Almost the end...

 "Life is a journey, not a destination."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

     This part of the journey is almost over! I have exactly 30 days left with the family and then I am off for 2 months of traveling! 

I am very excited to start my travels but its also a bit sad.  I've made some good friends and have enjoyed seeing these boys grow these past 5 months!  This is a photo of my dropping one of my friends, Holly, off at the airport.  It was so cute because my au pair kids and my other friend's au pair kids have become best friends and wanted to hold each other's hands in the parking lot. 

 I have completely given up trying to keep this kid clean when we go to parks.  It is an impossible task.  Its not that he's eating the dirt and sand, its just that he drops his food in it and then eats it.  Oh, and falls over a lot! Hey, at least he's cute dirty or clean.

I drive around to put the boys to sleep at nap time and every day I am blown away by the view!

It was fun having Easter festivities with little ones! Malakye had an Easter egg hunt and loved eating all the chocolate.  They even had cute bunny ears courtesy of an Easter package sent by my mom. 

 Malakye went from barely speaking at all when I came, to being a perfect parrot.  Its also super cute because now he is making his own phrases.  When two things match he says its same same.  One day he got super excited because he was same same with me.

 I've now reached mom level after 5 months with these kids.  This was Baxter reaching under the door of the bathroom.  There is never a quiet moment of peace unless they are asleep or not in the house.

I realized I didn't really have many photos of the boys as on our usual days I'm too busy running after them to take pictures.  One day they were both dressed cutely and still clean, so I bribed Malakye to smile nicely for a photo!  

 The area I live in is a beautiful desert, but there aren't many sites in a short driving distance.  Going north, there is a city 2 hours away and then the next one is 8 hours away.  Going south you won't hit a city until 5 hours out.  The Indian Ocean is to the East, and there aren't any roads to the West as there is literally nothing there but desert, or so we thought.  Last weekend, some friends and I decided to explore Millstream-Chichester National Park.  You can only get there with a 4 wheel drive vehicle because its only accessible by dirt roads.  It was the weirdest thing to suddenly be surrounded by water in the middle of the desert.  This photo is taken at a place called Python Pool.  Its a beautiful natural pool, after rains there is a waterfall right in the middle of the rock formation.

This is what the normal view around this area is, large arid hills.  These hills are called breakaways and the tops are where the land used to be but has eroded away.  

The picture above is the normal landscape of this area, but slowly as we kept driving more and more trees appeared until we were actually in the middle of a forest! I never though I would miss seeing large reserves of fresh water, but I do! It was so exciting to see a whole river and be able to swim in it! 

 How weird is it that just 2 hours away from the desert area I live in, is actually a place that has enough water to form a marsh? Apparently all of this water comes from an underground aquifer that also supplies the whole region of the country with fresh water.  

     It was very nice to get away for a weekend, and really nice to camp again.  The next month is going to go so quickly! Next week, one set of grandparents is going to come and its also Baxter's 1st birthday.  The following week, my replacement comes! So she will hang out with me and the boys for about 2.5 weeks to see what we do every week.  The final week of May is going to be really interesting as the grandparents will be back to celebrate Malakye's 3rd birthday and that will bring me to my last day, May 31st.  I've got everything booked and ready for my travels and cannot wait to begin! Until then I'm stressing over setting things up for my 1st semester as a graduate student at UW-Milwaukee! Hopefully everything will fall into place before I leave here, so I can enjoy every minute of my travels before I move onto my next adventure!