For the Love of Pete, We MOVED!

Tuesday our landlord called and said the new condo we are moving into would be ready that day!  YAY with a capital Y!!!  We were so excited for many reasons!  We literally packed up the tiny 1 bedroom, cleaned it spotless, and moved all of our stuff to our new apartment by the end of the day.  It was awesome.  

Now that I am out of the tiny room we lived in I can write a little about why I was so ready to get out of there!  There have been many times that I wanted to blog vent about our apartment, but literally I could not bring myself to write about it for fear I might have a mental break down just writing about what how I was feeling about the place.  Once I start writing it just all comes out, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I needed to be okay until we were out!

Imagine living in a dorm room with your 7 year old son, and a 4 month old puppy, crazy suit mates that party almost every night for a month cause that's exactly what it was like. It was so tiny we could not fully unpack because we literally had no where to put things.  We all just kept out a couple of pairs of clothes that we were wore over and over.  Wearing the same clothes wasn't that big of a deal, but if I every needed to find something we didn't leave out in the first place it was torturous trying to remember which bag it was in, plus I had to dig through it to find it leaving a mess in an already squeezed room.  It was so tiny cleaning was really pointless.  When I would clean the counter, I had to move things to the table, but if I moved things to the flimsy plastic table, MP would would jump up and grab something running off with it.  It was like a cartoon and I kept feeling like I was a little girl stuck in one of those glass mirrors rooms and every time I tried to turn around I just ran into a wall because it was tiny!!

Then there were our neighbors upstairs.  All 3 were crazy single alcoholic males that slept until 3pm everyday so had no consideration for anyone else at 3am.  One of the lovely individuals also had a dog that barked excessively all night, which they never noticed cause they were so drunk.  Occasionally the awesome owner would get sick of it and yell the most obscene names (ones I wish to not share because they were so offensive) at that dog.   We all slept with ear plugs but it didn't drowned out the noise enough.  The dog owner also never picked up his dogs poop, left their trash out on the porch where of course Molly Paws and the other dogs tore into it, and never picked it up.  It was seriously like living next door to a 12 year old boy who was on his own with a pre-teen attitude, he is what I call an awful human being!  Their crazy loudness paired with the fact we lived on a main street in Jaco with taxi's and trucks going by all night honking all the time (seriously everyone honks their horns here all the time, it's a bit much for me, it's like a wave or smile, everyone does it just to say hi, or get out of the way, or hey I'm coming up behind you, or hey I think your hot, or hey I'm mad at you for pulling out in front of me, or hey your going to slow, or hey I want to keep you up all night, whatever the reason I'm still getting used to every honking all the spankin time.  I'd like to pull a prank on the whole town and unhook all the honking devices in every car.  That would show them!  If only Dash was real from the Incredibles and could run me around the town all night slashing honking wires!!!  Okay this tangent is over!)!  Seriously though with all this commotion at the apartments Jeff and I averaged about 5-6 hours of sleep a night.  If you know me, you know that is entirely not enough for even one night much less a whole stinkin month!  It also took it's toll on G, he never got his full 11 hours of sleep which certainly added to the awesome state of emotionally healthy persons in our house, cause he is just like me when it comes to sleep!  Needless to say sleep deprived Swansons are not that fun, in fact we are down right miserable!

I am also an introvert.  Which was one of the reasons I hated dorm life in college!  I was so excited when Jeff and I got married, and I could only live with one person!  He learned quickly that occasionally often he should just get out of the house and let me be, it was awesome, he was awesome for recognizing that.  So even though I LOVE Kathia and the kids who lived downstairs, I never had a day  hour to myself without someone wanting to play, hang out, or Kathia and Jeff getting together for work.  I literally felt like my head was going to explode.  Not because of them, like I said I love them dearly, but because I need space!  I need space from own dear husband, and little boy, much less anyone else in life!  In the full month I was there I was literally was not alone once!  My emotions were going bonkers and I was completely drained every day.  Not a good combination for starting to homeschool, having a puppy, and starting a new life somewhere!  There were days I was on the war path or as G would state it "my bucket is completely dry and dusty"!  I'm so sorry Jeff and G!

Good news is here though!  Our new place is just awesome!  We love it!  It's a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo with 3 other condos in the complex.  There are 2 other families with kids, and 1 single lady that works.  We have slept a full 8 hours of sleep every night since we moved in.  G is back to a normal bed time of 8 and sleeps all night until 7am when Molly Paws drags us all out of bed.  We are much happier and I cry much less :)  Also even though we have met our neighbors, all the kids are school age so during the day everyone is at school or at work.  G and I spend the day doing school, swimming, hanging out, being quiet, you know all the things that introverts do :)

Now there are of course little things that aren't perfect in our new place.  We found out the 2nd day we were here that we didn't have any forks...this was after I had made spaghetti (with salsa instead of tomato sauce, whoops!  Good thing we miss the NM spice in life, we actually liked it) which we ate with spoons and our hands.  The little 80 year old abuela that lives down stairs with her daughter and grandson is not a fan of Molly, but we are winning her over with baked goods and bringing her dogs treats :)  At least that's our evil plan!  It's also hot!  Electricity is 3x the price of electricity in the States.  So if we were to leave the 2 units on all day we would pay about $600 a month in electricity!! Yikes, obviously we don't want to do that, so everyday we open all the doors and windows and hope for a breeze.  Most days we do get a nice off shore breeze so we sweat, but the breeze cools us off.  We only run the AC in our room at night so we can sleep.  G doesn't have a unit in his room so we got him a fan that we run at night.  Overall it's not to bad, but I'm still getting used to being hot all the time with sweat dripping down my back no matter what!

Another good thing about our new place is G has friends in the complex and right across the street.  The down stairs neighbor has an 8 year old named Randoll.  He and G hit it off the first night, they both love boxing and were boxing down in the court yard, it was a friendly fight!  Randoll speaks English but is still learning so it's good for G to be around him, we keep telling him to only speak to us in Spanish in hopes that we continue to pick it up.  He is a great kid and G are at the same level so it's fun for them to play.  We go swimming and usually IronMan and Hawk Eye are in the pool with me saving people from bad guys, occasionally Hulk, BatMan, and Spiderman show up...it's quite entertaining :)  He also loves Molly and says with his really cute accent every time he sees Molly Paws "Oh everyone loves Molly, she is such a good girl", we are hoping his love for MP rubbs off on abuelita :)  Across the street is the pastor of the church we have been going to and he has 3 boys, and right next to him is the pastor of the Spanish speaking sister church with 2 more boys.  We have never lived in a neighborhood that G had buddies so close.  So it's been really fun to just walk across the street and have friends!  The pastor took G with him and his 2 older boys to a circus/juggler act on Saturday night and Jeff and I went out on a date, it was so awesome!  It feels like we are building a community of friend which is awesome, but I'm especially so glad we have met kids Gentry's age every step of the way cause it has made his transition so much easier.

This was G and Randoll the first night, Randoll showed us all the in's and out's of our new condo :) 

They have a lot of fun together :)

Our back yard view.

This is the kitchen and island that G and I use for school.

This is our front door and if you look closely you can see Tigger the cat who also loves Molly and comes and sits right outside the glass door when Molly is sitting inside, it's so funny

We have 2 hammocks on the back porch, G likes doing homework in the big one. 

G's room is on the front of the complex and this is his view from his window. 

G took this picture of our pool.  You can see too much but G loves that it has a waterfall :)