House-hunting complete.

We have a house! I just got off of the phone with the landlord to give him our decision! What a blessing that Jonathan and I both have a peace (and are relieved, actually) to rent a house for now and the one we looked at yesterday will be good for us. We would have preferred a house with 2 bathrooms but after growing up with 11 people in one household & only one bathroom for many years I know that three can survive just fine with only one! (even if it does come without a shower head or a toilet seat).

Here is a picture of the front of the house.

Right off the back porch is this big cemented in area, which will be great for Karis when we get her a bicycle or when other kiddos come over to play.

And the side yard even has grass. This is a huge bonus and a not-so-common thing to find in a rental house here (out of the 6 families who just moved here I think we're the only ones with a decent yard like this).

Ok, one more benefit that I am so excited about....are you ready? drum roll please....(you're probably already looking at the picture so that there's no suspense here, oh well).

Kitchen cabinets! Wahoo!!

Not enough cabinets to fit our food and dishes but this definitely helps. If we had rented a house without any cabinets I think we would have been using cardboard boxes for a while. I am so thankful about this!!!

Tomorrow Karis and I will head over to the other city about an hour away from here where the other families moved. We need to buy transformers for the house since everything we own is 110 volts and everything here is 220! I am also going to try and find a bicycle with a seat on the back so that Karis and I can do whatever we need to in town. We can walk for now but a bicycle will save so much time (and energy...ha!).

I am just a tad concerned about my big left toe (no, I'm not kidding!). First I need to explain that here in Brazil it is very important to have clean and tidy toes (maybe because we always wear sandals here?). It is rather repulsive to Brazilians when we Americans show up with our haggly ol' toe-nails. So even though I don't like to spend the time nor the money (it's really cheap, actually) I decided I better get a pedicure before traveling by plane and bus. I always wondered why some other ladies were so fussy and voiced concern about getting an infection. Well, yeah...I think my big left toe is infected! The girl who did my pedicure was pretty young and honestly it was a tad painful when she was cutting/digging around my nails. However I didn't think much of it 'til a few days ago when I realize how sore they still were. My right toe is getting better but my left one is continuing grow more red and swollen. It really isn't that bad now but I am really praying that it gets better! I do NOT want to have to go to the Dr. and have my toe cut open and cleaned out. eh, no thank you. And if you happen to be thinking "She deserves it!" please know that it was in respect to the culture that I decided to have a pedicure. Really:-)