All is well in the world again...

FROM THE SOFTER SIDE~

If you read yesterday's blog, you know that our children have arrived. Due to some last minute planning with our 'live life in the moment' child, there was only room in the hired van for seven people (both children brought friends). Consequently, I stayed home and worried all night about my entire family traveling over the Andes late at night in a van. Horrid remembrances of the kamikaze van driver we had last year kept creeping into my mind. OK, I admit that he did a good job for a driver whose feet did not reach the pedals but a worried mind is a funny thing. Only the worst case scenarios kept slideshowing through my brain. Falling boulders, slick roads, sharp curves, cows in the road, landslides...oh my God, I'm going to be widowed and childless and will have to move back to Kansas and go back to work!!!!

I finally managed to fall asleep with my cell phone tucked in my underwear (I'm deaf, remember, and I sleep like the dead. My only hope was that the vibration would wake me when that horrible call came.)

At exactly 3:23 a.m. I bolted wide awake. A few minutes later the phone rang with Clarke telling me to put on the coffee pot - they were on the outskirts of Cuenca, alive and well (how I woke up at the precise moment they hit Cuenca, I'll never know. Chalk it up as one of the maternal mysteries of life.) All I know is that Mama Bear has her cubs home safe in the den again. All is well in the world.

Yes, there are five of them sleeping on the floor. The next picture shows the REAL reason why there was no room for my new set of pots and pans!