home and back home again

We start by apologizing to those of you that check our blogsite and have been bored for the past two months by the lack of updates. We left for Manitoba July 4th and returned August 7th. We returned home to a broken computer and no internet. Apparently our apartment was the crashing pad for Escuela Caribe while we were gone.
Of course when we were home for vacation everyone asks, "how's the Dominican?" and when we got back here everyone asks, "how was vacation?". How do you answer those questions other than "good". It was a weird feeling being back "home", it felt so normal to be back in Manitoba. But, after a month, it felt nice to be able to go back "home" too. I (Jill) was wondering how I'd feel leaving our homeland to return to the DR. I knew by the fact that I didn't cry when landing in Santiago for our second year that I'd be okay. The staff and students were both very happy to see us back, we knew we were missed.
Being back in Manitoba for only a month was exhausting, refreshing, busy, relaxing, enjoyable, all of the above. The first week was spent seeing as many people in as little time as we could and coming up with creative ways of spreading our baby news. Of course our family and friends were more than thrilled that we were finally reproducing. We needed to keep up with all the babies that were born while we've been gone this last year. It was great also seeing our new niece and nephew and friends kids.
We were able to do lots of camping, we miss fresh Manitoba lakes so much! We spent a week at Lake William with my mom's side of the family, a weekend at Falcon with Terry's family. We were also lucky enough to get to Falcon Lake Trails resort to spend a night with John, Lisa-Joy and Mekhi at their cabin. We also saw lots of southern Manitoba as we travelled the triangle of Winnipeg, Winkler and Killarney a few times to see Terry's family. The rest of our time was spent in Winnipeg, visiting family and friends, and frequenting favourite restaurants. We tried to waste as little time as possible doing errands but I guess that's inevitable when you're returning for another year to a third world country, especially with a baby on it's way. I stocked up on baby supplies and Terry stocked up on Dr. Pepper!
Once back to school, we had a few days to prepare before the students came back to class. Terry's doing mostly what he did last year and unfortunately, so am I. I've been trying to go part-time since we got here but the gods must be against me. We are terribly under-staffed right now and so I agreed to hang on for about 5 more weeks until we can get new staff trained and then I can resume my dream of part-time. My plan is to volunteer on Monday and Thursday afternoons at a Kids Alive center in town, it's a sponsorship program like Compassion or World Vision. They supplement the kids school with extra programs, give them lunch, uniforms, medical care etc. I'm not sure what I'll be doing, whatever they need help with.
An exciting possibility for us right now is that we may be moving into an actual house in town. Right now we really like our apartment but it's on the outside of town and really noisy. It also keeps us from the Dominican community experience. We'd both really like to have a yard of our own, however small, and a front door. This house we're looking at is small with a tiny gravelling yard, but has potential. The enticing part is that we are smack dab in the middle of a neighbourhood and were already invited up to our neighbours house for coffee when we went to look at it. It would speed along our Spanish learning very quickly. If we do take it we would probably move in the two weeks. It would be ideal for me when I'm home with Terry Jr. to be able to walk to town, it's about 5 minutes from the centre park.
Here's some pictures of our trip home this summer. I'll try to post some pregnancy pictures soon as my belly seems to be stretching almost daily.