Feeding Frenzy

Everett's new thing is to feed his sister baby food.  It's very cute - what a good brother! - but I do feel a little sorry for her, having to learn to eat, and get used to the food, and sit in the high chair, and wear a bib, AND get occasionally poked in the cheek with a spoonful of runny apples.  However, Everett loves it so much we let him do it anyway:

He's demonstrating how to open your mouth for the bite.  Really, he is pretty good at it!  He even sings to her when she gets upset about the process. 

And of course, "I do it, too!" wants a shot.  He gets a little extra help from Daddy.  Wow, look at all that blonde hair on that kid.

Ha!

Little Did You Know...

Little did you know that you were living amongst heroes.  But the secret is out!  By day, we maintain our mild-mannered personalities.  By night, we are known as....

The Super Family! 

Here we are in our Super Jammies.  Our super power is -  sleeping!  We are all super sleepers!  We work together with our friends Nice-Warm-Bath and Bedtime-Stories to do battle against our sworn nemesises (nemesi?) Dessert-Sugar-Rush, But-*You're*-Not-Going-To-Bed, and One-More-Drink-Of-Water.  So if your kids can't sleep, you can call on us to come and help you (if we're awake, that is).  Ha!

PS But remember, we are not awake after 2:30 pm your time unless we are home for Christmas.  So, basically, we are almost always asleep when you need us.  :)  This time change thing is handy!    

Our Pantry

As promised, here is a picture of all that baby food we brought back for our little Arabian Princess:

It's like having a grocery store right here in our own pantry.  Here you see sixteen different flavors represented, and each flavor is eight packages deep.  Adding eleven loose packages on top, plus three applesauces, gives us 142 packages total, but 139 of those include two tubs, so it's 281 containers of baby food.  That's the first shelf!

The second shelf is for meats (we have about 50 jars), plus rice, oatmeal, and mixed cereals, formula, four kinds of puffs, and three kinds of yogurt tabs.  We also have a few of those pouches with the screw top lids in the back.  Oh yeah, and one extra Target brand pears in the front there.  Think we've got enough??

While I was rearranging the pantry to accept all this baby food, I found this, which Mike must have bought while we were gone:

COUNTRY Corn Flakes??  Are these somehow different than regular corn flakes?  As opposed to City Corn Flakes, perhaps?  Maybe they mean country like nation.  Each flake is shaped like a country?  "Look, Mom!  I got Sweden and Japan in the same spoonful!"  ???  (Speaking of countries, these Corn Flakes were manufactured in Lebanon by a Swiss company and distributed from Dubai for sale in Saudi.  Maybe it means Multi-Country Corn Flakes.) 

Hurricane Benchich Makes Landfall in The Sandbox

Well, we made it!

The trip back was about the same as our trip over - it was long (but not as long as before - only 22 hours this time).  We had our fair share of just-plain-awful moments, like when Lawrence figured out how to undo his seat belt *during* the landing into Atlanta and proceeded to run and jump and scream "I don't want to be on the airplane!" while the flight attendant belted over the intercom "WE ARE ON AN ACTIVE TAXIWAY!!" (Ok, so should I get up too and restrain him??  You're not helping me, dude!)  (What happened was that I did get a hold of his arm and I put him together with Everett in a seat next to me and I held out my arm across them both while holding the baby in the other.) (It got us through that moment, anyway.)  And then there were moments like on the way to Dammam when Everett was happily watching movies on the screen in the seat back, Lawrence and the baby were sleeping, and I got to watch about 45 minutes of a movie, too!  Wow!  That part was easy.  The lines in passport control in Dammam took two hours, which was also long, but Mike was waiting for us after customs and he scooped us up and took us home.  We are just now getting over the jet lag.  Hopefully the kids will sleep through the night tonight. 

It's a little easier to come back to something the second time.  We came home from the airport to our home with all our stuff, and everything is really familiar, as it should be.  I guess I was expecting that it would be as difficult as when we first came, with no stuff and no car and no idea where anything was or how anything worked.  But after a day or two, we are back in the swing of things.  We took a family trip to the commissary tonight, and we signed Everett up for T-ball this afternoon, and Lawrence has his first day of preschool on the 16th of September.  So life will continue to plug along over here, and maybe it will even get a little easier once both boys are in school (hooray!! but not until October - Everett's preschool starts really late!)  Our friends were all already back.  We went to Shawarma Night with one family and bumped into another while we were there.  Our next door neighbors were thrilled to have us back, too, and I hope to get in touch with more playgroup friends this week. 

Hopefully some pictures will be upcoming tomorrow...I have a shot of all the baby food that I packed and brought back (you can't get baby food here) and we somehow managed to get four months worth of it onto two shelves in the pantry.  Good thing I am married to an engineer!  (Can hardly believe little C is already eating pears, rice, and banana!  Big girl!) 

A few corrections, and good news!

Things are not as bad as I thought in the last post! 

First, the international calling rate turns out to be about 1 SR (that's one Saudi Riyal) per minute, which is about 25 cents. So our calls are turning out to be $10 per CALL, not per minute.  phew.

Mike went out and (after six attempts - yay Arabia) bought a router from a cell phone company called Mobily.  You can plug it into your computer, and then you get internet like you do on a smart phone.  So we are connected, even if the bandwidth isn't very big. 

Then yesterday, the internet got turned back on on camp.  Mike thinks it was because everyone was coming back from repat and discovering that the internet was out, prompting a FLOOD of complaints.  They decided better to risk hooking back up than deal with the angry populace. 

Unfortunately, our internet at our house is still out because they gave us a weird router when they hooked up our DSL, and it isn't back online yet.  ??   So we wait a little longer for the full solution.  But I am impressed that the company got the internet back in 15 days!  That is a miracle.  Let the blog continue! 

Three days until takeoff...have four bags half packed....can I get it all in??  Including the four months supply of baby food??  Stay tuned! 

Gearing Up to Return

What a vacation it's been!  I have not posted anything to the blog recently because I have been SEEING most of you LIVE AND IN PERSON!  HOORAY!  We've been so busy that it's dizzying.  Over 8 weeks we have been to Knoxville, Cleveland TN, Troy OH, Grand Rapids, Charlotte,  Kiawah, and Charleston.  We've hit pools, beaches, and the slip n slide in the backyard.  We've been to two zoos.  We've had three rounds of professional pictures made -studio, environmental, and beach.  We've been to the doctor and the dentist and the hair cut place (twice!).  Yes, we have been here so long that the kids have needed two haircuts.  I guess that's a signal - our time is up. 

Mike is already back.  He went back on August 23rd, and when he got there, he had a really big surprise.  All the internet all over camp is down.  SURPRISE!  When he arrived, the internet had already been down for more than a week.  And it's still down.  Which is not just inconvenient - it's crippling.  Ramifications for this twist in Our Arabian Adventure include (most importantly) no more Vonage.  Ack!  That's our phone!  Also no more Skype.  And without TV or radio already, no more internet means no more connection to the outside world.  Since I am still here in the land of normal, I have been acting as Mike's own personal news reporter when he calls in (which he does from our land-line in Arabia, which means it's some ungodly expensive rate like $10/minute).  "Hi, honey!  The kids are fine, Hurricane Isaac is getting ready to wipe New Orleans out, and Neil Armstrong died.  I love you, bye!"  Poor Mike - talk about bored!  No TV, no radio, no news, no streaming movies or TV, no phone, no computer at work.  What to do?  You can only run for exercise for so many hours every day.  Thank goodness he's got the cat. 

Apparently, there was a "hacktivist" attack on the company that wiped the hard drives of 30,000 company machines on August 15th, while we were all lounging on the beach.  If you do a quick Google of [the company name] and computer, you will see all the articles.  They say that IT is working 24/7 to get it cleaned up and fixed (hmmm....unlikely that they are working that hard, with the work ethic we've seen over there), and rumors on camp are running rampant - some say two days, some say two weeks, and some say two months until the internet is back.  (And some say never, but I bet that's not right either.)  So there's no telling when it will be back.  My best guess is a month or so.  If that's the case, we will again be in a hard place about functioning over there.  Take our mortgage payment for example.  How are we going to make our payment without phone or internet?  Credit card statement?  View our bank records?  Communicate with our property manager?  Not having internet makes everything hard.  It's rather like they suddenly shut off the electricity.  This is going to require some major adjustments.  Snail mail, here we come.  

Oh yeah, one last thing....no internet means no blog.  I'll try to post a few things before we get on that plane, but if you don't hear from me after that, don't worry.  It's only because Hurricane Benchich (a very destructive Category 5) ventured into an information black hole.  (Fun!  Maybe we will emerge in another dimension!  I will let you know - if the internet comes back!)