The First Day

4:30 AM, November 20th, we landed in Dushanbe.  As we waited for all of the other passengers to file out of the plane and onto our last bus (seriously?!? I'm pretty sure I saw several unused jetways) I turned to Brandon.  "Thank heaven we're done with this part of the nightmare.  Now we can move onto a new one."

We got on the bus, drove fifty feet, and unloaded into Dushanbe's brand-new airport terminal, so new that the baggage carts still had thin sheets of white styrofoam wrapped around their pristine metal frames.  An expediter had been set up for us, so he grabbed our stack of seven passports, waved us through passport control, and then dropped the children and me at a column while he and Brandon went to one of the two baggage claims to pick up all thirteen of our hand-tagged bags.

All of them, that is, except for one.  After waiting half an hour at five in the morning after flying all night to figure out that one was missing, I didn't really care which one it was at the moment.  We had a car and a house and a nap waiting.  Let's go.

This time I only had the stroller to push as the expediter commandeered several airport workers to follow him in a train of baggage craziness through the randomly parked cars, taxi-men, potholes, and occasional curbs that define airports in all of the countries we've lived in.  A large white van was waiting to receive all of our thirteen-minus-one-bags.  Brandon's work sponsor hopped out, introduced herself, and we all climbed in for the twenty-minute drive to our new home.

Only, it wasn't our new home.  We had been told the day after packout that we would be in a temporary house until our new (as in, the kitchen isn't even finished yet) house was put in order.  But maybe this house we were going to was actually our new home instead?  She wasn't quite clear.  There had been a frenzy of activity while two houses were being worked on and so don't get too comfortable yet.

Our van finally rolled to a stop outside the usual set of iron gates in a concrete wall.  Brandon and the driver schlepped our thirteen-minus-one bags across the brick courtyard into not-our new house while the children, Brandon's sponsor, and I tore through the house like kids on Christmas morning.  Oh look!  Stone floors!  Hey, here's a study! And a dining room!  And an eat-in kitchen!  And a family room!  And four bedrooms upstairs!  Oh wait! Don't forget the basement!  And its endless series of empty rooms!  Look at all of those cisterns!  It's too bad this isn't-but-maybe-is our house!  It's so huge!  And it has some trees in the courtyard!  And nice big windows!

We all finally subsided into quiet by the time all of the bags made it into the house.  I raided the refrigerator for some breakfast - toast, anyone?  Yogurt? and by the time the sun started feebly trying to rise through a grey, overcast day, everyone was ready for a nap.  Of all of the times to arrive in-country, early morning is about the worst.  Everyone is tired, exhausted, and completely thrown off by four days of traveling halfway across the world and now we have to make it through an entire day that require three whole meals before we can all go to bed again.  I'll take middle of the night any day.  Then at least you can let sleep fade some of the shock of being back in a country where nothing works quite all of the way it should.

Usually I'm a great sleeper.  But on Thursday, November 20, at 8 am, I couldn't make it happen.  I thought of the house and how I would rearrange the furniture and how I would fit a swingset into the yard and how maybe it wasn't my house but maybe it was and who I would hire for a housekeeper and how long it would take for our things to get here and was it really going to be my house and how I could make laundry work in the tiny European washer and dryer crammed into a closet in the basement and what was I going to cook for dinner and did they have takeout and has it already been an hour and could I get to sleep in the hour before the alarm went off and 99, 98, 97, 96, this was really boring and were the children warm enough and why did they put our bed in a room that was not attached to a bathroom and why were the boys in the master suite and how was I going to take a shower when the only shower with a curtain was in the boys' room and oh my was I really STILL AWAKE?!?!?

My alarm went off at ten and I had managed to drift off for five minutes before a unidentified horn-blowing person managed to rouse Brandon out of his sleep enough that he could jump up and make sure the children weren't causing problems.  Brandon crawled out of bed to wake the children and left me to find some earplugs, get my scriptures, and get some sleep.  After all, I had been awake since 7 am the day before.  Surely Alma could get me where counting backwards wouldn't help.  An hour later Alma wasn't successful and counting didn't work either and so I crawled out of bed to face the ten more long, tired, grumpy hours until bed time.

I hadn't had any breakfast past the cold half piece of toast the Joseph had abandoned in favor of a nap, so I got myself toast and yogurt and called it lunch.  Halfway through lunch the power went out.  This is not supposed to happen thanks to the large yellow box with an exhaust pipe sitting in our courtyard that was, at that moment, not doing anything.  Brandon suggested waiting it out.  I suggested calling the embassy and asking very politely if we were supposed to go and throw the switch ourselves if the thing didn't start on its own.  After that question was asked to the right people, we had our local friendly facilities staff at our door within twenty minutes, ready to get our power turned on.

With the power on, I decided to wash a load of laundry.  While packing my bags back at Oakwood, I had taken organization to the next level and made a spreadsheet detailing what was in each bag.  So when we came up with twelve and not thirteen bags when we landed, all I had to do was check which number bag was missing.  Thankfully, it was the last bag I had packed and contained a random assortment of things that weren't too critical - some of Eleanor's clothes, extra packing cubes, a backpack, my socks - with the exception of one very critical item - my underwear.  And, being Mormon, I couldn't even run out and get a few extra pairs.

So I loaded up the washer, set it at cotton, and almost fell backwards when my extra-fancy Bosch washer told me that my underwear would be nice and extra-fancy clean in two hours and twenty-five minutes.  I muttered something about talking to Someone about this and stomped back upstairs.

By this time the children were fully awake and bored enough to fight, so we bundled everyone up for a walk.  Our-not-our house was large, full of lots of hard surfaces, and completely without any window covering on any of the large windows, and so fighting echoed marvelously well.  At least the streets had potholes, large piles of dirt, crumbling concrete walls, and two foot-deep gutters to absorb some of the sound.

Brandon's sponsor had mentioned earlier that morning (yes, it was just barely past morning.  How much longer until bedtime???) that a bazaar was just at the end of our road and right up a few blocks.  We didn't have any dinner, didn't have the number for any takeout for dinner, and no ingredients for dinner other than eight cans of peas, six of tuna fish, and a couple boxes of pasta.  And ketchup.  So the bazaar was a great place for a walk.  I can make a whole variety of dishes with potatoes, carrots, and onions.

When our sponsor said 'take a right at the end of your road,' what she meant was 'take a right at the first block,' not 'take a right after you've walked as far as you possibly can and have run into another crumbling concrete wall that bars your progress.'  In all fairness, I'm pretty sure that she told us the right directions and we just weren't listening properly.  In the end we made it to the bazaar via the scenic route after some helpful directions from various locals (all of that language training, now validated), and made it home with exactly three rounds of bread.  Bread for dinner, anyone?

So a few hours later, after the power was fixed and Brandon had cleaned out the pump that had silted up on the downstairs toilet (no joke, after the children's bathwater is drained, there is mud left in the tub) and I had bathed the children and walked around the house like a zombie, dodging piles of suitcases vomiting clothes and toiletries and cords and papers wherever they stood, Brandon went back to the bazaar.  The fast way.

He came back with potatoes and carrots and onions and even lentils and I set to work making lentil soup on my flat-top easy-bake stove (I didn't think it could get worse than the one in Baku, but it turns out that it can) for my family's very first dinner in Dushanbe.  I'm not sure if it was the lack of spices or crunchy lentils or underdone potatoes or nastiest chicken broth ever, but even Brandon declined seconds and opted to fill up on bread instead.  "This," he said, smiling at me in fond recollection of the worst dinner ever, "isn't quite as bad as bulgur risotto in Cairo, but it's pretty dang close.  Don't bother keeping the leftovers."

And so we called it a night.  We put the children to bed, I checked on my cleanest-underwear-ever and found them to be still dirty due to mysterious E17 that would never be explained by the non-provided owner's manual (thank heavens this is maybe not my house), and took a shower.  As Brandon toweled off with the most disgusting scratchiest welcome kit towels ever (why five?  It's a good thing I can convince some of the children to use their sibling's towel), I commented that perhaps they carried scabies and Brandon broke down into fits of laugher, barely able to touch himself with the towel.  Every time he tried to resume toweling, he broke down laughing again, giggling and snorting.  I joined in, happy to be laughing instead of yelling or growling or sobbing.  As Brandon and I climbed into the paper-towel sheets and snuggled under the scratchy plastic blankets I was so happy to finally sleeping after thirty-four hours of awake.  I drifted off to precious, beautiful sleep, happy to be horizontal and happy to be done with my first day in Dushanbe.  One down, seven hundred and twenty-nine to go.

Hello From Dushanbe!

We've now been here for ten days and life is settling down - somewhat.  Our internet was finally hooked up on Friday, so here's my journal entry about the trip here.  Enjoy!

It’s 6 am on the first Sunday morning here in Dushanbe.  I’ve been awake since 3:45 and, after having read for awhile, counted backwards unsuccessfully, and made gardening plans for some more time, I’ve finally given up and come downstairs to do something useful.  

Our trip here wasn’t as bad as I had feared in some ways, and worse in others, which I suppose makes for a reasonable trip.  If I had been making this trip five years ago, I would have been an unmitigated stressful disaster.  But as I have grown old and tired and used to international travel, it wasn’t too bad.  We started Monday evening.  I spent the day of our departure packing the rest of our ten suitcases while Brandon took Kathleen and Edwin for haircuts and dropped our van off at the Jeppeson’s so that Jef’s shipper could pick it up.  We had had always planned to just sell the car to Carmax, but Jef offered to buy it back for whatever Carmax was offering - which turned out be be $6000 less than the $11000 we paid for it eighteen months ago.  He was able to pick it the title from where it had been languishing at my parent’s house ever since it was mailed there and the renters never got around to sending it on to us.  

The Super Shuttle picked us up from Oakwood at five, with plenty of time to drop us off at Dulles for our ten o’clock flight to Frankfurt.  We were able to get all thirteen bags checked in without much difficulty and get some dinner at Five Guys (which Kathleen tearfully ate, claiming that she was just too full to eat more than the three bites she had managed to choke down along with the ten french fries) before we had to board the plane.

The flight was very uneventful, and Eleanor fell asleep easily after I nursed and covered her.  She slept until I woke her up for the descent in the morning.  I, unfortunately, did not sleep as well, not wanting to use sleeping pills just in case she didn’t sleep very well.  The children had been passing around a two-days’ fever picked up at Brynn and Chad’s the week before and I lost the count and finally came down with it while traipsing through Dulles.  Thankfully I had ibuprofen to keep the worst of the chills, aches, and fever muted, but sleeping was even less pleasant than it usually would have been on a transatlantic flight in coach.  The children all slept just fine, and Brandon got his usually thirty minutes of rest.

We had scheduled a rest stop in Frankfurt and so when we landed we had to pass through passport control - where the young passport agent let all of the children come into her booth to stamp their own brand-new diplomatic passports - and retrieve our bags for the night.  Brandon ended up having to rent three baggage trolley carts to fit just the suitcases, leaving the two carry-on bags and stroller to be managed by whoever could take them.  So I pushed one trolley, Brandon pushed a second, Kathleen pushed the third, Sophia pushed the stroller, Edwin rolled on carry-on and Brandon looped the second around a wrist while pushing his baggage trolley.  Kathleen, after running her cart into a wall or two, freaked out, broke down in tears, and refused to push her trolley any more.  Edwin also decided that baggage-schlepping wasn’t for him. So Kathleen rolled a carry-on, Sophia pushed the stroller holding Eleanor and Joseph, I pushed a trolley and pulley a carry-on and Brandon wrangled two carts holding much more than their stated 70-kilo carrying capacity.  

I had booked a room at the Sheraton, as it was in the airport and would be easy to get to.  I didn’t know exactly where the Sheraton was, but Brandon and I faithfully followed the small signs encouraging us to keep going through random hallways, street crossings, and doors because somewhere there would be a hotel.  After all, this was Germany and everyone knows that German signs can be trusted.  So our journey progressed, slowly slowly from sign to sign as I herded the children and my trolley while Brandon attempted to make both overloaded trolleys go the same direction at the same time, that direction preferably being forward toward the fabled hotels promised by our prophetic signs.  

Every two or three minutes I would turn around to check on Brandon, not being able to offer anything more than moral support, and one time I turned around to see a smiling dark-haired man pushing one of Brandon’s carts.  Then I noticed that a hijab-wearing lady was pushing the stroller.  And then my cart got taken over by another smiling dark-haired man and I was left with my carry-on bag and Edwin’s hand.  We wound our way through the airport, dropping the hijab-lady and her daughter off at a cafe to wait her husband’s return, as the three men manfully wrestled our ridiculous amount of luggage through several tiny elevators and across approximately three miles of granite airport flooring, pausing every five minutes to consult with a variety of airport workers on the exact location of the Sheraton.

I followed with perfect faith in these strangers who stopped to push a baggage cart and help a wandering family find their way through a strange land.  Eventually we staggered through the glass doors of the Sheraton and our angels left us, their errand done.  I found out later from Brandon that one of the men was a refugee from Syria, come to Germany to escape the fighting.  His wife and children were still there, waiting for him to send for them as soon as he could set up a stable domestic situation.

Grateful, jet-lagged, and hungry, the children and I waited while Brandon checked in.  We waited while he talked to one associate, then while he talked to another, and further while he talked to both together.  The children wandered off to look at a scale model of the Sheraton and I hoped that Eleanor could stay calm for just a few minutes more.  I held Joseph, told Sophia that we would get something to eat soon, and assured Kathleen that I wouldn’t go up to the room without her.  I told Edwin to get off the floor, told him to leave Joseph alone, told him to stop pushing the stroller, told him to get off the floor, told him to not kick his brother, and told him to sit next to me.  Finally Brandon came back.  We did have one of the adjoining two family rooms I had requested, but he had traded the second family room, on the floor below the first,  for a two-twin room on the the same floor as the family room.  

As the two concierges unloaded bag after bag after bag onto the floor of our room, I thought about the difference between can and should and baggage allowances.  Then I applied the same thought to rest-stops.

After feeding everyone fruit snacks, crackers, and granola bars for breakfast/lunch, we suited up and went downtown to have some dinner.  Theoretically we could have eaten at the hotel, but I have learned by sad experience that four tired and hungry children will fight if left unoccupied long enough (more than thirty minutes), no matter how interesting the hotel channel is.  Unfortunately, it was raining in downtown Frankfurt, but it wasn’t raining too much and nobody had too much time in between the U-bahn station and the restaurant to get too soaked.  After a dinner of pork in all its varieties, we got back to the hotel for baths, pajamas and bed.  

Brandon and I finally settled on keeping the three youngest in the family room with me, and having the girls with him in the two-twin room that was just down the hall.  So after settling in the boys, we wheeled the rollaway bed out the door, around the corner, through the lobby, down another hall, to the last very last room door - which opened to a king-sized bed.

Everyone, by this point was tired enough that eight o’clock saw us all asleep.  At 11:30, Joseph woke up with a brief bad dream.  I took him to the bathroom, settled him in, went to the bathroom, took another dose of Ibuprofen for my fever and started counting myself to sleep.  Eleanor cried, and I found her in the dark, changed her diaper, fed her, and settled back to my counting.  My phone, which I had set for seven-thirty the next morning, flashed.  I looked over to see what was the problem.  I set it down.  It flashed again.  The battery was almost dead.  I debated doing nothing, calling Brandon and telling him to make sure his own phone was set, calling the front desk for a wake-up call, and finally got out of bed after fifteen minutes of deliberations and found my charger in suitcase number seven so I could be an adult and be responsible.  I settled back into bed, finally drifting off after ten minutes.  Edwin woke up coughing.  He stopped.  My world went fuzzy.  He coughed five times.  I fell asleep.  He coughed seven more times.  I thought about sheep.  He coughed nine times.  I found cough syrup in bag number five.  I laid down and went back to counting.  Sleep evaded me.  I counted some more, tried to imagine myself floating in the clouds, told myself a story, and finally found my Lunesta in bag number nine.  Eleanor, who had been awake for the last two hours of the shenanigans, started crying.  I put in earplugs.  She kept crying.  I put a pillow over my head.  She didn’t stop.  I gave up and fed her again and then crawled back into bed, confident in chemicals.  Joseph coughed once.  Eleanor cried twice.  I drifted off.  Joseph coughed once.  Eleanor cried twice.  I drifted off.  Joseph coughed once.  Eleanor cried twice.  I drifted off.  And the phone rang at seven, waking me up for the day.

Breakfast the next morning was delicious.  When I declined coffee or tea, the cheerful and attentive breakfast attendant offered hot chocolate.  I filled up on fresh-made french toast, sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs, krapfen, pastries, muesli, fruit, fresh orange juice, and whole milk.  I always believe in eating as much breakfast as possible when you’re about to travel.  Joseph had the M&Ms that our french-toast cook had scattered around the serving plate.

Our helpful concierges from the night before, no doubt encouraged by the 10-euro tip that Brandon had given them the night before, showed up to wheel our bags back to the airport and right up to the Lufthansa family check-in desk.  The children and I waited while Brandon, surrounded by a sea of bags, checked in.  Parked right in front of the enormous flip-style flight board, the children and I watched as the departed flights’ information spun until all of the spaces were blank.  We counted how many went blank before the entire board - four separate columns of at least twenty-five flights apiece - flipped in one three-second rush of whirling white-on-black letters and numbers to reveal the new information.  After five or six cycles, we decided that eight was the usual number that had to go blank before that magic three-second spectacle occurred.  

We watched the board cycle and cycle again, belongings collected on the ground around Eleanor’s stroller.  Thankfully she had fallen asleep in her car seat at nine in the hotel and had slept through the transferral to her stroller and stayed asleep while waiting for Brandon.  She slept as we watched the board, she slept as Joseph unhooked the cloth stanchion tape guarding the family line, she slept as her siblings, one by one, collapsed on the floor, she slept as Joseph tried to sleep leaning against her car seat, and she slept as Brandon was ushered by a helpful Lufthansa employee to the Turkish airlines desk to see if there was any possible way we could avoid taking all thirteen bags off in Istanbul and re-checking them.  There wasn’t.

So we went through security for the second time in two days and sat down to wait for our inevitable airport bus that wound through the airport, giving Edwin a good view of every single type of wheeled vehicle that operated in the Frankfurt airport.  Three hours after boarding and discovering, much to the girls’ bitter disappointment, that there would be no personal video screens, we landed in Istanbul.  

Brandon and I had gone through various iterations on plans about what to do when we got to Istanbul - would we have to buy visas to be able to get out to baggage claim, maybe just Brandon could go and re-check the bags, perhaps there was some way to do everything internally and no have to deal with passport control, and we finally settled on having him take me to the next gate and then throwing ourselves on the mercy of someone who might be able to help us.  

So when we got off the plane and saw our new dark-haired smiling best friend, I made a bee-line for the young airport services lady and waited for Brandon to explain about five children and thirteen bags.  After listening with a cocked head, she smiled and cleared the last significant hurdle between us and Dushanbe.  “I think I have a solution for you.”

So we waited by the service desk while she found our bags in the vast sub-concourse caverns that shuttle uncounted bags from plane to plane.  A colleague hand-wrote new bag tags which were then attached to our luggage and sent to the plane heading for Dushanbe.  And I thanked Heavenly Father for answering our prayers for easy travel in very real and concrete ways.

Then we went through security again.  We waited with the vast and thronging crowds in the Istanbul Attaturk airport until our flight was assigned a gate and then waited until we could board another bus.  We waited until the plane was boarded and our seats could be sorted our and waited until a fellow passenger was through berating Brandon for having caused so many problems.  Then we waited in line for the airplane to take off and waited for dinner.  And finally I could sleep.  Until someone else’s crying baby woke me up (my baby was asleep again).  I have more sympathy for people who don’t even have children and are woken up by crying children.  I also have sympathy for the mothers of those crying children.  I have sympathy for everyone.  But that sympathy, unfortunately, didn’t help me sleep more than twenty minutes of the four hour-fifteen minute red eye flight.  Neither did counting.

The wonderful thing about airplane travel, however, is that no matter how much sleep you do or don’t get or how well behaved or not your children are or how happy you are or aren’t or how many bags you do or don’t show up with, if you just wait long enough, you will eventually get to where you’re going.  Which at 4:30 Thursday morning on November 20, 2014, was Dushanbe, Tajikistan.  Our new home.

Shots in the rain, again

Last Wednesday was shot day and so it rained.  The Wednesday before was also shot day and so it also rained.  As Brandon works for the Federal government, we have semi-socialized medicine (thank you, all of you faithful tax-payers!) and have to go to FSI, where Brandon has class, to get our pre-departure shots.  Kathleen's the only one who has had a full course of rabies shots, so we still have more round of shots before everything is finished up.  While we already in for rabies, we get some extra ones thrown in for good measure.  I'm not sure what they are, but it's always good to be efficient about getting poked.  I've already got my sleeves rolled up, so poke away.  The children don't mind because they get a lollipop for each poke.  More pokes means more lollipops!

Going anywhere with five children is always a circus, and going anywhere with five children in the rain is a monkey circus, but the goat-rope monkey circus award goes to going to FSI with five children in the rain.  Why is it that nobody else ever has any children at the same time I'm parading my five look-alikes through the hallway?  Brandon always walks fast, but it's never fast enough to evade the stares.

So last Wednesday it was raining, hard.  We owned two umbrellas before coming to Virginia, but Joseph pulled them out of the UAB pile when we were separating items to be sent here.  When we got to Virginia, our two umbrellas were in Belgium.  Now we own three umbrellas (all black), but only one is currently in Virginia.  Since I carry the baby (whose car seat shade-thingy is missing) I got the umbrella and the other children trailed behind me, ducky-style with their hoods pulled up.

I had been late for the last shot appointment, so I made extra sure to get everyone out of the house on time.  Well, almost on time.  We would have been pretty close to being on time if I hadn't missed the light, missed the turn, and had to pull a U in order to wait at the light again.  After showing the guard my ID and placing it on the seat next to me, I barreled down the road to visitor parking and almost ran into Brandon, waiting in the rain to tell me that visitor parking (all five spots) was full.

He hopped into the car and we circled the parking lots along with five or six other cars looking for open spots in the rain.  I could see that anything remotely close wouldn't be open, so I dropped by the entrance and ordered everyone out to wait inside while I trekked back alone, with the umbrella.  After ten minutes of circling (and now fifteen minutes late for our appointment), I finally gave up and parked illegally.  Everyone else was doing it, so I gave into peer pressure.  After all, who would be towing in the FSI parking lot?

I muttered curses against the trees and verdant lawns that hadn't been paved over for parking as I hiked the half-mile back to the entrance where Brandon and the five children were patiently waiting.  Brandon didn't say anything as I dug into my purse to retrieve my wallet.  That was sitting back in the car.  So then I took my turn patiently waiting while Brandon got to double my own trip, in the rain, with no umbrella.  He returned a few minutes later, panting, my red wallet in hand.  I reached for my license, which was still on the passenger's seat.

There are times in marriage where it's just better when both parties say nothing at all, so I waited again, patiently, while Brandon went back out in the rain, with no umbrella.

Thankfully nothing else was going on in the med clinic, so we all recovered from the soaking while watching old episodes of Friends.  I think that Beauty and Beast would have been more audience appropriate, but I don't think my children were interested enough to ask about various jokes.  I watched, fascinated that Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox's hairstyle and clothes were ever considered attractive - by me, no less.

Eight pokes and six lollipops later we were done.  The travel office is just down the hall from the med office so we stopped in to schedule our plane tickets.  Did you know that mileage plus members flying from Dulles to Dushanbe via Frankfurt and Istanbul can earn 7,134 miles?  Eleanor just joined mileage plus last week, that means that our family can earn 49,938 miles in one trip.  Not too shabby.

Brandon decided that taking all of the goat-rope monkey circus out in the rain to trek a half mile back to the car was a bad idea, so he dashed out for his third trip in the rain to our Golden Sienna-Van.  I waited patiently with the children, watching the clock and wondering, as the time ticked from five minutes to ten if maybe there were tow trucks prowling the FSI lots looking for foolish crowd-followers who park in white-stripey places.  I pulled out my phone to think about calling Brandon just as it started ringing.  Apologies on my tongue, ready to promise good behavior for the next month, I answered it.  "I'm just outside."

Relieved, I shepherded the goat-rope monkey circus outside and into various carseats.  As I finally climbed into my own seat and buckled in, I caught The Eye from Brandon.  I figured it couldn't be too bad, considering that he was driving the car, but I pretended nonchalance as I asked about his return trip.

"Everything okay?" I smiled, "You really could have taken the umbrella, you know."

"Welllllllll," he drew it out, focusing The Eye on me.  "It all ended well.  But you'd better be lucky that I run so fast and was able to beat the white truck that boots all of the cars that are foolish enough to park in illegal spaces."

And then he went back to driving.  I kept sitting.  And we stayed quiet for awhile.

Maybe next time we'll just take the Oakwood shuttle.

Eleanor, almost six months

So Eleanor is almost six months old.  If she was my first child I would be counting in weeks, days, hours, and minutes, but since she's my fifth, we'll just call her six months old.  

I remember thinking that Kathleen was an enormous giant that was about ready to head off to college when she was six months old.  She was hardly even a baby anymore!  I blinked in May and now I have a six month old baby.  It's pretty shocking.

After acting the punk for her first two months she's really settled down to a happy, smiling baby who is completely relaxed about pretty much anything.  I was resigned to giving up our adventure Saturdays until next year, having to work around baby naps, but Eleanor just rolls with whatever we're up to - camping, hiking, or just going to the playground with friends.  I carry her around in my carrier (thank you, Laura, for that recommendation so many years ago) and she falls asleep when she gets tired and the adventure continues.  When we're home she is kind enough to sleep through most (and sometimes all) of school and go to bed before I get dinner started.  I don't think that I could ask for a better baby.  

Every evening when it's my bedtime I feed Eleanor one last time.  Then Brandon and I sit around and admire just how darn cute she is.  I think that I could sit and watch her all day.  I'm probably biased but I think that she might just be the cutest baby ever.

I'm not looking forward to spending four days traveling halfway across the world with a six month-old baby, especially one that has just discovered that the best cure for boredom is to make continual high-pitched baby squeals interspersed with coughing, but I'm pretty sure that we'll all make it there intact.  Because, after all, nobody can stay irritated very long with a baby that is just so cute.

Welcome to Crazy Town

We have just a tad over three weeks left before we hop on a long sequence of airplanes that will eventually deliver us to Dushanbe.  So far I've managed to keep a lid on the Crazy, (mostly) keeping to our normal schedule and fitting in all of the necessary pre-departure administrative items around regular life.  Brandon and I started a checklist and have been steadily marking tasks off to make room for new items.  I checked the initial date on our list a few days ago and realized that we've been working on leaving since the first week of August.

So far we've gotten new passports for everyone (that was a fun dog-and-pony show to take down to Main State), gotten our Tajiki visas, renewed our medical clearances, gotten Eleanor medically cleared, added Eleanor to Brandon's orders, booked plane tickets, booked two hotel rooms in Frankfurt, had two of our three shot appointments, bought consumables, shipped consumables, scheduled our packout, hired a financial planner (to manage the loads of cash we make in our high-class lifestyle), taken everyone but Eleanor to the dentist and half of us to the optometrist, repaired our camera and shoes, and hung out with a variety of friends and family.  It's been busy.

But now life's about to get serious.  I feel that I've actually done a pretty good job of managing the multitude of tiny details; my native tendency is to seriously underestimate the amount of time it takes to get everything done (really, how hard is it to book a few tickets, right?) and then forget about the twenty pre-steps that pop up when you're trying to get one thing done.  Which inevitably leads to complete disaster and all semblance of normal life ceasing for much longer than is healthy for the children and their long-term education.

Life I said, however, this time I listened to my husband's advice (yes, we all get smarter over time) and I really feel like I've got the meta-situation under control.

But it doesn't matter how well you've prepared, eventually three weeks is three weeks is three weeks and life just gets crazy because you can't fit in all of the things that have to be done in around the edges of your normal life.  So next week is our last week of normal life - we'll have school, visit the library, go to the park, spend some time with friends, and enjoy the last week of consistently cooked dinner.  Then, normal life gets packed away for at least four weeks (yes, all of you who know better, I'm being optimistic) while Crazy Town is in session.

Although Crazy Town is, by its very name and nature, crazy and therefore kind of exhausting and pretty unsettling, it has its own appeal.  While we're living in CT, long lasting issues (how are those piles of cash doing?  What about the long-term emotional health of current problem child?  And Ebola?) don't have to be dealt with because we're so busy sorting through piles of crap stuff that has found our apartment and hidden in drawers and closets so it can jump out and scare us two days before the movers show up.  In Crazy Town, nutrition no longer exists (pancakes! again!!), along with healthy sleep needs.  And all of those AAP guidelines about screen time?  They don't apply at all.  The more screen time, the more suitcases I can pack in peace.

By the time we get to Dushanbe, detox from jet-lag, unpack suitcases, figure out how to cook without having to resort to our welcome kit knives, and get some more sleep I'll be ready to leave Crazy Town behind and get back to a life where I have to cook dinner every night, teach school every day, and get up at five every morning.  So it works out pretty well.

But that time is more than a month, several continents, and over seven thousand miles away.  So for now, welcome to Crazy Town!

Camping and Camping

Did I tell you that we went camping again?  No?  Well, we did.  And then we did it again.  But now we're done for the year (only four weekends left) and our stuff is rolled up and waiting to be shipped halfway across the world.

A few weekends ago we went to a state park on the Shenandoah river.  While not as beautiful in a mountain sense (I think that really the only place to camp is the mountains) as the National Forest a few miles away, it did have a lot more stinkbugs to crawl into our tent and scare Kathleen into a whimpering mess.

The trip was a reasonable success (nobody got hurt, it didn't rain), but we realized that camping is a lot more fun when you bring other adults that don't have children.  Then you are somewhat distracted from having to take care of five children outside in a public place.  And then the children can get distracted by the other adults and not swarm you while you're trying to roll up six different sleeping bags.  

We also sorely missed the songstress/game leader/cheerful presence of my cousin's wife, especially when we were about a quarter mile into our four-mile hike and the only response I could think of when the inevitable whining started was 'quit whining because you're driving me crazy!'  Also, when there are witnesses around, you're less likely to commit physical violence upon your whining/fighting/arguing/yelling/crying children.  Just sayin'.

Last weekend we went camping again with my Aunt and Uncle.  The plan was to try our luck on a first come, first serve camping spot in Shenandoah National Forest, which was evidently the plan of everyone else on the east coast because every single campground in the entire park was full by the time we got to them.  So instead we drove the entire 105 miles of Skyline Drive before exiting the park and finding a commercial campground to sleep for the night.  Not quite as atmospheric, but there was a playground.  

We had a beautiful hike the next day, which was made even better by having two adults to take turns carrying Joseph when he decided (about twenty feet in) that hiking really wasn't his thing but being carried certainly is.  I've realized that it's generally not the baby that causes problems on these outings, it's the two year-old.  

The next time we go camping, it will be on another continent in a country where there is no such thing as a campground.  While I'll certainly miss having running water and especially toilets, I do look forward to not having to camp next to anyone but the sheep.  There's something to be said for being away from the rest of humanity when you have five children who occasionally fight and might sometimes have to be loudly reprimanded for it.  Just sayin'.  

Mt. Vernon, With Friends

I am a very bad tourist.  Since we've gotten to DC in late February, Brandon and I have taken the children to see one (1) point of historical or touristical notice - the Museum of Natural History.  This is the exact same museum we took them to last time we saw something of note in the area - which was three years ago, during the Arab Spring evacuation.

We have, however, seen a lot of parks and gone camping three times.  So that's something.

Recently I reconnected with a good friend from high school who is now living in Richmond.  It turns out that she also has five children, all about the same ages as mine.  We almost got the same gender mix, only getting out of sync on the last children, who were born within two weeks of each other.  And since she homeschools her children (with the same curriculum we use) we decided that a reunion/field trip would be in order as soon as we recovered from the babies.

So a few weeks ago I got to play tourist and meet up with her and her own five children at Mt. Vernon.  I think that perhaps I could hear George Washington rolling over in his grave when we all showed up.

Thankfully, my friend's mom was in town so we had three adults versus ten children eight and under, which was a slightly better ratio.  I was very grateful that most of the day was outside and the weather was cloudy so that there were much fewer people to give our rowdy children the stink-eye as they tore around the estate.

We didn't help much because we were too busy catching up and comparing notes.  It's funny how you can not see some friends in over a decade and pretty much catch up right where you left off.  We were of similar mindsets and temperaments in high school and it was pretty obvious that things hadn't changed very much.  

I don't remember that much about the actual historical side, but I do remember having a great time and being surrounded by a continual swirl of motion and chaos that drifted around us as we strolled through the grounds.  Like I said, it was a good thing we came on a cloudy October weekday.

By the end of seven or eight hours together (we only left because it was closing), we decided that we had to do it again before I took off to the other side of the world.  Hooray for friends and hooray for history!

...And Kathleen is Never Getting a Smart Phone

Girlfriend is already too fond of selfies as it is.  I shudder to think what would happen if she got her hands on an internet connection and Instagram account.

The Last Six Weeks, or "Oh shoot! I forgot to do that and that and that and that..."

As of Monday, we officially have six weeks less in America.  Yesterday while shopping at Costco (where I got to make two trips with a lunch break in between) I realized that I was probably buying my last quart of Land O' Lakes cream for the next several years.  It's always sad when you start reaching the 'last of' stage before moving.  I'm really going to miss bulk amounts of... everything.

We've known about our impending departure for quite some time now, but somehow nine months feels like an eternity and six months is quite a lot time and four months is probably too early to start things but two months - wait!  That's only eight weeks!  And suddenly travel orders need to be changed and shots scheduled and pack-outs (yes, that's with an 's') arranged and consumables purchased and medical clearances updated and plane tickets scheduled and passports renewed and visas obtained and hotel rooms reserved and shuttles booked and luggage purchased and shoes repaired and doctor's appointments scheduled and cameras fixed and laptops obtained and eventually, finally, at long last, at the very end, all fourteen suitcases packed.

It's a lot to do.

And then, of course, just like that cream will no longer be available in a month and a half, neither will we.  And the cousins and aunts and uncles and former co-workers and friends and former roommates and future co-workers random people that you've been meaning to see over the last several months need to all be fit into the next six weeks.

So if you're dying to see me?  Let me know.  The weekends are almost gone, but we still have a few weeknights available.  I've never felt so popular.

But right now I'm in a good spot, emotionally.  We're leaving far enough away that it still seems possible to get everything done in an orderly fashion and I can still enjoy my cream a little while longer (note to self: eat more ice cream).  But it's still soon enough that I can start to really anticipate finally getting on that plane (or rather, finally getting off that plane).  I'm busy enough that I'm not bored, but not too busy that I'm feeding everyone cold cereal for dinner every night.

Of course in about four weeks, I'll be a crazy lady, trying to get everything done and cram one last visit and date and movie and park and library in before it's too late.

Until then, however, you can find me in the ice cream aisle at the local Safeway.  Mmmmm, mint chocolate chip....

Just call her four-eyes

Brandon and I both have glasses.  I got my first pair in fourth grade and Brandon got his in high school.  I remember having to strain more and more each week to read my teacher's handwriting up on that fuzzy trapezoid of light cast by the overhead projector in the stuffy darkness of twenty-five bored children learning about the nine planets (back when there were nine) of the solar system.  It was months before I finally confessed to my mother that I might need glasses, shamed with my inability to see.

So when Kathleen asked what hymns we were singing in church and I directed her to the handy large numbers on the wall that told her and she admitted to not being able to read them, I wasn't surprised.  She's been reading in the semi-dark for years now (crazy to think that it's been over four years now) and it was just a matter of time before she needed glasses.

Being lazy, I just waited until her eight year-old check up.  Pediatric care has gotten fancy since I was a child and instead of the chart on the wall, the nurse now takes a magic picture of the child's eyes which magically tells me that - guess what - your child needs to go see a professional and your life just got a little more expensive.

The problem with children is that when they come out they're not too expensive to keep - a few diapers, some onesies, maybe a toy or too - and so you have another one and maybe another one too as long as you're having them.  And then by the time they start needing things like glasses and braces it's too late and you have five children and they rest are likely to be just as, if not more, expensive as the first.  And I'm not going to even think about thinking about college.  Hopefully they'll be too dumb to go to college.

So last week Kathleen and I trotted down to Target and visited with the eye doctor that confirmed that yes, Kathleen was definitely in need of glasses.  Kathleen was ecstatic.  We had a fun time trying all the pairs of children's glasses sitting on the cool white pedestals, just begging to add some hipster to your child's life.

After a few days, Kathleen's glasses were ready.

I don't even want to think about braces.