Flights at last

We managed to book and pay all of our flights all the way from Helsinki to Porto Velho. The trip will take us some 43 hours (including the 5-hour bus trip to get us from Porto Velho to Jaru). It'll be interesting to see how the kids cope...

Now there'll be no visiting friends in Brasilia nor spending the day at a huge mall in São Paulo but sweating 10 hours in Manaus... I hope we'll get to see some of the town itself instead of just the smallish airport. Providing our check-in isn't too difficult we should have time to go to the centre and have a meal and a look around.

It seems our lives are all about flights but surprisingly there are other things going on too. Today we had a lovely picnic with the Sunday School kids and some mums too. We went to an open air museum in Helsinki, played some games and had some food. All the kids participated so well, no one happened to have a temper tantrum and everyone seemed to have genuinely enjoyed it. Luana was really good at walking there and back and having her nap slightly later than usual.

Tomorrow I'm off with the kids to stay at my brother's for a week. He and my sister-in-law are going on a holiday and I'll look after my nephew and niece while they're gone. The kids are already 11 and 17 but they still need someone to cook for them and just to be there for them. They also have a dog (the calmest and best behaved dog I've ever seen) and Luana will hopefully not be afraid of dogs by the end of the week...

So at the moment inmensely thankful for the fact that we finally sorted out our flights and slightly anxious about staying at my brother's with the kids.