Editor's note. Our R&R this year was technically home leave, but I'm still going to call it R&R. Nobody cares about State Department's arcane labeling except the State Department anyway.
On the whole, we had a great trip back to the US this summer. Nobody got terribly sick, although most of us got the usual welcome-to-America cold that we get each year. We've been gone for an entire year, so whatever cold we got last year has now morphed into a new variety that is ready to give everyone a week of snotty noses again. It happens every year.
Our travel went amazingly smoothly, especially considering all of the crazy flight delays and cancellations I've been hearing about from everyone's summer travels. One of our flights - the flight from JFK to Salt Lake - even got us to Salt Lake an entire hour early. Our Uzbek Air flights had more than the usual four movies and even they were on time, which is practically unheard of. There was a hurricane projected to hit JFK at the exact same time our flight back to Tashkent was scheduled to take off, but Henri was kind enough to move just enough east that the kids and I made it home without any trouble.
We started the party out in Utah this year, where we got to see a lot of family - seven of Brandon's nine siblings with their twenty-two children made it to a family reunion. All forty-three of us got to party for three days together and catch up with everyone, playing lots of games, telling lots of stories, and making lots (and lots) of happy noise. Our girls were in heaven with their girl cousins, staying up much too late singing songs, braiding each other's hair, and talking about boys. Sophia later told me that she had always thought that those things were silly, "but now I've realized that girls do those things because they're really fun!"
In addition to seeing Brandon's family, we also got to spend time with various friends that both live in Utah and were passing through during the summer. We played in the park, had lunch together, had picnics, went swimming, hiked, got ice cream much too late at night, and got to set off fireworks to celebrate the 24th of July, a Utah state holiday. Joseph got to live his best life as we stayed up late into the night eating homemade cherry ice cream and setting off round after round of smoke bombs, ground stars, cans of worms, and various other low-key fireworks.
We left straight from one party to the next, flying in to North Carolina to a full house of guests who were at my parents' house in preparation for our annual beach trip. The kids had a great time playing all week with their other cousins and all of my father's siblings but one. Despite not having any hurricanes this year, the weather wasn't that great. But it was a great year for rainy days, because we got to watch the Olympics. It's the only time I don't feel bad about watching hours of TV on end, and with the power of smart TVs, we got to choose which events to watch. One evening, Brandon and I stayed up much too late with my brother, watching endless random events and making snarky comments. Because, family + Olympics = awesome.
After the beach, we stayed at my parents' house for two weeks for the yearly summer ritual of doctor's visits. In between the visits, the kids played in my parents' backyard, went to the movies, celebrated Kathleen's fifteenth birthday, swam at the pool, went to the park, had birthday time with their grandmother, and spent time with their cousin who came back with us. My parents also took our five oldest and all of my sister's children on a bike riding adventure in the mountains of Virginia, which everyone enjoyed. Brandon and I enjoyed having three blissfully quiet days all to ourselves. Two small children are pretty easy to take care of when you're used to having seven.
After five fun-filled weeks in the US, Brandon and I went separate directions. The kids and I all flew east back to Tashkent and he flew west to go caribou hunting in Alaska with his brother . We had an uneventful trip home, and Brandon got to enjoy some quality time with his older brother. What he didn't get to enjoy, however, was any hunting. After waiting around for five days, waiting for the weather to clear up enough to catch a ride on a bush plane out to the tundra and caribou herds, their hunt got canceled. So Brandon got to come home a week early and I got to single-parent for a week less.
We always have a marvelous time in America, and we're always happy to come home at the end. I hope that the children have many happy memories of our summers in the US. As we were going through JFK airport, I was hit with the sense of having made it back to the motherland. Then I thought about the children and realized that they probably didn't have that same feeling. None of them have spent more than ten months in the US at any one time since we joined the State Department when Kathleen was 2 1/2 years old, and some of them haven't spent any more than three months at a time in the US. The last time we actually 'lived' in the US was in 2014.
When I asked Kathleen how she felt about coming back to the States, she agreed that it didn't feel like the motherland to her. "It feels more like I imagine what Disneyland would feel like. It's the place where all the good things happen and all the best people are."
One day we'll move back for good and summers won't be quite the same jam-packed level of magical happiness. But for now, we'll enjoy them while we have them.
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