The Living Room

So, welcome to my home!  Here is the living room where I read 25 books a day and play kitchen, play pet shop, watch "My Little Pony" in Portuguese, and "Go Diego Go!" in English, snuggle my kids, snuggle my hubby, and stay up too late reading several nights a week.  This is also where we pile together for our routine Friday night Family Movie Night.  It's also home to our one and only fireplace, and therefore our whole family gathers here on cold days. 

The electronics you see here we brought from home, but the voltage in Brazil is different, so we need a big 10"x10"x10" black box, an inverter, to change the power from 220 volts to 110.  Unfortunately, often electrical here isn't grounded, so when you touch the box, and sometimes the electronics, you get shocked.

The sofa belongs to the house, but we used a company provided furniture allowance to purchase the remainder of the furniture in this room. The recliner is a very recent addition.  DaddyHealy has been asking (begging) for it for months.  I said it'd never fit, he claimed it would.  We still had allowance money to spend.  We went back to the store, looked, talked, I explained to the saleswoman my concern, and she (smartly) suggested they bring it out for us to try for a day.  If it doesn't work, they'll come back and pick it up.  Let me just say, she earned her commission.

This is the view taken from the fireplace.  I don't know if you can tell, but there are no light fixtures.  Every room has just 2 or 3 bare bulbs hanging down.  I remember shortly after we moved here asking DaddyHealy what they have against light fixtures.  Now I don't even notice.  These are the kind of little luxuries I expect to notice when we move home. 

Obviously this looks into our dining room, and to the back right is the door to the kitchen.  On the upper left wall you can see our "split" air conditioner/heater.  Most Brazilians who have these have smaller ones in their bedrooms only.  It's uncommon to heat or cool common space.  Normally they just use it at night.  John Deere owns this unit and had it installed for us.  The units themselves are expensive, but the electric bill is what prevents most people from having them.  They are relatively efficient, but how efficient can a heat source be when there are huge gaps between your door and it's frame?

It's a good space, though.  There are already so many family memories that have been made here.  We do a lot of Go Fish! on the coffee table, which, by the way, has teething marks from baby H.  The bottom of the entertainment center has 2 drawers, one full of toys and the other full of books.  We keep books in 6 different locations in the house, but these are the ones that get read the most.