First Day of School!

So, today was the first day of school! In order to relax a little before getting this school year started, we went to the lake yesterday with Elvis's family. We had lots of fun, and Elvis got to teach everybody how to fish! Lucky for the fish, he decided to let them stay there in their nice lake ;-) Here are some pics of our cutie pie nieces:
Daniela, the newest addition of the family:
And Camila, who was our flower girl in our wedding, all grown up now! Today was a little bit of a crazy day because they are actually building a new school building, so we have moved the whole preschool and kindergarten into a temporary house, well, temporary for at least 3 years. It has definitely been a hard task to move everything and decorate the new classrooms. Actually, they aren't quite finished yet with the temp house, but we started classes anyway! Here are some pics of my new classroom, with the murals we painted:


And some shots of the rest of the house:
And this one is for you, Mom and Dad....the annual first day of school shot!!

Peas and carrots part 2

So, tonight we went out with our friends Cady and Fabio (how many of you can say that you have been around someone named Elvis and someone named Fabio at the same time?!?!) They are lots of fun because they are another case of a gringa marrying a Salvadorean, and they got married just a couple of months after us. It also turns out that she is our pastor's daughter and she is my boss in the high school. Anyways, we went out for pizza, bowling, and dessert, and of course ran into students of ours at each and every stop (San Salvador is smaller than you think!)

So here's the story: First of all, pizza is typically really good here because it is all very homemade and yummy. we also have Pizza Hut's like on every corner which are really fancy and have an incredibly diverse menu (not like the run down, dimly lit, 80's scary Pizza Hut we had back at home!) But we went to a different pizza place tonight and were looking at the menu, and really they only had like 5 different types of pizzas you can choose from, one of them being pizza with beans on top! yucko. so we were looking for the safest option, and decided to go with a hawaiian pizza, and a mixed veggie pizza. so we asked what toppings were on the vegetable pizza, and the guy was like, "It's canned vegetables." I guess he realized the confused look on our faces since really no one eats canned vegetables here since fresh veggies are so good and cheap, and so he was like, "I'll show you the can." So i'm thinking that it must be a can of like peppers and onions and jalapenos like you see here, and the guy pulls out a can of canned green beans, peas, and carrots!!!!!! who the heck has ever heard of a green bean, pea, and carrot PIZZA?!?! i mean, it's like a chicken pot pie, but without chicken, and the pot, and on top of a pizza instead. we decided to go for the pepperoni, mushroom, and onion pizza instead, obviously. good choice.

oh, but dessert made up for the pizza confusion....cheesecake with nutella on top. whoa mama. for those of you that havent experienced nutella, its heaven in a little jar made out of chocolate mixed with hazelnut. good with bananas, crepes, anything except for olives as i have been told. do yourself a favor and just go ahead and buy it the next time you see it. hey, go ahead and smear some on a pizza too. and throw some peas and carrots on there too while youre at it and think of us!

Quaker Gap Mission Trip

So I really have a good excuse this time for not blogging in a while...we were so blessed last week to have the Quaker Gap mission trip with us!! To use their words, "The rednecks came to town!" My worlds collided... I mean, there were adults here who have known me since I was 6 months old, and youth that I remember when they were born! We stayed reallly busy...we worked in a nearby mountain town with one of our pastor friends (remember the blog about Jose Luis and his 7 kids??), and despite the suffering and struggles that his family go through, he had a burden for an even poorer part of their community. So, we worked in that community in the mornings, fixing roofs and painting houses, then in the afternoons we had a vacation bible school for the kids in that community (well we limited it to only 150 kids each day!) we did crafts, songs, Bible stories, games, and gave them a good meal everyday (probably the only food they had that day). We had a lot of fun with all the kids, even though it was tiring! we also went to several different church services during the week, where a couple of the girls from the group did an amazing job of expressing God's love without words with art. It was so neat for me to have special people from my old home come here and meet special people here in my new home. I guess the best way to describe our trip is with pictures:

We would love for you to check out more pictures: http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=233227480/a=25466295_25466295/t_=25466295

This week was also fun because it was my birthday, and I got to celebrate it with Elvis, Marty, Sara, and the whole Quaker Gap group! On monday, Elvis had called around to all the fancy chinese restaurants and took me out to the only one in town that has General Tso's chicken (my fave!) The next day, he and marty and sara fixed me an amazing crepe breakfast, and then an awesome steak, sweet potato, and greek salad dinner (a baldwin family tradition) and a homemade oreo cheesecake. yummmmmmmmm!!! Elvis surprised me with a new cabinet to go in our dining room, which he had custom made by the little Guatemalan man who has made all of our furniture so it matches great! i love it. Then, we celebrated salvadorean style with the whole team by going out to pupusas one night. now thats what im talking about- i mean, we celebrated for a week straight!!!

Peas and carrots

So, yesterday was our b-day bash, and here are a few pics as i promised!

First: Forest Gump and Jenny, with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia:

And the birthday girls (Ashley aka Jenny, Pao the Mexican wrestler, and Ruby the gypsy)And some more...

bywaters-baldwin/henriquez-baldwin extravaganza!

So, we finally made it back to El Salvador! My brother Marty and his wife Sara were waiting for us here, and we've been so busy having fun that i havent had time to blog! we've been to the beach, lake, mountains, etc etc and so i have a few photos for you here to get a glimpse of what we've been up to. This week also marked 3 years that i've been living here in El Salvador so that is reason to celebrate! Speaking of celebrating, tonight we are having a birthday party for me and my friends Ruby and Paola (we all have birthdays this coming monday or tuesday) and it's a costume party so ill definitely put up pictures of that soon. and tomorrow our mission group from Quaker Gap comes! So we are excited about that! It's gonna be a big week!

USA part 2

So, in a perfect world where there are no travel problems, Elvis and I would be in El Salvador right now with marty and sara...but alas, after waking up this morning at 3:00am to get to Raleigh in time for our early flight, they told us at the check-in counter that our flight was cancelled and we could not leave until tomorrow morning at 6:00am. they say they called us twice and left messages, but those messages mysteriously disappeared i guess. anyways, we came back to wallace this afternoon, to get a couple minutes of sleep before heading out to raleigh again tomorrow...we have to leave the house tomorrow at 2:30 am. cool. cant even say the butt crack of dawn because its not even dawn!! anyways, the good thing is that we got another day with mom and dad, and got a chick-fila biscuit out of it. =) and we got to put off goodbyes for another day.

In other news, this has been a good week in wallace/wilmington...we've spent time with the extended fam which was fun, got to catch some fish which was fun, got to have a great reunion on sunday with lindsey parker after 3 years of not seeing each other, and got to see Kate on thursday- we had a fun day of riding on the ferry to Southport and exploring that little town, with all of its July 4th festivities, which included a naturalization ceremony. i was interested to learn that 45 of the 100 people in the ceremony to be naturalized as US citizens were already US soldiers. The best part of the day was feeding the seagulls off the back of the ferry...they would go crazy and they would eat things right out of your hand if you held it up for them. remember the hitchcock movie "the birds"? pretty much like that, without the eyeball poking. but let's just say that they got full off of all the chips we were giving them, and one of them got an upset stomach...sadly it was evacuated onto dad's shoulder........

Before:

After:

More pics of the day with Kate and a short video of elvis, showing his confidence in the birds....

And some pics of our fishing trip...

And last but not least, some videos from our spontaneous dance party at granny and pah-pah's house the other night....

Dad's famous shoulder shrug is catching on...

Some intense salsa... (remember ben stiller in Along Came Polly??)

Granny showing us how shagging is done...

This is a great one of Pah-Pah showing us all up...but i cant figure out how to turn it around...help?

Ok, so we've had problems with the videos...lemme know if you can see them or not!

Hopefully the next time we write will be from El Salvador!!