sunrise walk

Well, still no internet in our house.  Maybe tomorrow?  Eventually I'd like to turn this blog back into more of a steady conversation instead of the sporadic one-sided posts that I've come up with in haste recently.  Until then, here are some more photos... and these are fresh from this morning!

I realized today, as Lena began murmuring in the room next door around 6:30am, that up until this point in my life I have been a big sunset person.  Elliott and I loved sunsets from our little studio on Capitol Hill; we took tons of pictures of the sun setting behind the Capitol Dome in the months after we were married.  We went on long walks at sunset and watched the colors change from the National Mall.

Now, however, two things have happened.  1) Our windows face east, not west, and 2) Lena gets up with the sunrise.   This morning, when she awoke as dawn broke over the hills, Elliott jumped up to get her and brought her to our bed for some snuggles.  At that point we both turned our attention to the windows and the rising sun.  So beautiful coming up from the Mediterranean!  Elliott took a few pictures as it crested the hills.

The aforementioned snuggles that happened as the photographer was hard at work:

A lovely view of Mt Etna from our kitchen window:

After awhile, Elliott said sheepishly, "I kinda feel like... going on a walk."

[Note: For those who do not know Elliott personally, Elliott pretty much always feels like going on a walk.]

I was definitely game this morning, though.  It was only 7:30 and the morning light was calling us!  We threw on some pretty random clothes (including a hat I knit for Lena when I was 9 months pregnant and totally forgot about until now) and started off down into the valley.

A path winds down the hills.

This is a view of our town from below.  Our house is the yellow one on the farthest right side of the cliff, just on the other side of the castle tower.

Elliott right about then: Remember when you wanted to live in Italy, Becca?  And now there's our home, built into a 1,000-year-old city wall in a little Sicilian town!  Can you imagine townspeople in medieval garb, watching you as you approach, judging when you were close enough for their arrows?

Wowzers.

We reached the stream ("a river runs through it"... kinda?) in the center of the valley.

Daddy has a couple girls who love going on walks in the early morning.

We turned around to hike back up the hill toward our house.  This is a view of the old city wall from the old stone stairs that lead from the valley to the town.

And now we're almost back home!  Here's a view of our house, the hills, and a bit of the Med.

And if I turned 180 degrees, this is the view behind me.  Hello, old Norman castle tower.

And all the way home.  Time for naps and second breakfasts!

making home in Sicily

Elliott shooed me off to the library on base to run some errands, make a blog post, and generally have some alone time.  Ahhh.  So nice to be able to focus on my computer for more than 5 minutes without worrying about where little mobile Lena is off to next!

I'm so glad to finally be able to share some photos of our home in Sicily.  From chaos to... less chaos.  Here we go!

Last Wednesday (less than 24 hours after we'd flown back to Sicily), the movers brought our boxes to our new home.  We took a lunch break in our kitchen halfway through the day.  Thrilled to be moving in at last!

The movers left around 4pm, and they left everything in chaos because they needed to find all "valuable items" (of which we have... like... nothing... but still certain things had been listed).  So they unpacked and/or went through every box for us!  Where to begin?

Here's what our bedroom looked like:

And Lena's room:

Ahhh... take a break to look out the huge kitchen window at that beautiful view.

The next morning we tackled the kitchen.  Lena was an eager participant.  We have these open shelves in our new kitchen, meaning everything dangerous must be moved out of baby's reach.  She's pulling herself up and swiping stuff off shelves as quick as she can these days.

But oh... how can you resist that cuteness?

Elliott took a few photos of the view from our balcony:

Another morning in front of the kitchen window.  That's the "gentle giant" Mt Etna smoking in the background.

After a few days, Lena's room looked better!

Now to tackle all our books.  Eventually I shelved them by category and in alphabetical order.  Whew.

The washing machine is a new source of fascination.

More beautiful views from the balcony.  We're looking down on a valley and then out towards the Mediterranean.  We can hear cow bells as herds graze in the hills or watch shepherds tending their sheep.

The books are shelved, the cardboard boxes are gone, the tubs are filling up with things to put in the garage... it's beginning to look a little more like home!

a few photos from Thanksgiving

Here's a fun batch to begin with!

Before Lena's Uncle Jonathan proposed to Lena's soon-to-be Aunt Erika (!!!), he practiced his proposal for Lena.  She loved it all, including trying on the diamond ring. 

I took some photos of my first completed order for Making Room {Handmade}, a pair of knitted fingerless gloves that my mother-in-law requested for a co-worker.

Lena's pulling herself up on everything these days.  She loved climbing up onto the hearth this Thanksgiving... under careful supervision!

Meanwhile, Jonathan proposed and Erika accepted!  Their faces hurt from smiling, but they tried to smile a little more for a loooot of photos at the Garber household.  Elliott popped the cork off a bottle of champagne and we toasted to their lives together.  Congrats, you two!

They had to smile for many, many photos that evening.

That Thanksgiving weekend Jess had an inflamed tibia after running a half marathon.  She tried to stay off it... sometimes more successfully than others...

Thanksgiving Day came at last!  The table was set...

... and the guests arrived, all admiring of little Lena.

And we feasted!

The aftermath:

And the parking lot outside the house:

An after-dinner walk to work off some of those calories.  Lena is already an avid frisbee "player," and her daddy rejoices!

More to come soon!

another little update

Well, folks, still no internet in our house!  I wish I knew when that would change, but unfortunately there's some issue with the Italian phone company that would install our internet.  And so we wait.  Hopefully tomorrow I can bring my laptop onto base and upload some pictures.  Still so many good ones to share from Thanksgiving!

We've been working so hard on our house and it's really starting to look more like home.  There's lots of odds and ends and lots of photos/artwork just lying around, so the real settling in will be to organize all those little things.  Lena's adjusting well and adds so much brightness to every day.  Right now she's crawling around the library in little mini jodhpurs, a Nordic-style sweater, and little fur-lined boots.  The advantages of discovering a box of baby clothes!

I've been knitting busily for my knitting business and am ready to mail a couple big orders.  Yesterday I uncovered our Pride and Prejudice DVD (the BBC version, of course) and might have watched about 4 hours of it while knitting a very long and lovely scarf.  Photos to come of the completed projects, too!

For those of you who are still faithfully reading, thank you.  I hope to be back to regular posting very soon!

love from Sicily

Well, we're here!  Finally back in sweet Sicily, a lovely land that turned lush and green with autumnal rains in our absence.  Right now Elliott and I are in the library on base, enjoying the internet for the first time in 3 days.  Lena is crawling around as quickly as she can, smiling at the librarians and other visitors.  A couple just walked in that haven't seen her in 4 months and stopped to marvel at how much she's grown up.

Four months!  It has been 4 months since we first arrived on the island.  A month and a half in Sicily, and then two and a half months in the U.S. for Elliott's training... and now we're back at last to set up house here.

House.  Well, folks, you should see it.  It's chaos right now.  We arrived in Sicily on Tuesday, slept for 12.5 hours that night in the hotel (!), and then on Wednesday morning the movers arrived with all our boxes.  They brought everything crate by crate (7 in all) to our front door, and each crate was strapped in the back of a little pick-up truck because that was the largest size of car that could make it up the narrow streets of our Italian town to our front door.  The entire process took from 9am-4:30pm because of the long lull between when each crate was finished and when the next one arrived.  We thought we were all set at about 3pm but then realized we were missing some "valuable items."  The movers insisted we go through every box after that to find the valuable things, and we finally found them after we went through each box the third time.  Our house looks like a bomb exploded in it.  Gaaaah!  But at least we can live in this state for long, so it's highly motivating for us to get moved in quickly.

Today Elliott and I made a huge dent in organizing our kitchen (the most important room in the house, of course) and it looks so much better.  I also met up with friends for a playgroup; it's so good to see those friendly faces again and get back into the community.  We also did a massive grocery shopping trip and--

-- sorry, Lena found someone's hair clip on the library floor and was eating it.  Gross.  Rescued.

Anyway, life is up in the air right now.  We have no internet yet, which is why we're at the library at 5:45pm.  I also have no cell phone, but that should change soon, we hope.  But we can see shepherds herding sheep on the hills from our bathroom window, and we heard a distant cock crow this morning as we woke up with the sunrise streaming into our bedroom.  I can watch horses graze and Mt Etna smoke gently from my enormous kitchen window.  We really are living in Italy.  It's a dream.  It's happening!

headed back to Italy

Unbelievably, our time in the States has come to a close.  Tomorrow morning we fly back to Sicily!  I am both thrilled and miserable, realizing that all these happy days (especially those filled with family) are over.  Now we're moving back to a new community, a new home, a new culture, a new life. 

This past week has been wonderful and filled with family.  So many gatherings around dinner tables, so many games, so much conversation, so many snuggles of a beloved granddaughter/niece/daughter.  The big news around here is that the Garber family gained a sister this week... Jonathan proposed to Erika!  And tonight our little Lena was baptized at our church on Capitol Hill, a big celebration which many of our dear friends and all of our family attended.  There are so many photos to share!  But I'll leave you with one of the best photos from the weekend: an aunt and her niece, both in cozy onesies.  Quite indicative of the coziness of our Thanksgiving week.

Internet will be spotty the next few days as we travel and then set up house.  I'll share as I can.  Hopefully (... fingers crossed!) I'll be getting a new iPhone with video capabilities, so we'll see if that leads to even more fun updates from across the pond.  Sicily, we're coming home!

a day to be thankful

 

a visit to Israel with our 2-month-old daughter

This morning I woke up remembering last year.  That Thanksgiving was a difficult day in this house.  Elliott was on a one-year deployment in Egypt, I was 5 months pregnant with our little Lena, my grandmother died around 2am in Cincinnati, my entire family was with her except me, and I got up at 6:30am to get my dad's phone call about my grandmother and then went in to work a 12-hour shift in the ICU.

It was a rough Thanksgiving.  Although even then Elliott and I sought every reason to be thankful, we were very ready to pass that day by and look to the future. 

Now we're living the future, and we are together.  Waking up next to Elliott instead of thousands of miles away from him... can't ever take that for granted again!  And now there's Lena, too, our snuggle muffin and little joy.  Although the difficulties of last year will always be with us (I miss my grandmother so much, I'll never have a "newlywed year" with Elliott, etc.), God has indeed replaced a lot of our struggles with rich blessings and much joy these days.  Take none of it for granted!

Is this Thanksgiving a special one of joy, or one in the middle of a year that you're ready to see end?  Life isn't always "peachy keen," I know.  I'd love to hear about your joys and your struggles this year, knowing they often come hand in hand.