Visit with Jane and Brad

Today we visited a long-life family friend, Jane, who used to live in Costa Rica, her husband Brad and their grandson Federico..(Sasha kept trying to say his name, but ended up saying "infinirico"!! - don't ask me how she came up with that!)
It was so nice to see Jane after a long time and to meet Brad.

Here we are in the living room of their beautiful, cozy home:




The rest are, oddly enough, of Sasha.



Here helping Daddy make pancakes:




Spaced out:




Here she was singing at the top of her lungs:







We didn't bring her tricycle, but we met a beautiful family, Sonja and Jody, who live in our apartment complex and who have a little girl Sasha's age, Xena. She can't ride her trike yet, so she lent it to Sasha:

We visited James' aunt Adrienne and uncle Jan today. We spent the afternoon with them in their beautiful home and had a delicious BBQ lunch. Adrienne's cousin Alan and his wife Edie joined us as well. We had a great time, and hope to see more of them while we're in Houston!





We went to the zoo yesterday. The Houston zoo is huge. We were there all afternoon and didn't even see all the animals.




We saw tarantulas:



Grizzly Bears:



An amazing-looking Crocodile:



Giraffe:



Pythons...There was a caption about this particular type of python that had eaten a 200-pound deer, including its antlers!

Sasha and her imaginary play: talking to her animals and dolls









We visited the Houston Children's Musuem:

Finally have internet!

How did we ever manage to do anything without the internet?!
We finally have it set up in our Houston apartment.
The move went well, although moving out took longer than we expected - we have so much more than we thought we did. But somehow we managed to get everything into our moving truck and, more miraculously, into our little storage unit. Now the problem will be getting the door back open..everything was so crammed in there! But we'll worry about that in three months!
For now, we're happy to be in our new apartment, and especially in the warm weather.

James has started work but won't actually get started with the real work until next week or so. For now he's just getting to know the system, the people, etc.
He'll be interpreting seismic sections of the Persian gulf to better understand its geology. He really likes the people he's working with and is learning a lot of interesting things about the geology of the Middle East.

Sasha seems to have adapted just fine. I brought along some of her favorite toys and some other familiar things for her room. We've established a great routine and it's been working really well for the three of us.

Here are some pics.

Standing in our moving truck:



Reading in the living room:



We were able to make it to the beach!








Our apartment complex has a swimming pool!