It's time.

This past week we celebrated a holiday with our Arab friends. This involved us traveling back to our former, big, modern, Arab city and a lot of visiting! It was really a great time!

On our drive down, we saw lots of people buying animals. This holiday, or Eid, celebrated the sacrifice Abraham made. And although their book doesn't say which son of Abraham it was, they believe it was the other son, Ishmael. Anyway, to celebrate, they buy an animal - a goat, a cow, a sheep - and kill it as a family, and then cook it up. They cook it in the ground using only smoke. It's so tasty!

So, we got to visit the 2 families we're the closest to and it was a wonderful time! They were all amazed at how big Lucy is. And I had fun trying to speak more Arabic with them. Although, when the older women wanted to speak to me in Swahili, I fumbled all over myself! My brain has been putting Swahili in this little box and trying hard to NOT use it, so when they wanted me to speak it - yikes!

Moving on. We also had a great time just relaxing and doing some shopping and eating out at some of our favorite restaurants! I had lots of hamburgers! (Can't really get good beef here, so I have to wait til we eat out somewhere for my beef intake!)

We were blessed to spend the week in our friends' house. They went camping, so we had the whole place to ourselves! It was such a blessing! Lucy was in her own room and we were in ours. (Makes for a much happier ALL of us when we can sleep well - and we don't sleep well all in the same room!)

The house is 2 stories. Lucy's doing great on stairs. No problems there.

She was sleeping in her pack-n-play during her nap one day and then all of the sudden, I see these little fingers holding on to the rail, coming down the stairs! She climbed OUT of the pack-n-play and came down the stairs, just like she was a big girl waking up from her nap! We didn't hear her or anything! It was WILD!

That night, I closed the door to her room cause we didn't want her doing this in the middle of the night and then getting all lost/scared downstairs in the dark. Our friends had come home that night, and the next morning, one of the girls went into the room Lucy was in and I think she didn't close the door all the way back cause when I heard Lucy and got up to get her - at 8 am - she was DOWNSTAIRS walking around and crying cause she couldn't find us! Crazy, right? (I didn't find out until later that the daughter had opened the door - so for a while, Brad and I thought that she climbed out, opened the door, and went downstairs all by herself! Sheesh!)

We came home last night after a wonderful time. We figured Lucy would be fine in her REAL baby bed. It's bigger and has taller rails. So we went to sleep as usual.

This morning, around 8, guess who walked into our room and woke us up? Yepper. Lucy. She climbed out of her baby bed with apparently no problems, and came right into our room! WOW! (She did the same after her nap today, too.)

So, remember that post a few posts ago where I said I wasn't quite ready for Lucy to be in a "real" bed... too bad if I'm not ready, cause she's ready!