about every 10 years. We also took a short ride on a boat made of reeds. It was absolutely

fascinating to visit these people and see how they live. My dad had a great time giving the kids little presents, and they loved him for it.

After the islands we headed outside of Puno to see the Sillustani Tombs. These tombs were Inca and pre-Inca burial grounds for the society elite. It was really cool to see this site. I think the weirdest thing was that in front of the most prominent tombs were smaller tombs where "volunteer guards" were buried alive to accompany the ruler into the afterlife. Spooky.

Our last stop of the day was at the home of a local family to see how they live. The home was clean, well organized and homey. I decided that the biggest difference between many of the Peruvian homes and American homes is that we live inside and they live outside.

Following our excursions we were able to get dinner at a nearby restaurant. We all had pizza, which was great. This restaurant was funny because they wanted to trick you into ordering expensive meals so you had to ask for the "tourist menu" which was a four course meal for about $7.
Today was our last day of touring.

Puno

We finally had a day where we weren't rushing around and seeing as much as possible. We left fairly early this morning and boarded a luxury bus for a 7 hour bus ride from Cusco to Puno and Lake Titicaca. Basically we were able to sleep, relax and Marc got some homework done. The only major stop we had was a site called Raqchi. This was the site of the Temple of Wiracocha. There was a pre-Inca/Inca settlement here. It was interesting to see a small village that the Inca had "conquered" or as Hector said, "Incorporated." It was cool to see the houses, granaries and temple.

After the long bus ride was finally over we explored Puno for a bit and went back to the hotel to relax. While we were at the hotel we kept hearing a cannon go off. From Marc's time spent in Spain, he suspected it was some kind of Saint's Day. When we were sufficiently hungry we went to get pizza for my mom's "birthday dinner." :)
As we were eating, there was a procession of people dressed up nice and doing a simple dance with a band playing and rattlers. It confirmed our suspicion that it was a religious celebration. After dinner we ran into Hector and he told us that everywhere around Peru there is a religious celebration going on as an excuse to get drunk and make trouble.
Tomorrow is our last full day of touring.