A Christmas Whirlwind

Blog Post About Winter 2020

The cards you all sent made the best decorations in 2020! It was such a blessing to be remembered by so many and our plain-looking tree thanks you :)

We went to church for Christmas Eve, and then we came home and Kylie and Karis treated us to our own "food board." We weren't able to have all of our overseas friends come by for the Christmas story and some American food, and they were missed.

On Christmas morning, Keira read us the Messiah's birth story from Luke 2.

I don't have a picture of Caleb because I think I missed him opening the few he had. He had decided to forego most gifts so that he could buy parts for and build his own computer. 

That evening (on the 25th), we all loaded in the car to drive 2.5 hours to my parents' house to celebrate Christmas with them and other family member that could make it.

Kylie and my sister-in-law put this "board" together. In reality, these are the kinds of foods we have always eaten and snacked on at Christmas and other times with family...for years. 

I was just thinking the term charcuterie board was something new invented to describe what we had been doing for years. Nope.

The French came up with this in the 15th century. "Chair" means "flesh" and "Cuit" means "cooked." It basically translates as "pork-butcher shop." Their shops also included the pig's internal organs, which I'm thankful has gotten removed from our boards in America.

In French, the one preparing the meat is called a Charcutier.

So just like Solomon in his great wisdom reminds us, "There is nothing new under the sun."

The cousins that were able to make it sat at the "kids' table" for dinner. 

Who doesn't love sitting at the kids' table, right?

Things like this happen at the kids' table :)

This is my son on the right and his cousin (12 days older) on the left.

They decided to try some hot sauce called "Da' Bomb" my dad had around the house.

The sweating, moaning, and pain continued for quite some time (and probably later, if you know what I mean).

When Kylie returned back to college, she found a youtube video showing that the hot sauce these boys tried was the third hottest in this particular hot wing contest.

Yes, these are things that happen at the "kids' table." :)

We only stayed two nights with my parents because we needed to go see the other grandparents and more cousins on the 27th. 

One of the many benefits of the grandparents living in Waco is that we can go see the Chip and Joanna Gaines empire almost anytime we want. We hadn't gone in few years so we drove over to see all of the new additions like this chapel. The crowds were really low because of Christmas, plus there was rain in the forecast.

We also took advantage of other "Waco-things" like the store near the Dr. Pepper museum.

S'mores by the fire was a nice ending to the day.

And the next morning, a few of us got up and went running/walking downtown.

Covid + Christmas made for a very quiet, enjoyable morning.

We knew it was important to see both sides of the family because we are rarely, if ever, in America during Christmas anymore. So even though this was a whirlwind of a trip, it was good!

Soccer ⚽* Driving * Thankful * Mail 📬and Rain 💦

Blog Post About Summer 2020 

We got back to Texas and enrolled the girls in ballet at the same studio they had attended four years earlier, and through a friend, we found a soccer club for Caleb to join.

He quickly had his very first game, and it was on a regulation-size field. 

There are very few regulation-size fields in our overseas country, so he had never played on one. Not only that, the heat this particular day was nearing 100 degrees. I was burning up just watching him, but when I went on the field after the game was over, the heat emanating up from the ground was mind-blowing! I have no idea how those guys don't pass out every time they are out there because the temperatures on the field seemed at least 10 degrees hotter!

August 16, 2020

A big day for Karis was August 17, 2020, when she got her provisional license (hard copy) in the mail.

I am so glad she had time to practice in America before coming back overseas because it's just hard to learn how to drive when so few people around you obey the rules.

August 17, 2020

August 18, 2020

*She's thankful for her brother and her mom

*She's thankful for Target and her mom

*She's thankful for Macaroni & cheese

*She's thankful for kangaroos

*She's thankful she gets to play "Littlest Pet Shop"

Keira rarely gets to bring things like this home, so I found great joy in seeing what did in Sunday school one day.

As we traveled around to visit friends, we often visited different fellowships, and if Covid rules of the church allowed, Keira got to visit a different Sunday school class each time. A couple of times we would get to a church and they would tell us you had to sign up the Wednesday before each Sunday to attend.  Since I rarely knew about this rule, I must say, there were a few really gracious places that let her go to class anyway!

On a side note of her being thankful for her brother (whom she adores), I love pictures like the one below from 2015 that show how early on she started modeling him :)

August 8, 2015

Keira had also never received a letter in the mail.

When my father learned this, he made the effort to send her a letter every week or so telling her about things going on at his house. 

She liked roller skating out to the mailbox to check to see what had come each day.

August 20, 2020

Keira has always loved to play in the rain. The pictures below are from when she was 2 1/2  years old.

May 2015

A warm Texas rain with no lightning present was a welcome invitation to play outside...every single time.

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August 26, 2020

 

One Last Time

While we were looking for a house to move into, this is one of the things that Doug inspects. How much amperage does the house hold and what is the condition of the electrical box?

The one in this picture is a fairly new setup; however, the city is going around to houses and blocking the amount of amps they can run at a time, which greatly reduces the amount of cool and heat you can use when you need it.

Oh well, looking for a house will have to wait.

Kylie needed one last hurrah around town.

Kylie, Karis, and Doug went downtown and had fun acting like tourists for one day just taking pictures, buying last minute things from here that Kylie wanted to take with her, and generally, just enjoying the city one last time.

We hated to leave when it looked like it was going to be such a mild summer. 

These are the actual summers you WANT to be here for, but alas...

The Party's Over...Literally

I don't know why I can't find time to blog, but it doesn't seem to come first in my list of "to do" items each week. So, since I mainly blog to have a record of our time here, I can't just skip to present day. That means you'll have to bear with me for who knows how long until the timelines of my blog and my real life match up. 

For now, I'm back at the morning after Kylie's graduation party, which is ironic, because we are currently getting ready to start KARIS' senior year.  Crazy!

The morning after, the decorations were were taken down, and we pulled out all the boxes we had been hiding in the basement while the party was going on.

Time to pack.

Before and After.

(If you don't remember, our landlord had asked us to leave so he could try and sell the house.  

Present day (2021), we are 14 months from our move out, and he actually did sell it last month.

Doug told me a doctor bought it and gutted it, so I went to see for myself. 

Sad day.

December 4, 2018                                                                                                                                                                                                        August 10, 2021

They have taken out every tree on the outside and inside of the gate, and torn up the garden that was there. It was also sad for me to see my laundry room tile on the street.

August 10, 2021

Back to 2020, even though we were packing, Doug still made time to cut Karis' and Caleb's hair! This wasn't just a "quarantine cutting." This is something he does all year long for any of us that needs it.

Caleb got a LOT cut.

At this point, we still hadn't found another home to move into, so while we were still looking, we also had a plan put in place to store our belongings in an unused house of a friend if we never found another rental.

Because we were trying to get to America to get Kylie ready to go to college, we decided to get our rugs washed, dried, rolled up and bagged for the months we would be gone.

We took them to a big, open cemented area, and some men rolled them out, told us how much it would cost, and then they were dragged away to be hosed down.

And even though summer 2020 was a relatively mild summer here, it was still warm.

And as you can see, it was almost as hot inside as it was outside.

June 6, 2020

So, Doug, Keira, and I decided to camp in the yard for a couple of nights, and it was actually not bad. The temperatures dropped a night, and it was a lot better than being in our bedrooms.

It was quite the pressure situation.  

Packing. 

Not having a new house to move into. 

Needing to get to America, and at the moment, no way to get there (see picture below).

So, we kept working and kept praying.

Summertime '18

While we were traveling this summer, we turned off all fans and swamp coolers in our house, so it was just a huge cinder block structure soaking up heat.

Let's not talk about the cucumbers I accidentally left in our fridge 😬 (thankfully, no pictures were taken of that), but I did photograph this sweet potato that was left in our hot box known as a house.  Remember the pictures of candles I sent you from last summer.

It's quite a shame, too, because sweet potatoes can rarely be found here.  In fact, since we came back, I haven't been able to find any.

 Summer sunset in the dessert.

It was so hot in August that this Mercedes Benz business put umbrellas over all of their small bushes.  I have NEVER seen anything like this.

Doug and I went on a double date with our teammates, and they took us to the 21st floor of a fancy hotel in town, because they had been to the lookout platform before, and they wanted to share it with us.  

It was stinkin' hot, which you can't tell from the picture, but there was a hot breeze blowing.  And I remembered something about perspective...a different perspective is often helpful.

The city looked so beautiful and clean from up here.  

Unfortunately, I know what it looks like at ground-level.

 At the end of the summer, we had a guest come from America.  The weekend before the girls were supposed to start online school, we took everyone, including our guest, to a lake two hours from here for a kayaking/swimming adventure.

Only our guide had a camera, so I have no pictures from the day.  However, our guide (the groom in this post) sent us these two of Caleb.

It was Keira's and my first time to go, and we loved it.

Everyone did a lot of swimming.
Doug, Caleb, and Keira let little fish eat on their feet while they laughed.
Doug, the older kids, and even our guest, jumped off some small cliffs.
We stayed all day, and ate lunch in the cleft of some rocks.

The wind picked up a lot by the end of the day, and it was really windy when we started back.  Instead of the 45 minutes it took to paddle to the site, it took an hour and a half to paddle back!

It was a good, cool end to the summer.