House Photos

So I realized I haven't posted pictures of our house now that it's furnished and homey. So here it is. We love our apartment and neighborhood and it really is feeling like home.

Our bedroom. We have a 9 ft. tall wardrobe that's not in the picture. They don't have closets here, so we have to use wardrobes instead. There is a small balcony off our room.

Our living room. I couldn't get Ryan to move for the picture :)
Our dining area. Off the dining area is a nice balcony.
The bathroom. Yes, our washer and dryer are both in the bathroom.
Owen's room
The kitchen

The Seaside

Though we live just 30 minutes (on foot) from the seaside, we hadn't had the chance to spend a day at the water. Until today! We got up this morning and took a wonderful, quite walk to the seaside to enjoy the nice weather and great views. It was peaceful and quiet this morning because our country is celebrating a huge holiday called Kurban Bayram (Sacrifice Holiday). So all the businesses were closed and everyone was home with their families today. We took advantage of this day to be outside without all of the normal street noise and commotion. There is a walking path and parks all along the seaside, so Owen had a great time running around and of course throwing a million rocks into the water.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It can be hard celebrating holidays when to everyone else around you it's just another day. And of course our country does not celebrate Thanksgiving. But fortunately this year, our country is celebrating one of their biggest holidays of the year this weekend. So although they are not thanking God for their many blessings and eating turkey till they bust, there is a festive spirit in the air that made Thanksgiving Day special.

We had a great time celebrating with our friends yesterday. More than 30 of us gathered together to eat and enjoy the day. There was a ton of food and lots of Mexican Train, which makes for a perfect day in my book. Thanks to the creative women who lived her before us, we even had sweet potato casserole (made from carrots, since you can't get sweet potatoes here). It totally tastes like the real thing.
Happy Thanksgiving to our family and friends. We miss you today and love you lots!
Oh, and Happy Birthday Mom! You're the best!

Happy Birthday Ryan!

Ryan turned 31 this year. In order to properly celebrate this grand occasion we made the arduous trek to the European side to enjoy a meal at our very favorite restaurant, Chilis! We invited some friends to join us and we all piled into their car to begin the 1+ hour battle through Saturday evening traffic to get to the restaurant. Our friends have 3 young boys, so we brought a DVD player to keep the kids occupied in the car. About 45 minutes into the trip the boys started getting hungry, so we just rolled down our window and bought bananas from the banana guy standing in the middle of all the bridge traffic. Bananas? Really? At 6pm in crazy traffic? That's what we said, but it proved to be a good idea.
We made it to Chilis and enjoyed a fantastic meal. It tasted just like in the states, including the bottomless chips and salsa, which ended up being complimentary thanks to our friend Rob! Free refills are generally non-existent here, except for at Chilis, so I think Ryan drank his weight in Coke! Here are pics from the evening.



Owen and I are so blessed to have such a great daddy and husband. Our life has changed an unimaginable amount this year. Ryan has led our family in some huge steps of faith and he has trusted God through it all. There is nowhere else I'd rather be than serving our God alongside Ryan in this new place we call home.

Fun with Goldilocks and The Three Bears

Owen has started to really enjoy reading fairy tales and one of his favorites is Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This story is packed with great teaching points for preschoolers like opposites and order, so I decided to center a whole day around the book. We started with making porridge (oatmeal) and placing it in a small, medium and large bowl. We have to make our oatmeal from scratch here, so Owen really loved dumping in the sugar, cinnamon, apricots and raisins.

After breakfast Owen helped me change the sheets and make the beds (As much as I would love to, I can't spend all day playing Goldilocks, I have work to do, ha ha). After making the beds, we tried them all out and decided which one was too high at the head and which was too high at the foot and which one was just right!
For our morning snack, we made and decorated the Three Bears' Cottage out of bread, peanut butter and anything else I could find in my cupboard. I'm not sure if we had more fun decorating our houses or eating them when we were done.

It really was a fun day. I'm sure we will be acting out many other fairy tales in the days to come!

Silly

Need I say more?

The 2 year old imagination

It seems that in the past month Owen's imagination has really taken off. He really enjoys pretend play and is always ready to take a make believe adventure. This is fun for him, but I have to say that I enjoy the creativity just as much as he does. Here is some fun we've had the past few days.

We made a Little People house out of the box that Anne sent to us in the mail. The refrigerator was Daddy's contribution to the project. The next project is the swimming pool.


Owen has been really into the book Where the Wild Things Are and is always hunting for Wild Things around the house. One evening he told me that there are Wild Things in the park next to our house and that we should go "check it out". So he proceeded to dress himself for the hunt. He has his Turkcell hat that looks a bit like Max's wolf costume. He has his sunglasses to help him see in the dark. He has a fork that apparently scares the Wild Things away. And he has his Batman cape just because it's cool. When we came back from the hunt our little neighbor boy was standing in the hallway and Owen announced to him "I'm a hero".

He doesn't miss a beat

Owen woke up from his nap and immediately went to his bookshelf. Grabbing his little language picture dictionary, he informed me that he needed to read this so that he could learn how to talk to his teachers at school. He called it his "for class book".
NOTE: You'll see that Owen is no longer sitting on the floor. Yes, we finally got our couch and chair. More photos to come.

My favorite thing about this city

The Weekly Neighborhood Bazar!
Every week, vendors from all over set up tents on a designated street and sell everything from fresh produce to vacuum bags. We happened upon our neighborhood bazar last Friday night and I put it on my calendar to attend first thing Friday morning. It's just a 7 minute walk from my house and it's there every Friday of the year, rain or shine. Here is just a sampling of things that I have bought at the bazar so far.
Bananas, raisins, rugs, vacuum bags, tupperware, blankets, potato peeler, Tommy Hilfiger socks
And my favorite part of the bazar is that they love to barter! If you know me at all, you know that I love a good deal! Enough said.

First Day of School

Owen started school on Thursday. We found a great little preschool just 10 minutes walking from our house. For months we've been discussing how important it is to us for Owen to have a chance to socialize with national kids and learn the language. Since I will be going to class 3 mornings a week (I start Monday), we thought this would be a great time for Owen to go to a class of his own. So he will be going to school 3 mornings a week while I am at my language class.
Owen did great his first day. He was so excited to play with new friends and he loved all of the toys and the outside play equipment. He got a bit frustrated during the transition times because he didn't understand what they were doing next. But overall he is doing well and I'm sure he will learn to communicate quickly!
Some of his school activities include:
Ballet
Music
Art
Yoga
English (he should do well at this)
Drama

Here are some pics of his new school

I couldn't resist

I'm sure I will get in trouble for posting this picture about 13 years from now when Owen sees it, but I just couldn't resist.

What he is saying as he carefully arranges his letters and numbers... O-W-E-N, that spells Owen!

Just a super cute picture! You gotta love McDonalds happy meal toys!

Our Neighbors

I took this plate of dessert to our neighbors earlier this week. We wrote a little note (a little note that took us 30 minutes to write in a different language) with it just thanking them for welcoming us to the building and that we are excited to get to know them. Please think about them often. It is tradition in this culture to return a plate full, so we are hoping this will begin a relationship with them. We told them we would have them over as soon as we get our couch :)

My personal kapici

Every apartment has a hired doorman called the kapici. He usually lives in the basement apartment and is responsible for taking care of the daily needs of the tenants and keeping shared areas of the building clean and running. Our kapici brings us bread and collects our garbage every night. The kapici is usually pretty handy and can help with basic maintenance and repairs.
Well, I have recently discovered that I have my own personal kapici. His name is Ryan.

Here are a few examples of how Ryan has creatively jerry-rigged a few things in our apartment.


This is a picture of our shower curtain. Apparently they only make a one-size-fits-all shower curtain and you are supposed to just saw the metal rod to the desired length. The way our shower is set up, we needed to have a curtain that curved. Well, after drilling for what seemed like hours into the concrete ceiling with no success, Ryan found this lovely purple flower hook that was already on the wall in our bathroom, pulled it off and super-glued it to the ceiling to hold our shower curtain up. I was doubtful, but it's been up there for 2 weeks with no signs of falling.

In our last post, Ryan told you about the new dishwasher he bought me for our anniversary. What he failed to tell you is that when we got it and tried to slide it into it's space under the counter, it was too tall by about a centimeter. The delivery guy just looked at us and basically said, good luck with that, and walked out. So Ryan spent the next hour shaving off the wood counter with little more than a nail file, just enough to wedge the dishwater into place. Let's just say that I hope we never move because I don't think that dishwasher will ever come out.


I love my handsome kapici!

Terlik

It is customary here to keep a basket full of slippers at your door to offer your guests when they arrive, since everyone removes their shoes upon entering the house. We have quickly taken to wearing house shoes around the house all day. We even found little slippers for Owen which are the colors of the local soccer team. Here is a pic of us in our terlik.


This leads me to a story my friend was telling me yesterday. They were expecting the cable guy to come between 5 and 8pm that evening. Instead they got a call at 10:50am that he would be there in 10 minutes. My friend had just finished mopping and had left her small girly slippers near the front door so that she didn't leave marks on the wet floor. A few minutes later, the cable guy rang the doorbell and entered the house. Without even hesitating he removed his shoes and stepped directly into my friend's slippers. He proceeded to walk all over the house with his toes squeezed into her fluffy slippers and his heels hanging out the back. She said the funniest part was seeing him standing on the roof in her slippers installing the satellite dish. I so wish I could see a picture of that!