DURING

Here are some pictures of the arrival of our shipment.  It was a crazy day!  It was a lot like moving out, but in reverse.  :)  No, really, it was a lot like moving out with the stress level, but at least the time constraints were gone.  We could take as much time to unpack as we wanted.  By the end of the day, we were both utterly exhausted.  I am really glad we made it past all this moving part of Our Arabian Adventure.  Moving is no fun. 

All our stuff had been packed in these large wooden crates, called Lift Vans.  They got loaded onto one giant curtain truck in Charlotte, but they came in loads of 2, 3, or 4 on these smaller trucks when they arrived in Arabia. 

The trucks had to make multiple trips to the port to get all our Lift Vans.  I think we had 14 of them. 

They backed the truck up to our garage door to unload.  They took a crowbar to open the Lift Vans, and then they had us check off all the boxes as they were unloaded from the Lift Vans.  We had about 350 boxes. 

An empty Lift Van going away, back to port for another load.

Can you see the enormous pile of discarded boxes in front of our house?!?

Some things were broken.  This was Mike's mom's wedding crystal.  :(

Our own bed!!  Hooray!!

The living room was starting to fill up.  Note the all-important potty seat was one of the first things to come off the truck. 

We got our kitchen magnets back!

More things were broken. 

We made quite the debris pile outside. 

More trucks coming with our Lift Vans.  The yellow helmet in the foreground is on the handlebars of our houseboy's motorbike.  He came to help us that day, but turns out there wasn't too much for him to do until we got everything unloaded.

More broken things.  All the boxes had those yellow stickers on them, which identified which number box it was.  Items without boxes had the stickers directly on them.  It's been two months since the shipment came, and we are STILL finding and picking off yellow stickers from our stuff. 

Master bedroom is also getting full!

The boys' room.

Baby's room now has more stuff. 

Here is Mike checking off box numbers with the movers.  Luckily, it was a gorgeous day - mid 80s and sunny. 

It felt VERY weird to see something so familiar as a Charlotte address in the middle of all this foreign-ness. 

My mixing bowl must have been made of tempered glass. 

Master bedroom starting to come together!

Boys' room with their rug!

Nursery gets organized.

Hard to tell in this picture, but our kitchen was a WRECK.  Trying to absorb all my stuff into a smaller space was really hard. 

Living room is getting full, too. 

Here is the box that had the deep-fryer in it.  Yes, that is the oil that I forgot to take out.  The box did get flipped upside down, and the oil did spill out.  It would have been ok, except that the oil congealed in the warehouse in the cold Charlotte winter, and then re-liquified in the Saudi heat.  This changed its consistency, and made it impossible to get off!  We managed to make the rest of the stuff in the box useable again, but the deep fryer itself is still sitting in a plastic grocery bag in our garage because we can't figure out how to successfully clean it. 

We were all worn out by the end of the day.  The boys were real troopers.  They got farmed out to one person's house in the morning and another person's house in the afternoon.  By dinner we were all testy, but it wasn't anything a quick episode of Wonder Pets couldn't fix: 

They both fell asleep in the bear chair here in front of Linny, Tuck, and MingMing.  Looks like Wonder Pets, Wonder Pets, they found a way to help some baby people and save the day.  (Ha ha, now you have that song stuck in your head, don't you?  :)  )  (And wow, look at all that paper packing material.  It's just from one or two boxes in this room.)

All in all, it was a good day but very tiring.  We were very happy to have our stuff, even if it meant that now living here feels real.  As in, we really do live here now, and there's no going back home because home is an empty house - we couldn't even sleep there if we wanted.  Next up:  AFTER!