Catching up...

Well, if I didn't have much spare time before, I have practically NONE now!!! Right now is one of those rare moments when all 3 children are asleep...so here I am sneaking away to do a blog entry. (I must be crazy not to be asleep myself right now!) Seriously, other moms of three, how do you do it? And moms of more than three, WOW. I am in awe.

Anyway, so here's an update of our life for the last several weeks...

December was great...and very busy! You saw all our Christmas activities a couple of entries ago, but right after Christmas was over, we packed up our apartment and moved all our stuff into a garage on January 6th. Wasn't our choice to move... the landlady sold our apartment and said we could either move before we left for Thailand, or after. I thought it would be easier to pack with 2 kids instead of 3, so we decided to go ahead and move out. (I'm glad I did now, though it was CRAZY!) So here are pics of our home as we knew it...

The living room

The dining room Our room Susanna's room Caleb's room (and yes, we had a bathroom and a kitchen...I just forgot to take pictures of them!)

LOOOOOOTS of good memories of our first apartment in Central Asia. Though the place was small and had its problems, we made it home. I'll tell you one thing--I'm not much on moving. I lived in the same house from the time I was 3 til I moved out at 18 to go to college. Since then, I've moved 10 times, and I've learned that no matter how many times you move, or how brief a time you've lived there, it's always sad leaving a place you've called home. I could say a whole lot more about that, since moving and change and transition has been such a huge part of my life experiences over the last few years, and will continue to be in the years to come... but enough of my reverie!

So anyway, moving out was stressful, incredibly busy, and emotional as well, but we did it, and two days later we arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to have Emily. We came a few weeks early, and our time awaiting her arrival was precious. Lots of family time, lots of good experiences...

enjoying the house we sublet (HUGE compared to what we're used to!)

playing in the yard--enjoying the warmer weather! playing with the dog--her name's Gypsy, and she came with the house (owners are away on sick leave...)
taking walks around the neighborhood (the houses remind us of condos near the beach somewhere in Florida...) enjoying the vast array of gorgeous flowers that fill the yards and sidewalks here...

while observing a bit of Thai culture (these Bhuddist sanctuaries--some more elaborate than others, and most replenished daily with burning incense and food and drink offerings--are in pretty much every yard...)

(...and so are these water bottles. But they're not religious--we found out they're just to keep the neighborhood dogs from doing their business there and killing the grass... And it seems to work, believe it or not! You'd think it would have the opposite affect, but for some reason, to dogs, water bottles and fire hydrants are very different...)
Anyway, I enjoyed more time to homeschool the kids (mostly Caleb, but Susanna's picking it up too!) and we had fun riding local taxi transportation to get acquainted with the city.(Caleb's expression pretty much captures my emotion about there being no door on the back of the taxi trucks!!!)

Yep, those first couple of weeks were fun, but we felt pretty lonely after a short while. Feeling the language barrier again, missing our friends, our work, our home drove us to begin searching out new friends. So, this became one of our favorite places to visit... the Juniper Tree Guest House, complete with playgrounds, a swimming pool, and lots of kids and like-minded people in our line of work to visit with.

And then my mom arrived! And I'll have to continue later, cause sounds like my time is up for now!!!