Fish at Hol Chan Dive

Dolphins off the Belizean coast

Our BATSUB friends flying over the Blue Hole (famous Belizean dive site)

For all my friends who haven't made it to Belize yet (that's most of you).....get down here!!!! Come and sit on the beach with us.

It's great to know some people of the British Army in Belize. They take the best pictures from their helicopter! And Lucas loves it when they fly over and wave at him.

Testing, testing, one, two

Hmmm, interesting…..you can now write and upload blogs straight from Microsoft Word. This is my test posting, so if it happens to look weird, it’s because I’m experimenting.

Anyway, all is well here. My belly is slowly growing (running out of clothes to wear already). We finished tiling around the pool, making the place look even more beautiful. And we’ve had some lovely guests staying with us lately, which has been good fun. Everything is just very pleasant again.

Thank God we’re over that boring period, the one where there were no guests and we were crawling up the walls. Actually, saying that, we have another period like that to get through still, the month of October. That’s a very quiet month here with regards to tourism. So funny, everyone in Belize suffers from the same boredom and disillusionment in the slow season. Lots of people put their businesses up for sale at that time of year only to resume with new enthusiasm when the next high season arrives (and then you don’t hear them mention anything about selling up until they’re in the next slow season again)

Oh by the way, Lucas has been a terror this last week. I don’t know what’s happened. He has gone from being such a lovely boy to being plain horrible (not all the time, of course). According to the local women, it’s because he feels that something is changing. They say that a first child always plays up when the mother gets pregnant again. I always assumed that that kind of behavior wouldn’t start until the baby was here. But according to the locals, things actually start getting better again once the new baby has arrived. That’s when the first child accepts the new situation, they say. I’m not sure what to believe. I just hope that I can hold on to my sanity through it all.

Little boy growing up

Lucas seems to spending less & less time indoor these days. He is becoming so independent, it's crazy. Basically, we have a big pile of sand outside of our house that he plays on all the time and his best friend's house is right at the edge of our property. So Lucas and all his friends move between our house, the sandpit and next door's house all day. I am no longer "allowed" to come with him. All I get asked to do is walk him up & down our stairs (we agreed that someone always has to hold his hand on the stairs and he is sticking to that perfectly)

Here in Belize, kids of all ages play together & they all look after each other. So there may be kids aged 9 or 10 playing with 4 & 5 year olds and this group will also be wheeling a stroller around with an infant in it. It's not something we're used to in Europe, but I find it quite wonderful anyhow. Of course, we don't have to deal with any car traffic here and it's unusual to encounter any strangers where we live. We're in quite a protected little community.

Still, I do worry a bit. But I guess this is just how life is here & I wouldn't want Lucas to grow up separated from all the local children. And he is already amazingly good at judging what he is and isn't capable of. So he doesn't seem to get into too many crazy things.

Oh, as far as the pregnancy goes....I am getting a bit better now. Today is a good day, yesterday was another awful one. I felt so bad I couldn't even stand up under the shower, I had to sit on the floor as I was washing my hair. But overall I am getting better. Just waiting to "start glowing" now (don't they say pregnant women start glowing once they are past their first trimester?)

This is how Lucas looks after playing outside every day...covered from head to toe in sand. Here he is with one of his best buddies "Jimmy" who obviously loves playing in the sand as much as Lucas does. Those raskals.

Mosquito coast

Well, San Pedro was a nice break apart from the fact that it was full of mosquitoes. I mean, it was insane. There were so many mosquitoes that Lucas kept thinking that he stepped on a nest of fire ants. The poor little man had so many bites. The people of San Pedro said that they had never seen so many mosquitoes on the island. There literally were swarms of them, it was horrible. Anyway, the government finally sent one of the spraying trucks (apparently there are only two of those for the whole country). Once the island had been sprayed it all became a lot more bearable.

What else has happened? Oh, I handed out most of the school books. I only have a few more to buy.

And we've booked our flights to Rochester, NY. We are taking Lucas there in September for an eye operation. He has ptosis, which means that one of the eyelid muscles doesn't function properly. The eyelid muscle will be shortened a little, just enough to open up that eye. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's something we'd have to do sooner or later. We were actually hoping that the eye would open up by itself over time, but there has been no improvement whatsoever since he was an infant. And the nice thing is that we know the medical team in Rochester. They came down to Belize a while ago and we all became good friends. So we know that we're in good hands there.

Oh, Lucas made me laugh yesterday....he looked up my nostril and shouted "Hello, anybody there?" I told him that there was nobody up my nose. He looked up my nostril again and said "Mum, what is it? Is it some kind of jungle in there?"