A Million Word's Worth of India Pictures

Since I didn't get to post many pictures last time, I'll make up for it in this post! I finally got my phone on speaking terms with Blogger, so here come the pictures!

Here's our group we have here so far! Now you can associate faces with the names - Rick is on the back left and Scott is on the back right, and of course, Christina is in front with me.

 We've been doing lots and lots of this at night after the kids go to bed:

 So far Kyle is dominating on the win count. Christina won once. I have yet to win. Scott's pretty bitter about not winning yet ;)

Landon and Layla just love their new best friends. Scott, Christina, and Rick have all been amazing troopers about babysitting our kids frequently these first couple of weeks when Kyle and I had to be gone looking for our apartment, setting things up, etc.

Scott teaching Landon how to do push ups

Coloring with Rick

 I am BEYOND grateful that Christina is here. It's so nice having another girl around! She's a great opinion giver while shopping, and wonderful friend to hang out and talk with, and, bonus, we wear the same shoe size! Which doesn't happen frequently when you wear a size 10 (thanks a lot, Dad). Having her live with us has been such a blessing.

Finished shopping at a market and waiting to eat Khati rolls on the market street (safe, I promise...and delicious)

Remember that Barista pitcher of cold coffee I mentioned in my last post that Christina and I love to share? There it is in all of its cold coffee rich goodness.

 Oh, and our team also loves pancakes. Our very first home-cooked meal we had when we got the propane tank hooked up was a huge platter of made from scratch pancakes (also, my first time making pancakes from scratch! Christina and I were pretty proud of our resourcefulness bc we didn't have buttermilk, so we made it with vinegar and milk, and we also had not yet located baking soda in any stores anywhere, so we googled the answer to subsitute 3 tsps of double action baking powder per tsp of baking soda. Yep, we were feeling pretty good about our domestic skills that night).

Pancakes on pancakes on pancakes

 I haven't really taken many pictures of our flat yet, because it's still an unorganized mess missing a lot of furniture, so stay tuned for those eventually. Here are some neat pics of the views out of our window while it was monsooning though:

We conveniently moved here during monsoon season. Actually, I'm really glad we did because I LOVE rain and storms, so it was like a little gift from God to me to come to lots of rain! Most days it "monsoons" off and on throughout the day - it will POOOOOOUR down rain like crazy for 10-15 minutes, then stop for awhile, then start again a couple hours later, etc. One day it was pretty lightly raining almost all day, and there have been a couple of days of no rain, but that's the basic norm now. Although I have yet to wear the rain boots that I bought specifically to bring here!

And here are a couple of funny things about India so far:

This is our laundry detergent:

 Apparently here fighting curry and "milk tea" stains are a bigger problem than grass stains or coffee.

And this is our milk:

 The first week or two that we were here we were buying boxed milk (it comes in a box carton that's not refrigerated until you open it). However, it's much more expensive, and hard to find the brands we like, so we searched till we found a Mother Dairy supplier. Our friends in another city here swore by the Mother Dairy brand of bagged milk and promised us it was safe, so we took the bagged milk plunge. It's actually very convenient - there's a little side of the road Mother Dairy stand about a ten minute walk from our flat, so we just walk the kids over there in the evenings (getting ambushed by street children along the way who want to talk to Landon and Layla), buy our cheap milk (to get three bags of milk costs 39 rupees, which is about 75 cents), and then walk back. It's a great after dinner activity!

And here's one awesome thing about India. They sell flowers everywhere. Every market, every street corner, beautiful fresh flowers that are so CHEAP. I'm seeing a lot of fresh flowers in my future :)

Flowers from Kyle <3

House-warming flowers from Scott our first day in our flat!

Ok, that's enough for this post - I'll make a completely separate post catching up on pics of the kids!