Traveling, Again

Well, we have done it once again.  We've made our trip from the Kingdom to the USA to enjoy a few weeks at home with family and friends and celebrate the holidays together.  I think I could simply copy and paste all my previous posts from our other trips home onto this blog since it was pretty much the exact same thing.  THE ONLY DIFFERENCE this trip was I had us all completely packed, bags zipped up and waiting downstairs, and I was in bed by 8:30pm! I've never been finished packing before 11pm the night we leave.  YAY me!  it only took two years!   

So we went to bed.  Woke up at 1:15am, loaded up the suitcases, drove to the airport, got checked in, waited, boarded a plane, flew to Doha, played at the playground, was refused access to the Silver Club Lounge for having too many guests (yea, this was a first and incredibly annoying, but whatever), boarded our 16 hour flight and took off.  The flight wasn't too exciting if you consider 3 kids under the age of 4 awake at all different times, wanting a snack every 25 minutes, walking up and down the aisles instead of sitting in their seats, needing to go potty every hour, and refusing to sleep in the bassinet (Brooklyn) then, yea, it wasn't too exciting.  The trip really wasn't that bad, but it was a lot of work!

We were greeted at the airport by my mom, brother, sister in law, and niece and nephew.  The kids were all excited to see each other.  After picking up our rental car and loading the car up, we headed to Pappasito's because you can't eat anything other then Mexican food upon arriving in the USA (unless its bacon, of course).  We decided to spend two days in Houston to visit friends, do a little shopping, and take care of things near our old stomping ground.  We had lunch with some sweet friends of ours, The Southards, from our small group and enjoyed catching up with them.  Apparently, we picked the worst weekend in history for all our friends and due to illnesses, planned trips, and a few other things we didn't get to see 5 of the families we planned to visit!  Maybe next time.

After our time in Houston and thanks to jetlag waking all of us up before 4am, we got on the road by 7am and headed to Arkansas.  We'll be spending two weeks in Arkansas splitting our time with Brooks family.  Let's get this vacation started!

Happy Thanksgiving

We celebrated Thanksgiving this year in Arkansas with Brooks' mom and husband, John, at their house.  The kids played outside all day and had a blast running around the yard.  Mrs. Missie cooked all morning, while Brooks, John, and Bran finished up a tree house project they started earlier in the week (more details about that later)!  We had a really fun day, ate a delicious meal, and ended the day with a hayride around their property and a bonfire roasting hotdogs and marshmallows.  

We truly do have so much to be thankful for!  

I made my first French Silk Pie and got Miles' approval!

Brooklyn Eight and Nine Months

 Brooklyn turned 8 months old in September and kinda had a boring month-- unless you count traveling to Europe, getting a horrible stomach bug, as well as catching a nasty cold, and running fever for 4 days.  Yep.  Lots of fun for her.  She weights a little over 14lbs and is still eating 6 oz of soy formula every 3 to 4 hours.  I'm surprised she hasn't shown an interest to take more in her bottle, but the girl likes her baby food!  We spent the whole month battling reflux since the soy formula causes her to spit up profusely, but her medicine seems to be working!
She has started standing a lot more holding on to furniture and people.  She takes off crawling and is pretty fast.  She loves to be in the middle of things and voices her opinion regularly.  This chick is LOUD!  She fusses every time you put her to bed because she'd rather be out in the house with all of us!  She enjoys sitting in high chairs out at restaurants and expects to be sitting up in her stroller.  She likes to check on Miles sitting next to her in the double stroller all the time.

 

 

Here's a video showing Brooklyn climbing up our stairs.

I figured I better go ahead and blog about Brooklyn turning nine months and the few new things that have taken place before we head to the states and my blog takes the back burner, once again.  October 28th B turned nine months.  I can't believe how fast time goes by.  May I dare say it that this month, for some reason, I've felt it more and more on my heart that I'm not done having kids?  Please don't call me crazy or think I'm crazy, I'm loving this season of life we're in and am loving being a mom to these kids.  I just don't feel like our family is complete yet.  However, we're going to wait a little longer to make any decisions and work out some potential logistical things first, then we'll decide!  Anyways, I guess part of my feelings is watching my baby grow up and starting to be a little independent and moving out of the infant stage.  It's kinda sad!

This has been a fun month so far for B.  She's finally over all her sickness.  Praise the Lord she stopped spitting up!  Her pediatrician told me last month that once she turned 9 months the flap in her throat should be fully developed and we'd see a drastic change with her reflux.  Well, it did and WOOHOO... we aren't battling that any more. I actually got rid of her medicine as fast as I could!  Brooklyn is starting to shy away from her night time bottle, which both our boys did around this age, so we're slowly decreasing that every few days.  I'm thinking by next week she'll have gotten rid of that bottle for good.

After Brooklyn ran a fever for days and didn't have any other symptoms we had to take her into the urologist since fever can be the first sign of an infection with hydro-nephrosis patients.   We had an ultrasound done and learned that the blockage in her kidneys has caused her dilation to go from 19mm to 26mm.  Total bummer.  At her 6 month appointment, there had been no increase in the dilation, which made us feel hopeful, however the increase tells us that her condition is not fixing itself.  We have scheduled her follow up with Texas Children's Hospital in December and are anxious to see the results of that scan.  Her actual kidney function and the lining of her kidney looked great and showed no deterioration.

B is on the move crawling even faster then before.  She knows how to get our attention when she wants something and learned to wave when someone walks in the room.  She started chasing Miles this week and has guaranteed us lots of laughs with that little show.  Miles has realized that Brooklyn can take things from him and doesn't know if he approves of it yet.  Thankfully, Miles doesn't retaliate yet, and shows reservation and concern when it comes to responding to her in those moments.


B's new favorite place to hang out is on the dishwasher door.  Just when we got Miles to stop climbing in it, Brooklyn starts. Oh well.  She's stinkin' cute though.

 

Brooklyn had fun trick or treating and was just as cute as could be in her lady bug costume.  She's been pulling up on furniture for a while now, but recently has shown an interest in moving across the furniture with her feet.  She's not great at it, but makes lots of attempts.  Just last week she let go of the couch, turned her body, and grabbed onto the recliner.  WHOA.  We could have a walker in the next month or two.

 
 

Halloween

Since our kids don't have many opportunities to celebrate holidays or enjoy festivities that holidays usually bring, I decided to create some fun for all the little kids and invited our friends over and set up a cookie decorating party!!  I made pumpkin shaped sugar cookies as well as circle and square ones, whipped up some colored icing and set up bowls of sprinkles, chocolate chips and M&M's for each child.  They had their own personalized, homemade place mat at their seat with a labeled plate to take their cookies home on.  The kids all sat down and began decorating their cookies.  Within a few minutes instead of putting icing on the cookies they were stuffing the popsicle sticks in their mouths and licking the icing off!  It was cute.  Some of the kids went straight for their M&M's and camped on those until their bowl was empty.  It was really precious and fun to watch the kids enjoy the goodies.  Eventually, each mom got their child to decorate at least one cookie and they were cute!  When the kids had eaten enough sugar and candy finished decorating their cookies, they played outside jumping on the trampoline and jump house or goofed around in the playhouse.  Some of the moms decided to decorate cookies to take home then we got lots of visiting time together!  It was a really fun morning all together and a great way to celebrate the day together!  

Little Miss Savannah ate her first cookie at LuLu's house! 

                          Brooks was rolling onto nights Halloween day so he got to spend the morning with us!  It was fun having daddy around.. the boys got to decorate cookies with him!                                  
                                                             

Even though Brooklyn didn't get to enjoy the cookies herself, she had lots of fun watching the big kids!

That evening we got our kids dressed up.. we had a turtle, Iron Man, and a lady bug and they were PRECIOUS!!!  We were extremely impressed and surprised that Miles willingly put his costume on and kept it on without a fight since he refused to wear it everytime we practiced dressing up with it the weeks leading up to Halloween.  Gavin was so happy to be a Superhero.  I'm extremely over Batman and Spiderman and Superman so it was refreshing to see a different hero.  Although that morning he kept telling me he wanted to be Spiderman.  I wasn't going to fight him on it but in the end, he decided on IronMan.  Brooklyn was as cute as could be and rubbed her costume throughout the night.  It think the shaggy feel was new to her!

 Once again, our compound had a community wide trick or treat night.  It was actually nice since all the other company's on our compound weren't there so it was 99% Chevron peeps.  We only had about 30 houses to go to, which made for a shorter and more feasible evening for our kids.  Gavin did a great job showing Miles how to trick or treat and ask for candy.  It literally took Miles one house to figure things out then he was off.  He loved getting all the candy!

 

We saw our friends out trick or treating.  Savannah was a pink zebra and Devin was Spiderman!

When we finished trick or treating, we had a Chevron dinner and party for everyone at one of our neighbors houses.  We ate pizza, enjoyed some sweets, and just hung out.  By 8:30pm our crew was exhausted and headed home for bed!  It was another Halloween, in the Kingdom, making memories.  

September and October

Considering I spent most of September updating the blog with all our summer events and then it took me all of October to post about our European vacation, I didn't want time to go by without acknowledging some of the day to day stuff that happened in September and October.  

I decided to get involved with sewing and give it a try.  I figured what better time to learn then while living here.  My friend Laura wanted to give it a try too so we signed up for a beginner quilting class together. Before the beginner class began, we gave sewing a shot and attempted to make an applique beach bag. Hmmm... considering we'd never operated a machine, heck... I don't even own a machine, the one I was using was borrowed, we were a little over our heads.  We did both make a pin cushion and got half way through our plastic beach bag, making some flip flops and cutting out our bag.  Unfortunately, both Laura and I went on vacations when the beginner class actually started and ended up missing some classes and were told it was in our best interest to come back the next class sessions.  Looks like we'll try and start, again, in January.  I'm super excited about this potential new hobby and am hopeful to learn something!  

Gavin's school held Culture Day where all the students were asked to dress up in something that represented their culture and country.  I received the letter the day before and didn't have time to come up with something, but did send Gavin to school in a GAP shirt that had the American Flag emblem through the letters.  When I arrived to his classroom to help usher the kids to the parade I found Gavin dressed in a US Post Man outfit from his class's dress up bin.  Um. Okay.  US Postal Man it is, then.  The parade was cute and there were over 32 countries represented from his school- pretty cool!

We celebrated Delia being with us for one year!  She has been such a HUGE blessing in our lives and we love her soooooo much!!

Since we are leaving for the USA mid November and returning right before Christmas, we decided to decorate our house early for Christmas so we could enjoy our decorations and not have to set everything up days before Christmas.  The boys were a huge help to us putting all the ornaments on the tree.  Miles was amazed at all the shiny balls that kept coming out of the boxes and Gavin enjoyed placing them all over the tree.  

 

 

I found this idea on Pinterest to make a felt Christmas tree and allow your kids to decorate the tree with felt ornaments and presents and it be used as a way to prevent them from messing with your real tree and ornaments.  It has been a HUGE success in this house.  I let Gavin stay up one night after the little ones went to sleep and Brooks was at basketball.  He helped cut out the ornaments and glue the designs on them.  He placed the star on top and presents underneath.  Miles has fun taking the ornaments on and off the tree.  Even Brooklyn has had some fun ripping them off the tree.  

 

My group of girl friends last year decided we were going to have girls nights once a week since our husbands get basketball nights.  Sometimes we're able to make it work and sometimes we tend to get together during the day when all the kids are in school, but one week we took off and had dinner at Applebee's.  We were there for hours and even ordered desserts.  It was such a fun night talking and laughing.  It was also our last get together before our friend Heather had her baby.  

A week in October Gavin's school was closed for a week due to a national holiday called Eid and Miles play school was also closed.  It just so happened Miles and Brooklyn both got sick during this time with a nasty cold infection running fever for days and then Delia was out for the week due to various circumstances.  I was on my own with some sick and tired kids.  It was a really, really loooooong week.  I came downstairs one morning to find the bathroom like this and none other then Miles Lee on top of the kitchen counter, which he can now climb onto without the help of a stool, and helped himself to a few bananas, a bag of M&M's, a pack of gum, emptied Brooks' water bottle on the floor, and managed to open that bag of sugar and pour it onto the counter.  Nice.  All before 6:30am.

 

By the end of the week we were all hanging on by a thread.  We did manage to do a few fun things when everyone was feeling good.  

I heard Gavin calling me from outside and when I went to the door here's where I found him.  

 

Of course, if one gets to do something the other one has to do it, too! Miles got a turn!

 

Sometimes, we find Gavin asleep on the couch.  We have no idea when he went down stairs or how long he's been asleep down there.

Our Thursday morning watching cartoons.  They are too cute.