Steve and Gerdine Stanley are finding that twins are hard work, but it is getting better. A little extra sleep makes a big difference. Alice and Millie are not sleeping through the night yet, but they have started sleeping up to four hours a time at night.
Steve and Gerdine no longer feel sleep deprived all the time and are starting to enjoy them a bit more. For the last two months, all their energy was used up surviving but now they are able to do more again. A smile from both Alice and Millie has been a boost and Oscar has been enjoying his role as big brother.
Currently most of Steve and Gerdine’s time is spent with caring for their children and reconnecting with supporters. Their time line is:
December 2021: move to Netherlands
February 2022: return to PNG
March 2022: return to Kovol
International travel is still so stressful and uncertain, they are glad they can wait until their girls are a little older before attempting it.
Gerdine has had some dental work, which should be completed in October, and they are happy that their Covid vaccinations are underway and they hope they will both get a second dose before they leave. One of the most stressful parts of international travel now is needing to take a Covid test 72 hours before departure. A positive test means no flying and all your plans being wrecked, so they are grateful for a vaccine which will at least take that stress away.
On a good day, Steve gets a few hours to invest on reviewing Kovol language material. He has also been tinkering with the computer they use as a server in Kovol for sharing and backing up files and serving their dictionary as a web page. After two years in PNG with hacks, tweaks and experiments it has been good for him to have time to set it up properly and create code that can automatically set things up again on a new server (for the inevitable time the tropics kills the hardware!).