Good Things about our surprise visit to Australia

Well, the last two weeks have been a bit of a blur....
It still feels a bit surreal that we really did fly to Cairns, spend 3
nights in a hospital, 5 more nights at a hotel, I successfully navigated
my way around Cairns so that Calvin and I could have some fun memories
form this trip, and then we flew back to PNG. We really wanted to give
Calvin some GOOD memories of the trip, so we tried to do some fun stuff too.

Here are some positive highlights from our trip:

Calvin and I go to eat at McDonalds (ordinarily, I wouldn't count that
as a positive, but when you live in a place with no restaurants AND
you've been eating hospital food for three days, this is a definite
positive).

We go to have pizza that I didn't have to make. (Ever since our days at
Biola, our family has a tradition of pizza on Sundays. Since coming to
PNG, I've had to master the art of homemade pizza. I can make a decent
piza from scratch, but somehow it never quite compares to take out pizza.)

Calvin and I got to go to the movie theater (We saw Rio-- it was a cute
movie with some fun music.) There are no movie theatres in PNG, so this
was definitely a treat. (We even treated ourselves to movie theatre
popcorn!)

We found a fun playground in Cairns for Calvin to play at. (It would
have been a LOT more fun with his sister of a friend to play with him,
but I think he still had a good time.)

We read some good books while we were in Cairns.

We had fun shopping for presents to bring back to Chad and Sydney.

We got to have Ice Cream. (We haven't had Ice Cream here for quite some
time and even when we do have ice cream, I'm not sure PNG ice cream can
really be considered Ice Cream-- It doesn't even have milk in it. I've
made ice cream in our little ice cream maker a couple of times in the
last few months, but It was a treat to walk into the grocery store and
have a choice of flavors. We went with Cookies and Cream!)

We had yogurt too! (Yogurt is one of my favorite things to have for
breakfast. Unfortunately, we can get it here, I can make plain,
unsweetened yogurt here, but I love the creamy fruity flavored kinds you
can buy in the grocery store.)

It's kind of a sad commentary that most of this list involves food....
when you have a kid who's just been in the hospital with respiratory
issues, you can't exactly do really active things, so we didn't really
DO a whole lot once we left the hospital. Also, it just wasn't as much
fun without the rest of our family.