July 3 ~ Making Ourselves at Home in Letterkenny

Well, we had a pretty good night of rest after our long day of travelling. Unfortunately, Liam picked up a cold on the plane and woke up with the sniffles. Oh well....what can you do? The photo below was taken on the front stone wall in their front garden. The road in front of their house is a fast one so it's nice they have that protection for the kids.

Here's sweet baby Emma. She was born in late January. She truly is an angel baby. She was just so delightful and I really enjoyed cuddling with her whenever I could.

In the afternoon we went out to explore their town of Letterkenny. It's a lovely town with a very quaint main street, beautiful old churches, a fairly decent retail area, and a mall that is very small! It's a great place and we really enjoyed being there. It's spread over a large area and is the biggest city in County Donegal.

The kids are sitting in front of St Eunan's Cathedral. Ceara's school uses this church for their first communions, confirmations, confessions, etc. It's very beautiful. The church the family attends is very modern looking and a ways out of the centre of town.

Ceara willingly gave Nate a little lesson in lighting a candle. She also showed Nathan and I around the church and patiently explained to Nathan what a confessional box is! Nate had many questions about the church. I didn't take too many pictures as somehow it seemed disrepectful. There were people in there having a silent moment of prayer.

I love the directional signs that are all over Ireland. They are very picturesque.

Across the street from the cathedral is a Church of Ireland. It was really pretty to look at as well but we didn't go inside. Too many loud babies.

It was a beautiful day as you can see. It doesn't rain EVERYDAY in Ireland. Just most of them :)

Clodagh is a hard one to photograph. She only smiles and says 'cheese' for a moment and if you miss it, there will be no more until Miss Clodagh deems it time.

We walked down to the town square. The kids are being silly around an art sculpture here. We also stopped into their local library. It's very small and I now know that libraries all over the world smell exactly the same! Ceara let the boys chose a book to take out on her card. They have a limit since it's such a small library...I think it was 10 books.

That evening there was an amazing rainbow. We got very excited but Darryl and Sinead just shrugged their shoulders. They get to see rainbows all the time apparently!

Yum...we had the most delicious pasta dinner that night. I'll have to share the recipe sometime. Just think of lots of tomatoes, feta, garlic, green onions, olive oil......oh it was good!

We wanted to keep Liam's routine of a nightly bath. So we did! There is no hot water on demand at their house so we would boil up two kettles and bath him in a large baby bathtub. It worked perfectly. Their hot water is on an immersion system so you have to warm up the tank before you get hot water. For instance, for two people to have a shower you need to plan to turn on the immersion one hour ahead of time. It did take some getting used to but it really wasn't a hardship.

After dinner we met Sinead's Aunt Pauline who came to tea.

We found it hard to think of it being nighttime when it was still very bright out at 10:30 at night! Once again we had a late night....this was to be the story of our holidays!!!