Since the debut of Jackson’s picture in his bumbo chair many of you have shared your concern with the recent warnings that have been released about bumbo’s. We promise to be cautious and to be aware of the warnings. It appears that the primary concern is children falling and hitting their head when placed in the bumbo on an elevated surface. We will say that many of you might not be aware that there are also warnings that are yet to be released that warn against wearing a bumbo on your head. The consequences are not yet known but follow up research is being conducted.

Here is the link to the news story …and below is a picture from the private research we have conducted in recent months on an unsuspecting individual.

Jackson has recovered from his first Bogota cold and is loving life. He rolled over a couple of weeks ago and that continues to be one of his main focuses in life. He is also starting to try to imitate faces and gets very excited when daddy comes home from work. Jackson had his well-checks this week at both the Embassy health unit and the local pediatrician. He is strong and healthy and both doctors commented on what a happy baby he is.  One doctor commented in response to Jackson being so long that “someone’s gotta be on that part of the graph”. Jackson was scoring at 4 months or so on the Denver Developmental Scales which made his mommy proud.  All that “indirect” speech and developmental therapy is paying off!

This week we tried his new Bumbo chair.  I have included the picture since it is one of our favorites! He isn’t quite coordinated enough to really use the bumbo but we enjoyed trying it.

You can also see from his shirt that we entered the drooling phase!! Everyday it seems something new comes along. Thank goodness T. Berry Brazelton warns us as it’s coming.

Most people in Bogota don’t have a car, so taxis are prevalent. And thankfully quite cheap. Because we don’t have our car yet and probably won’t for several more weeks.

While taxis are everywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean we can take them. It’s our embassy’s policy that no employee or family member can hail a cab from the street. The reason for that is because it’s common for taxi driver’s to take Americans to all the ATMs in town and have them take out as much money as possible and then leave them on the curb with only a few bucks to get home. So what that means for us is anytime we want to go somewhere, we have to call a cab company. They find us a cab and give us the cab’s license plate number and a “code.” When the cab arrives, you tell the driver your code who radio’s his boss and the boss confirms it. That way if something happens to you, they know the driver who is responsible.

All of that sounds fine and good, but not only do you have to call when you leave your house, but you have to call when you want to come home. And the cabs don’t like passengers calling from cell phones because they know you could take another cab at a moment’s notice. So you have to ask your waiter, or store manager, or anyone else to call you a cab.

The most difficult part is when it rains. And it has rained here every day since we arrived. When it rains, the cabs have plenty of business and aren’t going to drive across town, skipping plenty of paying customers to pick you up.

Which leads me into a story from Friday night. We called a cab, which came promptly, even though it was raining. Went to dinner. Once dinner was over, we asked our waiter to call us a cab. 15 minutes later, no cab. So we asked them to call again. No cab. We talked to one of the valet parking guys, who “knew” people. We were promised a cab would come in 10 minutes. No cab. All the while, empty cabs are driving right past us and it’s raining. In the end, we waited for over an hour.

Speaking of modes of transportation, we saw the following outside our apartment on Saturday. Parking a horse on the street is very dangerous and quite a site to see. No wonder there are near accidents outside our apartment every single day. It was obvious they weren’t in the short-term parking because the owner left his steed plenty of grass.

By Seth

I guess when you live in a 3rd-world country, every day is exciting when compared to the US.  Bogota is a great city and very cosmopolitan.  If you read the NY Times article in the previous post, you know that Bogota has great restaurants, world-class art, etc.  But in so many ways, you can tell that Bogota is different.

Today was an eventful day for the Kolb family.  Let me set the scene by saying we live by a relatively busy road where cars are always speeding, passing each other, and blocking oncoming traffic because they were trying to pass but couldn’t.  Kristen says during the day that cars are always honking, sirens are going off, etc.  And we have picture windows in every room, so we have a bird’s-eye view of several blocks.  I got up this morning and was out in the kitchen getting breakfast when I heard a screach, yelp, and thump.  I hadn’t really ever heard any of those sounds in combination, so I looked out the window and saw a taxi in the middle of the road and a man crumpled on the ground.  Apparently, the taxi hit a pedestrian trying to cross the street.  So I ran and woke Kristen up and by the time we g0t back, we saw several people around the man who eventually got up and sat on the curb.  Several minutes later the cops showed up and several minutes after that, an ambulance arrived.  They didn’t put him on a stretcher or anything, they just took him to the ambulance.  It was quite surreal and terrifying.  Mainly because we walk next to that street almost every day.  And it’s obvious that pedestrians are risk takers as are the drivers.  We are definitely cautious when we’re walking and crossing streets, but this gave us a horrible reminder to always look both ways, at least twice.

Today we also got our air shipment (which was supposed to have come earlier this week…half of it arrived on Tues. and for a while we thought that Jackson’s 2 boxes had been “lost” in customs), which had a lot of our immediate necessities (that we couldn’t fit in our 12 pieces of luggage).   The only two things that were broken were two pampered chef stoneware baking pans that Kristen uses almost everyday. We aren’t quite sure how very fragile things made it just fine and two very sturdy pans were broken into a zillion pieces.

We also now have cell phones, internet, and today we got DirecTV (which was supposed to have been installed yesterday) with some American programming.  We honestly haven’t seen any TV since we watched the season premiere of The Office on September 27th.    3 full weeks without TV! We are holding our breath for Vonage which should be up and running sometime next week.

Really all we’re still waiting on is about 5,000 lbs of our other stuff, which we haven’t seen since Christmas of last year.  Oh, and our pillows finally came in the mail!  We forgot to put them in our air shipment, so our necks have been paying the price because of the flat pillows.

So, that’s a day in our life!

-Seth