28 months 13 days

Day 865. Last night I headed to bed at 1 am, to a kid-free bed. It wasn't long before Tammy climbed into bed with us. Emmy waited until 6 am, before he came and never fell asleep. By 6:30 I got up, as they were already up, and then the doorbell rang already. It was Paul. I had all the paperwork ready for him to take to immigration for our visa extensions. But I thought I had thrown away the original entry visas that I had discovered were not in our passports last night, so Paul left with the photocopies.

I started making their food, and we sat down to eat. After breakfast I cleaned them up and dressed them, and we went to the living room to read the Bible. Then I thought I'd look through my carry-on luggage if the visas weren't there somewhere, and in fact I found them! I let Paul know, and he said he was coming back for them. He had already talked to the director, together with his brother. The low-level worker had told him that they are not issuing two-year visas any more, but the director was so kind to overrule that and allow the two-year-visa for the four of us. As an American, Randy gets a 5-year-visa anyway, and his only costs $100, while we pay $1000 each for 2 years, so it costs us $4400 in total!!! Another problem was that our last wire transfer had not arrived yet, and so we had no way of producing that kind of cash today. Thankfully we had the director's favor who allowed us to bring the second half of the money on Monday.

Then Paul called again. Margit also needed her visa put into her passport, and they needed passport pictures for that, so I had to take Margit's picture and send it to Paul, who then went to a photo guy on the street to get it printed out as a passport picture. Margit had just arrived at our house, and the kids were eager to put their shoes on and go outside to see the animals. That gave me a few minutes of peace to work, as they had already come to me quite a bit before that.

Around 11:15 I went to the kitchen to start cooking. Sammy was cranky, and so I took him with me and put him into the baby seat right next to me. Yesterday I heard him say "ja" (yes) for the first time; so far he'd only said no. Just before noon we sat down to eat - sweet potatoes, beef, and then watermelon and yogurt. Then I took them to the bathtub to clean them up, we dressed them and put them to bed for a nap. It was already close to 1 pm today.  As Randy would say, they "monkeyed" around for a while. Emmy fell asleep at 1:15, and I don't know what was going on with Tammy. She simply would not go to sleep. I finally got up to work, and she was STILL awake and playing all by herself. It was 2:15 before she finally fell asleep. Emmy already woke up at 2:30, and I was unable to get him to keep sleeping, as he insisted on going to his Daddy. I thought he'd continue sleeping on his chest, but he didn't.

It was 3 pm, when Sammy woke up, and I took him to Randy. At 3:15 Tammy also woke up. She sat in my lap for a few minutes before she left to rejoin the others in the living room. I kept working all afternoon, with

the kids coming and going, and Sammy also being with me at times. At 5:30 I went to the kitchen to start getting dinner ready, and 15 minutes later we sat down to eat. Emmy ate a lot of the omelet tonight, and Tammy leftover sweet potatoes from lunch. They pretty much ignored the bread, but had already had bread before we sat down to eat. They also ate watermelon and pineapple and some yogurt.

Then I took them to the bathtub, where they were having fun, before getting them ready for bed. By 7 pm they were all in bed. And all three needed time to fall asleep. Emmy was first at 7:45, and the other two fell asleep around 8 pm.

I got up from our bed just before then and went to get my food. After eating I continued working until the internet stopped working at 9:30 pm. It looks like the provider is having issues, and I hope they can resolve them soon. There's way too much I cannot do without internet, plus I don't like being cut off from the outside world. I might just have to go to bed earlier tonight.