Basketball

This past week Brooks experienced his last Tuesday night Saudi basketball game. It was the end of an era for him and I'm pretty sure this will be the thing he misses the most about Saudi.  He has loved getting to play basketball every week with a group of guys the last 3 years! Before Micah and Dan left for vacation we took some pics at basketball to remember these times.   I'm thinking Brooks is going to have to find a group of guys to play with and a court in our new place!  

Brooklyn and Hospital Trips

A few weeks ago Brooklyn and Miles and I were in the backyard playing.  I set up some toys and we ran around from one toy to the next.  Miles wanted to set up the baseball tee and hit some balls.  We have different sets of baseball bats and balls for Miles and Gavin, but Miles really wanted to play with Gavin's, so I let him.  I stayed close by while he hit the bat and ball.  Brooklyn thought Miles was having so much fun she wanted to play, too. So, I set up our plastic tee ball set and gave her a foam bat and ball and she went to town.  After a while, the little ones wanted to play together and kept putting baseballs on one another's tees.  I stood between them worried that they might hit each other on accident, and before I knew it, the inevitable happened.  Miles swung around with Gavin's metal baseball bat right towards Brooklyn.  Thankfully, I was standing there and used my leg and body to block his hit, but he still managed to catch Brooklyn's forehead.  I feel like my block minimized the force Miles could have hit Brooklyn with and the location of where the bat hit her, but he still hit her.  

Brooklyn fell to the ground with her eyes closed.   My heart dropped and panic set in.  It took her about 30 seconds to open her eyes, all the while I was grabbing her, shacking her, and calling her name.  When she came to, she cried and screamed for a good 20 minutes, but then calmed down.  She acted fine and was her normal self.  She ate dinner and played with her brothers the rest of the night.  After baths, we were getting ready for bed and noticed Brooklyn had spit up.  Ten minutes later she spit up again.  A little while later she "spit up" again and then it dawned on me, she was hit in the head and is now throwing up. I called two ladies on our compound who are nurses and they both said take her to the ER.  We called for a car, took the boys to Micah and Steph's house and put them down for bed.  The hospital pediatrician saw Brooklyn and ordered an X-ray.  We weren't real happy that they asked for an x-ray instead of a CT scan, but we went with it.  They asked a lot of questions and said the main concern is vomitting.  We were sent home with orders if she vomits anymore, bring her in immediately and monitor her for the next 24 hours.  The x-ray showed everything was normal.  I stayed up until 1am watching Brooklyn through the monitor, just incase.  The next day we ran a few errands and she seemed fine.  At lunch time, I put Brooklyn in her high chair to eat and noticed her pupils were dilated.  One was dilated so much you couldn't see the blue in her eye.  I watched her eyes for a few minutes, moved her around the room, turned lights on and off, and when there was no change, I called my neighbor to come check and see what she thought or if I was seeing things.  She noticed it, too.  So, off we went back to the hospital. Turns out, that hospital doesn't have a neurosurgeon or a CT scan machine so we were told to go to another hospital with a trauma unit, neurosurgeon, and CT machine.  At this point I called Brooks and asked him to come meet me at the new hospital.  We went through the ER, she was observed, we told multiple doctors what had happened and then just waited.  Eventually, Brooklyn was admitted into a hospital room for observation, blood work was done, which meant an IV was needed, we had a scheduled CT scan two hours later and when we arrived, the technician said we had to back to our room so a nurse could put Brooklyn to sleep.  4 hours after we arrived at the hospital, a friend brought us some snacks and food while we waited for the sleeping meds to kick in.   The CT scan was done on Brooklyns head and 2 hours after that, we got the ALL CLEAR news!  Praise the Lord.  Apparently, when B got hit, she suffered a minor concussion causing her symptoms, but nothing caused internal issues.  Praise the Lord.  We were told Brooklyn had to stay over night, but I refused so we compromise with the doctor and had to stay at least another 2 hours to see if she could hold food and drinks down.  We eventually made it home.   

Fast forward a few weeks....

While on our vacation to Thailand, we noticed one of Brooklyn's toes was turning red.  We just assumed it had to do with her wearing some new shoes and walking a lot.  Then, we realized any time we touched it, she'd scream.  On our flight home, Brooklyns toe was HUGE and had turned purple.  We notice a spot on it and Brooks tried picking it to see if we could relieve some of the pressure.  The flight crew helped us administer first aid to her, but after a while she just wanted to be left alone.   It only caused Brooklyn to cry hysterically for an hour in the back of the plane.  When Brooklyn woke up I found her toe looking like this.  

Before

It was actually as big, if not bigger then her big toe.  We were our pediatricians first patients that morning.  Upon showing our doctor B's toe, she rushed us out of the room and we went straight to the hospitals' general surgeons office.  He took one look at it, turned to me, and said, "she may lose this toe." I was panicked.  I sat and prayed and prayed and prayed.  He said that Brooklyn had some kind of trauma to her toe that got infected.   The next 15 minutes were spent trying to get the infection out.  Brooklyn screamed her head off while myself and a nurse held her down.  After two attempts of draining her toe, the next move came when her toe nail was peeled off and the infection literally gushed out.  It was one of the grossest things I've seen.  We spent the next week going to the surgeons office every few days to have her bandage removed, the wound cleaned, and her toe observed.   Thankfully, everything has healed up and Brooklyn's toe is looking and doing good! She was a trooper the whole time!

After

Love being called Mom

There's never a dull moment around our house and everyday I'm grateful for the chaos and wild times!  These kids keep us on our toes and constantly busy, but our hearts and our home are filled with lots of love.  This season of life has been crazy, but enjoyable.  Looking forward to watching these kids grow up into who God has called them to be!  I love being their mommy!  

Another Hand Print

Years ago I bought a sign from a friend that allows you to place your child's hand print in paint to display.  I've kept up with it when our kids are between 1 years and 1 1/2 years old.  I realized while we were getting things ready to pack up that if I didn't get Brooklyn's hand print now, it was going to be another 4 months.  So, literally minutes before the packers were going to arrive I pulled this sign out, got some paint, and Brooklyn made her hand print.  She didn't like being forced to open her fingers and was interested in swerving her hand all over.  It took us a few tries before we got her hand print to show up and look like 1 hand and not 6 hands mashed together.  I love that I have this keepsake for years to come and know that I'll cherish it forever.

Gavin making his hand print in 2009.

Miles making his hand print in 2012. 

We're Moving

It's official..

WE ARE MOVING.

Brooks got a job in Borger, Texas, up in the Panhandle with his company.  It's not exactly southeast Texas where we lived before moving to Saudi, but it's a domestic job on US soil and we're excited and eager to make this move!  Brooks will start June 1st so we have 21 days until we no longer live in Saudi Arabia.  We are currently working on getting our house ready for movers to come and pack us up.  We have to figure out what we need to live with for the next 2 months (and it all has to fit within 10 suitcases), we have to make our air shipment based on a certain weight limit, then group things into our sea shipment that we won't see for a few months.  The only good thing about this process is how it causes you to purge things and really decide whether or not something is important and/or will get used, worn, or be needed over the next 3-4 months!

It is so crazy to think that we moved over here almost 3 years ago filled with anxiousness, anticipation, and so many unknown fears, but we did it!  We put our time in and made our home here.  We learned to love life here and adapted to the many changes brought our way.  And now, our adventure is over.  I've had so many mixed emotions over the past week since we found out we were really moving.

I'm sad to leave this season of life behind.
I'm sad to leave our friends.
I'm sad to leave what's become our new normal.
I'm sad to leave our community.
I'm sad to leave the convenience of having a grocery store outside our front door, personal drivers, our helpers, maintenance at our beck and call, a beach, pool, restaurant, workout facility in walking distance of our house, and many, many of the other perks that come with living here!
I'm sad to leave our Friday morning group.
I'm sad to leave the semi- slow paced life we have.

It's so funny to think that all the hesitations I felt when moving here are the very things I've grown to love and accept and am going to miss the most.

I'm grateful for making this move.
I'm grateful for the memories we made.
I'm grateful for the friends we now have.
I'm grateful for the travel opportunities living here gave us.
I'm grateful for how much living here caused us to change and grow and adapt.
I'm grateful for being taken out of our comfort zone and seeing there is a whole new world outside of the USA and it is amazing.

I love that we were challenged this season of life.
I love that we learned how to do life in our environment.
I love that we have a new appreciation for the different cultures we've been surrounded by and the various people who have enriched our lives who we may otherwise have never known.
I love that we will always get to say 2 of our kids were born in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I love that Gavin's first memories will be from a foreign country.
I love the stories we'll get to tell of learning how to understand broken English so much you begin speaking it to others because you know that's the only way they'll understand you or how it is possible to cook a meal without sour cream and rotel because stores don't carry them for months.
I love that because of this move I feel we can now do anything.  We can go anywhere.  We can adapt to any situation.  We can make any circumstances work and we can be happy no matter where we are or what we're doing.  Time truly has a new meaning for us.  I remember thinking before moving here 3-5 years is going to feel like FOREVER and here we are.  We're on the other side of it and we did it!

The biggest life lesson I will take from this experience besides NEVER SAY NEVER (I totally told Brooks I would NEVER move to the Panhandle of Texas, too) is sometimes you have to look at what you are gaining in a situation and make it work versus looking at what you are losing or missing out on.  That's the only way to survive it.

Sure, I could write a whole post about all the things we feel like we missed out on not being in the USA for the last 3 years, which believe me, I do have a list and there are some moments that sting my heart when I think about them, but what if we wouldn't have come here and taken this adventure because of holding onto all those things we weren't going to have or that we weren't going to be apart of?  Our lives would look very different right now.  So,  for this moment in time we went where God called us, we did what we came to do, and we are in a much, much better place and have been greatly enriched by all that we have seen and done the last 3 years.

I'll end this by saying our next move will surely be an adventure into unknown territory, where we won't know anyone and will start our new lives in a foreign place.

We don't know:
- where we'll live
- where we'll go to church
- where our kids will go to school
- what our friends will be like
- how long we'll be there
- what life will look like for the next few years
- what cars we'll drive

But we do know there will be:
-Wal-Mart and Targets nearby
- family and friends in the same time zone AND less then 12 hours away
- churches
- stocked grocery stores
- driving laws that are enforced
- movie theaters
- pork
- freedom to wear what we want and go where we please
- public restrooms that don't make you want to vomit when you walk in (well, we may still encounter some of those)
- stores that don't close half the day
- and many, many, many more wonderful opportunities at our disposal

Easter

We started our Easter Celebrations this year with a compound wide Easter Egg-travaganza!!  Several ladies got together and created the whole event.  There was Easter Egg Hunts for all the kids, based on age groups, a cook out, and scavenger hunt!  

**I realized that our kids have never had Easter Baskets so I went out and found some at a local shop and when I got home, decided they looked ugly.  Since I started learning to sew, I figured I'd make liners for the baskets!  It was a definite learning experience, but lots of fun and I was pretty happy with the end results!

Our kids loved hunting for eggs!  Thankfully, Miles and Brooklyn's age group was very few kids and the eggs were out in the open of the backyard making it extremely easy for our kids to get and find eggs!  At some point, pretty quickly, too. Miles and Brooklyn realized there was candy inside the eggs. Game over.  That was all they were interested in.  We did convince Miles to keep hunting for eggs and he was eager to fill up his basket!  Gavin was all into his age groups hunt and seemed a little competitive but just against himself not others!  He really, really wanted to get all the eggs he could find!!  

I took an applique sewing class with my friend Laura and we decided to make the girls Easter shirts.  We used our Silhouettes and cut out the images with fabric and then appliqued the designs on!  So cute and something I plan to do again.  MAYBE... I won't have to spend $30 on holiday applique shirts off Etsy anymore.. just maybe!  

Of course we spent the evening with our friends and the kids played their hearts out together!  We tried getting a few group shots together.  They were all more interested in what the other one had in their baskets!

Gavin got to dye Easter Eggs and was amazed his turned blue!  He loved it!

I made an Easter Bunny cake for the BBQ.

Easter morning was lots of fun this year!  The kids were excited to see their baskets and had a ball playing throughout the morning with all their new toys.  They got bubbles, and balls, and music instruments, toy planes, and bumper cars!  It was precious watching their faces with all the fun stuff they got!

After our morning group get together we invited all of our friends over for lunch and I cooked a Mexican meal.  What are you suppose to eat on Easter Sunday by the way?!?  Our friends pitched in with the side dishes and desserts.  I wanted for all of us to have a fun and memorable day so Brooks and I came up with Easter themed games for everyone to play!  We had a blast, laughed a lot, and made some fun memories!!  The guys played chubby bunny (with marshmallows in the mouth)- i think the highest number was 8 or 9!  We played egg on a spoon where each couple raced against the other to see who could make it walking/running without dropping their egg.  We did this twice!  Another game was Pass the Egg.  Each couple had to hand off an Easter Egg to the other one without using their hands and then drop it into an Easter Basket!  This game might have been everyone's favorite to watch and got the most laughs!!  We played Egg Toss.  Guys together.  Girls together!  The guys got real competitive and were pretty serious about wanting to win. They were really good at it too and had to move outside our yard to keep throwing.  They even did a few dives to catch their eggs!  Fun stuff!  When it was us girls turn, we had our own surprise!  We used hard boiled eggs so that it would be more difficult to crack our eggs and when they did crack, it wasn't going to be messy!  The other girls appreciated my gesture and went along with it!  We set up the jump house for all the kids and they were busy jumping, playing in the playhouse, jumping on trampoline, and riding around in the back yard!  I was a really, really fun day with all our friends!

Pass the Egg

Egg on a Spoon

Chubby Bunny

Egg Toss

Girls Egg Toss

This is Tara, 9 months pregnant.  She gave birth a few days later!

Me and Steph's egg cracked first!

Happy Easter! Hope you and your family are blessed!  He is RISEN!