A Day in the Life

So this is LOOONG overdue, but since Jason’s hours have picked up and we are now fully settled, I have decided to give you a little taste of our everyday life here in Germany! For Jason, this means getting up most mornings at 6:30 or 7 and biking to work (what a trooper, now that it is getting colder!), although his schedule varies every week (sometimes he is home for breakfast or lunch). London and I are usually up by 7:30, make breakfast (usually fancy oatmeal with raisins, walnuts, flaxseeds, “desiccated” coconut flakes, butter, honey, and a tiny bit of milk!), get dressed, and then wash dishes and check FB and e-mail while London watches a show (usually Dora). Mid-mornings we go to the grocery store, do errands, play (reading, doing puzzles, drawing, and Legos are favorites), go to the park, clean, hang out with Meg and her girls, or a combination of the above.

I have been trying to only go to the grocery store once a week to save $$ and have been enjoying meal-planing. It is a fun challenge to spend less and still have yummy homemade meals! On grocery store days we grab our shopping bags and the stroller and head out. The biggest grocery store close to us is 3 city blocks away (about 10 minutes walking) and there are 2 smaller grocery stores within the same distance in different directions. London likes to ride in the stroller there and then on the way home we load up the stroller with our groceries and she walks/runs home. Lately she has loved crunching the leaves. This will be considerably more interesting when the snow comes. She also loves helping me “push the cart to it’s home.”

Afternoons are for lunch and naptime. Here we don’t have common appliances such as a dish washer, clothes dryer, or microwave, so while we are saving money not having these appliances, it obviously makes daily chores more time-consuming. While Londie is sleeping I clean/do laundry, study German, read, (lately rest), etc., or a combination of all of the above. When Londie wakes up (usually by 4) we play, then make dinner. Jason is home usually 3/5 weeknights (other nights he has classes) and it has been SO nice to eat our meals together around the kitchen table. In the US we were able to do that only a couple of times a week because of our busy schedules and other nights it was too tempting to eat in front of the TV after a long day.

Evenings we spend time together as a family, enjoy fellowship with people we have met, and have a once-a-week Bible study (either at our apartment or at one of the other church members’ place). Jason has also been helping the pastor out with renovations on a house they bought on the other side of town.

I love the simplicity of our life here. We have so much more time for family and I love seeing London grow and learn. I feel so blessed to be able to be home with her and give her more attention. She loves that I am not working and she also enjoys helping me cook and hang up the laundry. I am cherishing this time!

My next post is going to be about all of the things I have been learning to make myself. The groceries are obviously different than those we could get in the US and some things we have had to experiment with to come up with something similar to what we are used to.

Here are some pics!

London drew Daddy. Notice the spiky hair and beard.

At the park!

Feeding the ducks and swans at the park.

Helping Mommy bake!

New Echeverria/Hospital Adventure

So, by now most of you must already know that we have another little Echeverria on the way. What a crazy 4 days we have had!

Last Thursday I had a doctor appointment for a followup of some bleeding I had during exercise the week before. My first appointment Meg (the pastor's wife) went with me to translate and we discovered that the doctor speaks some English! (Woohoo!) Everything had been going well with the pregnancy since my first appointment. Thursday's appointment was the first appointment without Meg (who drove me in her car to the first appointment) and I was walking (pushing London in the stroller), and I discovered that I couldn't walk on the same road she drove on to get us there (more like an on-ramp to another part of the city--no sidewalk), so I had to find my own way to the doctor's office. Unfortunately, it was WAY farther away than I thought it was and it ended up taking me 45 minutes to walk there, most of the time thinking I was lost, and I was 15 minutes late despite walking as fast as I could possibly go without running. Well, that caused more bleeding so when I got to the doctor she sent me to the hospital. TOTALLY unexpected.

Meg came and got me from the doc's office and drove me to the hospital and when I got there they did another ultrasound and said that the placenta was trying to unattach (I think) and that I had to stay in the hospital for a WHOLE WEEK to be monitored and take some pills and get a shot. (I have a weird blood type that causes my blood to create anti-bodies against the baby's blood, thereby trying to destroy the baby).

It was a really stretching experience being in the hospital and not really knowing what was going on. Having done medical transcription for the last few years, it was hard not knowing all of the details, but I just had to trust the staff that they would take good care of me! I was also frustrated because I felt fine and 2 of the days I was there the nurses just came in once in the morning to take my blood pressure and temperature and just left me alone the whole rest of the day. Anyway, after 3 blood tests and another ultrasound this morning, they said that everything was fine and normal and I could go home!

THEN we had a whole fiasco with our insurance. Unfortunately, since we ended up getting this weird health insurance for foreigeners (since we couldn't get our visas without SOME kind of health insurance) the hospital said I had to pay my entire hospital bill in CASH before they would let me go home. It was over 1000 Euros. At that point I had an emotional break-down (I had held it together mostly the whole time up to that point). Thank goodness there is a wonderful lady from our church who is a doctor at the hospital in a different department who came to visit me last night and offered to come to the maternity ward and translate if I needed any help! I had to call her up 4 times today to help figure the money and discharge stuff out. We were only able to get 500 Euros today and the hospital agreed to let us pay the rest tomorrow. (David and Meg are going to loan us the rest since it takes DAYS to transfer money from our account in the US.) Now we have to work with our insurance company to be reimbursed, but we are just praying that they will do it! So far we have had a really hard time working with them. We are going to try to get different insurance.

Thankfully, in all this Meg was able to watch London for a few days so that Jason could still work (he still isn't getting enough hours to fully support us yet, so this was very important) and Meg and David also made a lot of phone calls for us trying to find out what was going on with everything.

Living in a foreign country is hard. We happen to live in the only pocket of German-speaking Europe that doesn't speak much English, so that is very stretching. Fortunately, I gained a new appreciation of how foreigeners in the US must feel and I also learned a bunch more German words and got to practice speaking a bunch (oh, the ways in which God answers our prayers!). Plus, I had a lot of time to listen to worship music, read my Bible, and just take it easy. I read 2 novels and increased my Sudoku skills.

All in all, we are feeling BLESSED that God is protecting our baby, that we have WONDERFUL family and friends supporting and loving us here in Germany and in the US, and that we are growing in ways we didn't expect.

Oh, also have to say that after ALL of this, I still don't know my due date. :) I really tried to ask. I will post it as soon as we find out.