Churches of Cuenca

As I have been looking through our photos from our trip to Cuenca, I realized that we had quite a few photos of some of the colonial churches we saw there. Here's a collection of some of my favorites!

Baby Bump

Everyone has been asking for a "baby bump" photo. Here it is! This was taken almost 3 weeks ago when we were in Cuenca. They say the baby bump is growing at a rate of 1/2 inch a week now, so you can imagine how big it is now! I don't even want to think about what I'll be like when December rolls around.

more photos - Inca ruins - Ingapirca

Earlier this week, I had wanted to post more photos, but ran out of time. I also decided that maybe it would be better to post the photos in groups as we saw so many interesting things while on our trip to Cuenca. So today's posting includes photos from our day trip out to Ingapirca, the Inca ruins in the southern part of Ecuador. We had a lot of fun walking, hiking, and climbing up the walls and rocks on the ruins. We were amazed at the freedom they gave us to roam around! Don't forget to click on the photos for more detail!

Cuenca

Cuenca is a city/town in the very southern part of Ecuador. We had heard so many wonderful things about this colonial city and have wanted to visit it for some time. With some friends, we made plans to visit the city over a long weekend earlier this month. We stayed in a bed and breakfast hostal right in the heart of the colonial part of town and enjoyed walking around seeing the sights which included churches, museums, a reptile zoo and even a rippling river that runs through the city. The town is known for its ceramic pottery, red-tiled roofs and filigree gold & silver jewelry. We didn't buy much but had fun window shopping. We also enjoyed eating ice cream on the large plaza in the center of the city and doing some people-watching!

One of our highlights of the trip was traveling about 2 hours out of town to some Inca ruins. The ruins didn't necessarily compare with the famous ruins in Peru, but were fascinating none-the-less. We were able to walk through the ruins (with no restrictions or roped-off areas like you would find in at a similar site in the US), sit on the walks and even climb up to the Temple of the Sun. The immense size of the stones was amazing and we wondered how they managed to put them into place.

We enjoyed our little get-away weekend knowing that soon trips like this aren't going to be possible for a while once little Baby Arteaga arrives to our home. Thanks to Janine, Richard and Paul for helping to make it a fun weekend!

Hopefully the photos in this post will give you a little taste of a colonial town in Ecuador! I have to run - but will try to post more photos tomorrow!

Baby update

We are now in week 24 of waiting for Baby Arteaga to arrive! In the past couple of weeks we have had a couple of appointments at the doctor's office. One was for the monthly checkup with the doctor who will be delivering the baby. He checked me over and all is moving along nicely and all the blood work has come back good. So we are grateful.

We also had another ultrasound (thank goodness they are relatively cheap here - $40 compared to $1,000 in the states!) and were able to see Baby Arteaga in his little house (again, we have no doubt that we are expecting a boy!). This was an extra long ultrasound with the technician checking various measurements. The technician measured his heart, his lungs, his legs and arms and tried to get a count on how many fingers he has! However, most of the time his little hands were bunched up in a fist. But we're pretty sure we saw 5 fingers on both hands. At one point it did look like he reached up and picked his nose! I hope that's not a sign of what we can expect from him as a two-year old! ha, ha! At any rate, it was reassuring to see Baby Arteaga once again and know that he is growing and developing as expected.

Thank you so much for your many emails, prayers and words of encouragement during this time! We so much appreciate everyone's interest and love and care. We are very blessed!

Pray for Ruth this week as she has a bad cold and is trying to get over it without the usual dosage of cold medicines. Santi is being a very patient and loving husband while trying trying to nurse Ruth back to good health!