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!)   

Reflections on Being Home

We’ve been here a few days now, and we are just about over the jet lag.  It feels GREAT to be home.  I feel like I have walked into a dense rain forest after being in the bleak and sandy desert for so long.  I missed the blue sky!  I am not too chilly, as I had expected, because the humidity is like a warm, comforting blanket every time I go outside.  I love the humidity.  And we had a rain storm the other day!  Everything is so green.  I love the sound of the bugs chirping at night.  (I knew it was time for a trip home when I told Everett we would get to see lightening bugs at home, and he said “What are lightening bugs?” (!!) ) We have also been eating bacon for just about every meal.  I wore a tank top and shorts to the Ace Hardware this afternoon, where I drove myself there, ran inside for ten minutes to get what I needed, which was a set of four 2 ½ “ bolts, paid with my trusty old mastercard, and was back home after less than twenty-five minutes.  That would have taken weeks and weeks to accomplish in Arabia.  I am a little afraid to let myself go to Wally World, because I am afraid I will be so excited to be there that I will be greeting the greeters instead of them greeting me.  After all, I don’t want to embarrass myself. 

Some things, though, are just as hard here as in Saudi.  I am still trapped at the house a lot due to naps and the difficulty of taking three small children anywhere that’s not the grocery store.  Communication is still an issue, although not nearly as bad.  (I had a hard time getting the Ace Hardware guy to figure out what I needed.)  And I definitely did not miss the sensationalist news stories that flood the media about “so and so was murdered last night” and “drunk driver caused this big wreck” and “our schools are going to pot” and “drug dealers released from prision”, “live chicken found wandering outside a local Bojangles” etc, etc.  (I didn’t make that last one up!)  I’m sure that stuff happens in Saudi too, but we never know about it because we don’t have TV, and even if we did, all the reports are in Arabic. 

We are headed to Charlotte on Monday.  HOORAY!  HOME!  Brace yourselves, folks – most of the Benchichs are back! 

AGGH - Technology!

I've just realized that something has gone wrong with the blog, and a whole bunch of my last posts didn't post.  So I think I have fixed that, but the pictures are not showing up.  I'm working on it...for now, have the text and I will get the pictures back up soon (I hope).

Activity Overload

We went to a Fourth of July party at the Club - WOW I had forgotten about what normal kids do for fun. There was so much to do there, we were all in activity overload, because we have been so bored for so long. They had THREE bounce houses, face painting, pony rides, baseball and basketball games, a huge buffet, hot dogs, popcorn, snow cones, cotton candy, and a dunking booth. The kids were in hog heaven. And it stayed light so late! YAY summer!


How exciting!



We're binging on sugar and fun!

HEAR ME ROAR!

I DID IT!

I got our three small children halfway around the world all by myself. YEAH! WE ARE BACK!

I will spare everyone the gory details here but the short story is:
     - Everett was a real trooper and he did great. He threw up five times. But he kept on being cheerful and willing to walk for nearly the entire trip.
     - Lawrence had a hard time being on the planes for so long. He was great when he was asleep, which was not much of the time. Poor kid doesn't do well when he has not had enough sleep.
     - Catherine was perfect. She slept and ate and cooed her way across the continents. Thank you for sleeping through customs, sweet baby!

We had four huge checked bags, the stroller and infant carrier, and I carried a 30 pound frame pack with all our carry on stuff.  It worked pretty well.

In the car - going home!

Playing at the windows at our gate in Dammam. Too bad it was too dark to see the planes.  This is 10:30 pm.

I was not permitted to use the infant seat on the first flight (even though we had bought her the seat!), so Catherine sat in my lap the whole time.





Pretending to sleep on the transatlantic flight.

We got our request for the bulkhead seat on the transatlantic flight.  It really helped our situation that I had enough space to sit in front of the children on the floor to help them.

So two messy diaper blowouts and five vomiting incidents later, not to mention the drool and tears we worked through, we are back in Knoxville and recovering from jet lag. Our KLM flight from Dammam to Amsterdam had TERRIBLE service with awful flight attendants. Our Delta flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta had much better service and we got bulkhead seats, which helped a lot. Our Knoxville flight was fine, and we were all glad to be on the ground for good. And a big WELCOME HOME to Catherine, who was arriving in her home country for the first time. Welcome home, baby girl!  And while we're at it, HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!


I CAN'T WAIT to see all our friends!!  And watch out, Target, here I come! I can't wait to be out in public in normal clothes!