Well, this is my first post on my new blog which was inspired by my friend Danielle's blog. For starters, it took me forever and a day to come up with a URL nobody else had. So the address was taken as a last ditch effort. skn does NOT stand for skin. Rather, it is an abbreviation for St. Kitts-Nevis, which is where we are living at the moment. We are actually on Nevis, a small island that is only 36 square miles. We have been here since June 18. Brian has actually been here since January and was on St. Kitts from August through December 2004. He is a student professor at the medical school so the kids and I will be spending the next few summers here. During the school year Brian is going to ship us home to Illinois. He refuses on even entertaining the idea that we just move.





Nevis is in the leeward islands and is so small it is sometimes not even on the map! St. Kitts, Nevis' sister island, is only a few miles across the "narrows" as the small strait is called. We have been adventuring out more and more as we become more comfortable with our surrounding, which are A LOT different than the good old USA. The kids and I spend a lot of our time on the beach, where the sea breeze is much cooler than just sitting around the apartment. Last weekend we actually went to the Atlantic side We walked down to the ocean near the Lime Kiln and New River Estate, which is one of the old plantations where sugar was refined. That's the kids on the old sugar press. It's too bad there hasn't been more of an effort to preserve these sites, but that's how things are here I guess - leave it rustic. We also took a small hike through the rain forest at Golden Rock Plantation, which is now a beautiful inn. There were a lot of mangoes down though, so the hike was a bit slippery and stinky!