Amsterdam!

October passed quickly, and before long we were headed back to the airport. Usually when we're traveling from here to the States, first we fly to somewhere in Europe, then immediately jump on another plane to fly across the ocean, then there's usually at least one more leg on the U.S. side before we actually arrive at our destination. The cool thing about our November trip was that we got to spread it all out a bit by spending a few days with some wonderful friends who live in Amsterdam. We had a blast getting to spend time with them and experience their cold, damp, green world for a few days.

We only had forty-eight hours, but we crammed them full of activity. The first morning, we drove into Haarlem and walked through the beautiful streets until we came to this building.  

This is the jewelry shop and home of the Ten Boom family, who used it to hide refugees during the Nazi invasion during WWII. Jason and I had both read Corrie Ten Boom's book The Hiding Place years ago, and it was really amazing to actually be there seeing the places we had read about. The house is now a museum, so we got to tour the whole thing.

The kids even got to crawl inside and stand in the secret room where the people were hidden.

After that, we spent some more time walking, shopping, and playing.

Playgrounds are fun on any continent!

On our second day, we took a picnic to a fun touristy spot called Zaanse Schans. It was the perfect place for us to get a good little taste of Dutch life. They had a cheese factory, lots of windmills, and a wooden shoe museum and workshop. Oh, and a big courtyard where the kids could play with traditional Dutch toys. They loved that, of course.

Just her size, don't you think?

They also had this fun little petting area!

Here's me with my sweet friend Ashlie. I love this girl!

Sawyer and Annabelle had a blast together!

I had my kids pose with this sign because I thought it was hilarious. Exactly what are they trying to tell us? 

"No Drowning"? 

"Watch Out for People Dancing in the Water"? 

"If You Fall In, Wave Your Arms and Scream Like This"? 

Seriously, I just couldn't quite figure it out. Little did I know that before the end of the day one of my own offspring would be looking a whole lot like that crazy guy on the sign.

Yes, Little Bit here got just a little too close to one of the canals, and somehow ended up clinging to the side with water up to her waist. Fortunately, her friend Elijah shared his extra change of clothes, so she didn't have the spend the day wet and freezing. Just a few minutes later, she was warm and dry and happily enjoying her PB & J.

Check back tomorrow for pics from the end of our time in Amsterdam, and the story of why Ashlie might never let Jason come visit again!

Intermission

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post to bring you this video of Sarah Claire "reading" one of her favorite bedtime books. We are no longer allowed to read it to her because she likes to read it to us instead. We think it's pretty cute.



We'll get back to our travel log tomorrow.

Normal Life, Almost

When we got back from Kenya, we had a few weeks of “normal” life before our next trip. I took Sarah Claire to her preschool and went to work, the kids and Beth got back to their home school material and life was pretty routine. Except it was October, which is also known as “visit your friends in the desert month.” Each October we have numerous guests who come for business or just for sight seeing and visiting. It happens every year: as people are planning to come visit and lining up their calendars, we advise against coming in the hot summer months. And then November and December are booked with holidays and family travel and the like, so October is a good time to visit. I think we had 5 or 6 visits in October this year.

For the kids, all these visits mean chances to see some sights. For many of our visitors, seeing the great pyramids is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Its something they have read about since they were kids in school, but in person, their size is just breathtaking and awe-inspiring. For our kids, it’s just another trip across town. I don’t take the kids on every trip, but several times a year they get to go and experience the grandness. Of course, they usually just like to climb on the big rocks.

A Different World

When we had finished up our meeting, we took a little weekend trip to visit some friends who live in Kenya. Ben is an eye doctor at a hospital in a small village, and his wife Jenny was a friend of Beth’s many years ago in Pensacola. They brought their three boys to visit us a couple of years ago, and we took them to see some of the ancient wonders near our home, but we had no idea what to expect when we visited their home. They didn't have any colossal stone structures to show us, but there was definitely lots to see.

We rode about 4 hours outside of Nairobi to get to their village, so it was a far cry from the life we live in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Visitors to Africa talk about spotting the Big 5 wild animals on safari. They are the lion, elephant, rhino, cape buffalo and leopard. Well, we didn’t see those, but on the trip out there we spotted the Little Four--sheep, goat, donkey, and chicken. Apparently most of the area next to the highway has been fairly domesticated. We did spot some zebras and antelopes, though, later in our trip!

Once we got there, we really had fun comparing and contrasting our families' lives overseas. Our friends live in a house with a big private backyard; we live in an apartment building with a semi-private roof for the kids to play on. They get a good rainfall every few days; we get a couple of sprinkles a year. They drive to the city (four hours away) for groceries every six weeks; we walk or drive to the grocery store every day (or just call for delivery). They cook from scratch and eat every meal at home; we have our choice from dozens of American restaurants (that also deliver). They have blue skies over green hills with pink and yellow flowers; we have tan skies over brown buildings and a few brown trees. They have big chameleons in their yard; we have...well, hmm...we don’t really have any wildlife around here unless you count scrawny stray cats. 

Sawyer and Lee Anna had a big time climbing trees and playing outside. They even caught a chameleon or two and brought them inside!

One evening, Jenny made a fancy dinner with salad, green beans and grilled chicken with pineapple.We ate out on their covered patio with a fire in the fireplace. As we were serving the kids’ plates, Sawyer looked up at Ben and asked, "Did you get this from Chili's?" You see, in Sawyer’s world, grilled chicken comes from Chili’s, and fried chicken comes from KFC or McDonald’s.

We had a delightful weekend exploring a different way to live in a foreign land. Thanks for hosting us, guys! We hated to leave!

Hakuna Matata

Well, we did finally get our things moved in (see previous post), and set to work trying to make the new place feel like home (pics of the house coming later). We didn't have too long to get settled, though, because we had another trip approaching quickly. You may remember that Jason, Sarah Claire and I made a quick trip to Kenya last July. Well, we headed back there toward the end of September, this time to stay a little longer--almost two weeks altogether.

Our first stop was a beautiful retreat center where we spent some time with lots of other American families. It was in the mountains (who knew Kenya had mountains? not me), surrounded by tea plantations, and the weather was delightfully cool and damp--two things that our weather in September is not. We decided to take advantage of all that green and have a photographer friend of ours take some family photos, which you now see all over this blog. All the header and sidebar pictures were taken in Kenya that week. And here are a few more, just for fun.

We may or may not have promised ice cream to whoever smiled the best during the photo shoot.

They all got ice cream!

While the adults were in meetings, the kids got to do all kinds of fun things with a great group of adults that flew all the way from North Carolina to be with us. They even took the kids on a field trip to an elephant orphanage and giraffe center one day, so we sent Lee Anna with her camera. Here she is before they left for the trip...

And here she is with the elephants! Her daddy wasn't really thrilled to see his baby girl that close to all those large creatures. Even baby elephants are still really big!

I will spare you most of the 62 pictures she took of the elephants, but here are just a few.

Their next stop was the giraffe center, a fun little place where you can actually feed the giraffes by holding out little pellets of food in your hand. Here's Lee Anna with her very tall friend...

and here are Sarah Claire and I when we visited the same spot in July.

Sarah Claire bravely walked up, took the pellet of food from the attendant, and let him hold her hand out to feed it to the giraffe. When he actually put his fuzzy little mouth in her hand, though, she quickly thought better of her decision. From them on, she kept her distance, and kept her hand to herself.

When we had walked away from the giraffe area, I said, "Sarah Claire, that giraffe ate out of your hand! What did you think about that?" to which she replied, "I cryin'!"

All these little Massai warrior statues were set up in a market area right behind the giraffe-feeding area. Sarah Claire got down on their level to check them out.

We ended our time in Kenya with a special visit to see some friends. More about that tomorrow...

Moving On

As soon as we got back from the beach, we started packing up. We didn't want to hang around that last place any longer than we had to, so we scheduled the movers to come on Thursday, August 25. 


Evidently there was some misunderstanding regarding the schedule for moving day. When we asked the moving boss-man if they’d be able to come one morning and have everything unloaded in the new place that evening, he said it would be no problem. But it was Ramadan, and the moving guys were fasting so they weren’t quite as energetic as usual. And when they said they could come at 8:30 or 9 that morning, what they meant was 10:30 or 11.

Well, they worked four or five good hours before their bodies realized they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day. By 5:00 that afternoon, they were pretty much sitting around waiting for sunset, which was not coming until about 6:30. It was obvious to us at this point that there was no way in the world all this furniture and all these boxes were going to be in our new house before midnight. Sometime in that hour, they started calling the truck driver. He said he was an hour away, and would come right after breaking fast. Apparently he took a long time to break fast, because he showed up at our place a little after 9:00. By that time, we had checked Beth and the kids into a nearby hotel. I stayed to help and watch our stuff, since we knew the burglar was still around the building.

As they started loading the truck--about 20 feet of cargo space--it quickly became apparent that all our stuff wasn’t going in that truck on one trip. Not even close. Since our new house is only a mile and a half from our old house, they decided to take a load and come back for the second. Problem was, we didn’t leave the old house for the first time until midnight. Midnight!! Some time around 2:00 a.m., as we were carrying boxes up to the third floor sans elevator, it dawned on me that these moving guys were a good 20 years younger than me. And that we were paying them to carry the boxes up the stairs. So, I spent the last hour or so supervising from the top. My back was fine after about two weeks.

At 3:30 a.m. on Friday morning, we put the last box in the new flat, and I walked out with them as we looked for two taxis. The 7 of them piled into one way-too-small cab and last thing I heard, they were asking the taxi driver where they could get a hot meal. Too bad Waffle House hasn’t opened in this neck of the woods yet.

So...Where Were We?

When we last published a family blog post, the calendar read August 8. So we have five months worth of life to catch up on. Don’t worry, we’re not going to give every little detail, but we thought we’d share a few of the highlights. Well, “highlights” might be a generous description for some of the events of 2011, but they were memorable events, nonetheless.

On August 8, everything was fine. The kids were happily learning songs about the continents and oceans and getting into the routine of a new school year. Same for August 9 and 10. But on Thursday, August 11, I went downstairs to take Sarah Claire to school when I found our car had been broken into. We confirmed pretty quickly that the guy that did it was related to someone in our building, and since we had had some other problems with him before, we knew we needed to find a new place to hang our hats. You see, it wasn’t just broken into--it was trashed. The stereo and side view mirrors were gone. Anything remotely electronic was taken. The steering column was destroyed. The console where the stereo had been was ripped out of place. It was a mess. It took Toyota over two months to get the parts here from Japan and piece it all back together.

Well, on Friday night (we’re back to Aug. 12), Beth found a nice-looking place on Craigslist, and by Monday morning we had a contract signed! Finding a flat that quickly is nothing short of miraculous. We were amazed...and grateful. 

Because we had already scheduled a week’s vacation at our favorite beach hotel, we took off right after I signed the papers. We then spent the week sitting by the pool discussing paint colors and furniture arrangement and other moving-to-a-new-home topics. While Beth and I may not have been able to relax quite as much as we usually try to on vacation, the kids still had a blast.

When we got back, we had about five days to get everything ready to move. At the same time, we had painters in the new place, trying to get it all ready to go before we moved in. Needless to say, homeschool got put on hold. It was a busy week, but by that Thursday, Aug. 25, we were ready for the movers to come.

The moving-in process was a story of its own. I’ll save that for tomorrow and leave you with some pictures of the kids in the pool...

Happy Birthday!!

Happy Birthday, G.G.!! How many times have you been 29 now?

We've finally got our new blog up and running, and for the next 30 days, we're going to catch up on all our travels from this fall!  We hope you enjoy the pictures and stories and have a very happy day! Of course, last time we promised to write a new blog post every day, the internet got turned off for the whole country and then it all just sorta broke loose. But this time will be better. We hope.

 Here's a shot of all the kids and grandkids, just for a preview!  We love you, G.G.!

Always at Home

Our children are TCKs―Third Culture Kids―which is a fancy way to say that they are growing up in a different culture than the one their parents grew up in. Their worldview is being formed through the lens of a "third" culture that blends the world they come from with the world they live in now.

Growing up in a third culture does things to you―mostly good things, we hope. It teaches you how big―and how small―the world really is. It teaches you to appreciate people, places, and ideas that are different from your own. And sometimes it causes you to think in ways you weren't expecting.

One thing we've seen in our own little TCKs is that they think of "home" much differently than either of their parents ever would have. It makes sense, really, that a little girl who has called seven different houses or apartments "home" during her seven years of life might be quicker to feel at home wherever she is than someone who has spent their entire life at one address. But, I confess that even I have been surprised at how little it takes for someplace to become "home" for our kids.

When we talk about going to visit family and friends in the states, where do they say we're going? Home. When we're in the states, and talk about our host country overseas, what do they call it? Home. When we're vacationing at our favorite beach hotel, and they want to go back to the room, where do they ask to go? Home. When we spent a few days last fall staying with friends in Mississippi, and the kids wanted to go back to that house, what did they call it? Home. When we visited Kenya last year for the first time ever, and had been at our retreat center only 24 hours, where did Lee Anna ask to go when she wanted to head back to the room? You guessed it. Home.

While it may be simply an issue of semantics, I have to believe something more is going on here. Our kids have learned that home is more than an address, more than bricks and mortar, more than a place to store all your stuff. Home is where the people you love are, and home is where you are.

And so we thought that Always at Home would be an appropriate name for our family blog―one where we'll share the joys and experiences of life in our family. Whether we're traveling in Europe, having a "normal" school day in our apartment in the desert, visiting with family in Florida, or anywhere in between, you can know that wherever we are, we are, in a sense, at home. And we hope you'll feel at home here, too.