Mystery birthday guests from far, far away

True fact about me: I'm very resistant to change.

For example - let's say (hypothetically, of course) that I live in a certain city. Let's call it City J. I'm living there happily with my family and my great friend who (hypothetically speaking, of course) is named Rachel. Life is great.

Then one day, a new family moves into the city and onto our team. My anti-change radars are sounding, my resistors are put on high alert, I'm in full denial mode. I want things to stay the same!

Thankfully, God is bigger than my anti-change resistors. Over time, I start to realize that sometimes change can be good. Sometimes, changes you didn't want turn out to be the sweetest blessings of your life.

Am I still speaking hypothetically? Hmmm...I can't remember. I guess I'll just fess up and say it. I've got this friend named Amy. I love her. Like, I really really love her. But when her family moved into our city four years ago, I wasn't quite ready to add new relationships into my life.

I'm so glad I did. She makes me laugh. She laughs at me. She makes me love Jesus more. I taught her everything she knows about how to steam broccoli. She makes great chocolate cake. I eat her chocolate cake. We share resources, ideas, books, and every so often we actually email each other.

And she came to visit me.

Well, really...her kids came to visit my kids. The fact that all the adults got to hang out was just icing on the cake.

Her twin boys, Peter and Alex, celebrated their birthday the day before a 9-hour road trip to see us. I rewarded them with Baseball birthday cakes.

We took all the kids to Jump Zone to burn off some energy. I loved watching them play together!
I'm sure when I was an adolescent, the idea of arranged marriages made me sick. Now, the idea of arranged marriages makes me sing. If only my girls would marry those boys... [Of course, if you ask them now, they would! Let's check back in 15 years and hope for the same answer!]
All the kids together:
The super great news for Samantha was that her special friends would be able to come to her birthday party at The Little Gym! She was nearly beside herself with excitement when she found out they'd be able to come!

We chose The Little Gym (again) because we liked it so much the first time and because we wanted all the kids to play together. TLG did a great job of including everyone, and we really liked that.

For Samantha's birthday, I paid off The Cookie Company to help me out with the cake business. I don't think Samantha minded one bit! In fact, she liked the cake so much she didn't want to cut into it!

Emma and Alex hanging around:

After an hour of running, jumping and playing, there was pizza and cake.
This picture is like my two worlds colliding. Oklahoma meets Asia.
Again...worlds colliding. It was so fun for all my friends to meet Amy and her family!
Even this felt a little like worlds colliding! Abby was 18 months old when we left these friends behind in Asia. When they came to visit us, they met a rambunctious two-and-a-half year old!
Samantha also invited some sweet friends from her Friday school:
That little rambunctious two-and-a-half year old I just mentioned thought it was her birthday. I was so irritated with her for trying to blow out Samantha's candles! I was taking pictures and Josh was on the video camera...and it appears that Abby was running loose!
My big birthday girl got a chance a few days later to blow out candles all by herself at Pappy and Gigi's house.

M family, thanks again for making the long drive to come see us! Thanks for sharing Samantha's birthday with us and for all the many, many memories with you that will be tucked in our hearts forever. We love you!

a gift of thanks

Dear Mom,

Can you believe I actually remembered your birthday on time this year? It's amazing, I know.

I thought this year for your birthday, I'd just say thanks.

Thanks for always having a coke in the fridge for me at your house.

Thanks for being available at a moment's notice - like when you stayed with my kids until midnight on halloween so Josh and I could go to the OU game.

Thanks for being willing to help in any way you can...like rushing to WalMart for me to pick up black tights for Emma the night of her Christmas play when I was parenting solo.

Thanks for playing with my kids and loving them so well. They love Meemster.
Thanks for all the thoughtful little gifts you give - aprons, sticker books, piggy banks...there's always something that reminds you of us.
Thanks for just being around. I'm so glad you've been able to hug and read and play and laugh.
Happy Birthday, Dondon. We all love you so much!

And Samantha joins the Five-Year-Olds

I'm up late at the computer tonight because Josh is out. In fact, he's at our new apartment waiting for the moving truck to arrive from up north with our furniture. I have a bad habit of staying up late when Josh is gone!

I'm going through my pictures and realizing there are lots of memories that got bypassed in our rush to celebrate birthdays and leave the country! So here are some moments from Samantha's birthday, Part 1:

Samantha requested donuts for breakfast, so Josh took her out early that morning to pick up donuts for the rest of the group. I wasn't thinking clearly enough at that early hour to have the camera ready for a picture.

We try to give each child time with both Josh and I on their birthdays, away from the other siblings for just a while. On Samantha's birthday, she ran some errands with me - post office, dropping off stuff at Goodwill, returning a pair of shoes - then we had lunch together, just the two of us.

If you give Samantha her choice of restaurant, she'll choose Souper!Salad! All you can eat fruit and veggies? My girl Samantha is all over that!

Her birthday lunch:
After lunch - which included several trips to the ice cream station - we stopped at 7-11 to pick up FIVE cans of soda for our big five year old girl. She had been waiting for this birthday for almost two years, after watching Emma drink coke and chew gum. Here were the five cans of soda that we came home with:
Josh manned the video camera so that her reactions would be recorded for posterity, and I positioned myself in between Silas and her soda selections. One by one, we went down the line...

Silas decided that in the middle of the taste-test, he'd pull up to his feet for the first time. Good thing I already had the camera out, or I might have missed it!
Back to taste-testing:
In the end, each can caused a reaction that was pretty much the same (and note the Priority Mail sticker on her shirt that she picked up during our morning errands!):

While in America, our girls discovered that they love eating at IHOP, and that was where Samantha chose to have her birthday dinner. [Everyone else except Samantha had eaten at IHOP the previous day with some friends - Hi Tom & Rikki! - so I told Samantha she needed to choose another place to eat. But Daddy swooped in to save the birthday and granted her request, sending us back to IHOP for the second day in a row.]

Our dinner there actually turned out wonderfully! Our waitress was super sweet and surprised all of us with the entire waitstaff singing to Samantha and bringing her a huge dish of ice cream. I'm convinced that nothing can make a five-year-old happier than a huge dish of ice cream.

We had no trouble sharing our reasons why we love Samantha at lunch that day. She is quick to share. She is tender hearted. She loves to help. She's hardworking and finishes her jobs well. She often has a song in her heart. She jokes around. She gives great hugs. She's a great bible memory master! She's quick to admit her wrongs and make them right.

And now she's five years old! Samantha had a special birthday surprise this year - she had some surprise guests attend her party! More on that to come...

more thoughts from Samantha

Just a few weeks ago, Samantha's insightful comment encouraged my heart and caused me to look at the more important things in life.

Last week, while eating this -

she said, "It kinda tastes like a Ding Dong!"

And then I wondered how she can be so very perceptive one day, and completely clueless the next day.

For the record: Orion Pies are nowhere similar to Ding Dongs.

Finding Jesus in apartment hunting

In Josh's hunt for the perfect apartment, he found one that meets about 97% of our Dream Apartment Criteria. When you factor in the reality that a perfect apartment just doesn't exist, that 97% was looking pretty good.

The only downside to this great apartment (because there has to be one, right?) is that the landlord kept putting us off and wouldn't give a direct answer. In America, it would be easy to assume that things just kept coming up and that's it. But here, speaking indirectly is also a very clear way to speak directly. If he's putting us off, it's likely that the answer is no.

Anyway, so we're still waiting on a final word if he'll rent this apartment to us. In the meantime, we've been taking on the the role of the man who had friends arrive at his house after a long journey. Our kids are probably tired of hearing us pray that God will keep this apartment open for us!

Last night as we were finishing up family devos and getting ready for prayer time, I asked the girls, "What's something important that we really need to keep praying for?"

And Samantha answers, "For us to love Jesus and follow Him well."

In that innocent answer, all the importance I had placed on this apartment vanished. All the ways I had dreamed about using the rooms and improvements I'd make seemed so silly...because Samantha's answer was so true.

To follow Christ and love him above all should be my most important goal, my most frequent prayer, and my most worthy endeavor.

I can get so easily distracted by the promises of comfort the world offers. I can get caught up in thinking how I can replenish my pantry to our pre-America days. I can try to plan and arrange our lives and schedules to have as little difficulty as possible. But thanks to the Holy Spirit working in my kids, I'm reminded that at the end of the day, only Christ matters.

_________________________________________________________________

UPDATE: Due to slow and unreliable internet, this post was not published on the day it was written. I'm SO happy to report that the landlord contacted us and we can rent this apartment! We'll have to wait until around July15 to move in, which means still more trusting in the Lord to maintain our sanity for the next two weeks! Thank you to everyone who's been praying for us! I hope to post some pictures soon...if the internet cooperates. =)

so here we are.

I'm sitting here in the air conditioned room of the temporary housing where we're staying. The big girls are playing on the ipad, the little girl is passed out from a jet-lag induced nap, and the little boy is screaming for attention. Really, he's squealing for attention, but sometimes squealing and screaming are hard to differentiate. My wonderful, capable, and thoughtful husband is out looking at a few apartments.

It's been a good week so far. We've been blessed by the prayers of old friends and blessed by the hospitality of new friends. We've been in and around the city and are slowly starting to get a feel for the place. There are so many differences between this city and where we used to live. For those that might be interested, here's a few of them:

Our new city is super hilly - think San Francisco hilly. That means there are very few bikes. It's hard to believe there's such a city in this country that doesn't have bikes, but there is! We're in it! Our calves have been sore each morning just from the little bit of walking we've done.

Our new city has lots and lots of green. There are lovely trees everywhere, but the truly amazing thing is that they aren't covered in a layer of dust. They're...clean. It's shocking, really.

The roads of our old city were generally laid out in a nice grid pattern - North/South streets, East/West streets. This city so far seems to be a jumble of twisty and turny roads. Getting my bearings has been tough for this reason!

This city has a reputation for being cloudy and depressing, but in fact it hasn't seemed that way at all. I think if someone were coming straight here from America, it might seem cloudy and dreary. But if you've lived in other cities here, the fact that it's cloudy and means that you can actually see the clouds is pretty impressive. So many cities here are blanketed with a layer of smog that I wonder if locals even know that clouds exist. Here, you can actually see the shapes of the clouds - which I think is pretty nice.

We had very low expectations of what the city would be like, so I think we're being surprised at every turn. Even though apartment hunting is slow, we have so much to be thankful for. The Lord has truly been gracious to us in leading us here.

Our kids are adjusting well. Silas is totally jet-lagging and has been awake from 2-4 every night except last night. (Maybe that's a sign that things are getting better?) I've carried him more in the Snugli carrier than ever and I'm sure my shoulders and neck will pay for it soon!

Abby is such a little extrovert. She's friendly and funny and says hello to anyone who will look at her. She poses for pictures and waves at toothless old ladies. She's a real charmer. She loves the freedom she gets in the taxi now that carseats are a distant memory. [I, on the other hand, do not love the freedom she gets in the taxi!] She likes chinese food and loves strawberry ice cream.

Samantha has probably been the quickest to adjust of all our kids. She has enthusiastically embraced the people and culture around her. She bravely uses her broken language skills to communicate with waitresses, taxi drivers and passersby. She loves the food and has had zero issues with jet lag. Even she commented yesterday, "I think I'm really getting used to it here!"

Emma still seems a little skeptical of it all, which is fair since she's the oldest and has the largest capacity to compare experiences. She's been concerned about the smell of the streets and her inability to communicate. She doesn't remember many of our previous rules - you must always hold a hand when you cross the street, you have to sit still in the taxi, you've got to pay attention to where you're walking - and the learning curve seems to be hardest on her. I feel like she's caught between being able to be "big girl" in America and having to start from scratch here. We've been trying to be thoughtful about taking extra time to process things with her and giving extra grace for her. She's gradually getting used to things though, and she's enjoying the fun stuff we've been able to do together. She's been so excited to eat some of her special foods again, and she loves playing with the other local children she's met.

We're all looking forward to having our own place soon. We're staying in a two bedroom place, which is better than two hotel rooms but still feels a little cramped for the six of us! So - maybe next week will hold more progress on the apartment search? Thanks to all of you who have kept us in your prayers and have sent words of encouragement our way! We really appreciate you!

Samantha the poet

I haven't blogged much about this, but our time in the States is drawing to a close at a maddeningly fast pace. It's hard to believe we've been here almost a year. It's hard to believe we won't be here again for another four. It's hard to believe that we're almost totally packed!

In the midst of our upcoming move is Samantha's 5th birthday.

How can she almost be five? She still seems so little, so innocent, so dear...and five just seems very grown up. There are many grown up things she can do already, so in some ways it feels like she should be older than five. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not so sure I'm ready for her to be too grown up.

Our main reason for delaying our return overseas is so that she could celebrate her birthday with our families; now that it's upon us, I fear that it will be easy to overlook because of our mountainous to-do list.

My girl Samantha is a bit of a mystery. She's quick to introduce herself to little old ladies at Walmart and ask them a dazzling array of personal questions - how old are you? when is your birthday? is your favorite color yellow? Yet she can equally be hesitant and shy around new people.

She's our easiest-to-please child, hands down. She'll eat, wear or do whatever is asked of her. She loves to eat anything, has no strong preferences regarding her wardrobe (unlike her older sister) and is generally happy to help out.

She brings about the strongest reactions from Abby. She's a great artist. She sometimes feels unsure of herself. Her feelings are very sensitive. She'll hug you and never let go. Her consumption alone could keep the fruit and vegetable industry afloat.

I love this girl.

This year, I've learned more than anything that I MUST find a way to treat Samantha like Samantha. She's not Emma. She's not Abby. She's Samantha - and she has her own needs, her own personality, her own strengths and weaknesses.
The girl can read. And, as I was cleaning out our school folders preparing for our big move, I came across some "notes" she had written in her notebook.

The first one read:

Dear Emma,

I love you because you are my friend. You are a good sister to me. I love the way your voice sounds. It sounds like you and I like the way you are. Love, Samantha

Precious, no? It went in the keepsake box.

Then I found this one - and I realized that not only can Samantha draw well, she's a little poet too!

Dear mommy,

I love you. You are like a dandylion or a sugar puff floating in the air. Love, Samantha your daughter

The third?

Dear Emma,

I love you. You are like a snowflake drifting. Love, Samantha

Her sweet spirit is all over those pages. [And, by the way, I'm claiming dibs on being her literary agent for the future! ha!]

So, with her birthday coming up and the discovery of these great literary works, I wanted this post to be about Samantha. I don't want her to get lost in the shuffle. I want to be able to look at her life and meet her where she's at. I want her to feel like the loved and treasured child she is.
Happy almost Birthday, Samantha. We can't wait to celebrate your five years of life!

Three

I'm noticing that more and more of my pictures have all three girls in them. Abby's getting to the age when she can follow directions (when she wants to), and even smile in the right direction of the camera.

I took this a few days ago just before a water balloon fight in the backyard. I love how they got together and held up their balloons - it has kind of a Charlie Angels-esque feel to it, don't you think?

The three:
Again, the three:
There's still such an age difference between the older two and Abby that lots of pestering still occurs...but they CAN play together happily sometimes. I want my girls to know that leaving someone out isn't an option - no matter how old they are! - but still find a way for them to have a bit of alone time when they need it.

For now, I'm loving the three pics.

so we went to the beach.

If there's one thing that going to the beach will do for you, it's spoil you for reality. A week in balmy temperatures, of one-minute walks to the beach, of swimming and lounging and lazing and snacking - who would want to return to reality after that?

A few weeks ago, the incredible couple who masquerade as my in-laws took our family to Panama City Beach. Josh's parents manage their own business, have three other young children, and a host of other responsibilities - yet they put everything on hold to come and hang with us and our drama precious and well-mannered children.

In case you're wondering, Panama City Beach was gorgeous. We stayed in a gated community that was 20 miles away from what you usually might think of "Panama City Beach". It was quiet. Peaceful. Lovely. Landscaped. And, it was big. [Our beach house was a three-story place that housed all of us together. We were one big happy clan!]

The sand was soft, and the water was clear. I'd go back tomorrow if someone wanted to take me. Any takers?

Here are a few recaps from the trip...

Silas wasn't really digging the beach so much. Maybe the combo of sand and sun was a bit much for his wee little body. Or maybe it was the fact that once we got three other children and two adults dressed and sunscreened, it was already time for his nap?

The big girls LOVED it all. There was not a thing about the beach that they didn't like.

They built sandcastles. They buried each other in the sand. They jumped over waves. They swam in the calmer, deeper parts with Daddy. They found crabs in their holes. They watched tiny little fish get scooped up by pelicans. They were in heaven.
I'm not quite sure when Emma became such a little ham for the camera, but it's officially happened!
How was Abby, you ask? Hmm....
Abby didn't really like the sand so much either. It kept sticking to her feet and her legs and got on her hands - you know, the typical thing that sand does. She didn't like the movement of the waves, or how hard she had to walk to make it back to our beach chairs. She did not like it.

Josh's sister Kristen was able to temporarily soothe her with a joint venture sand castle. This just might be the only picture of her smiling anywhere near the sand.
It kind of put us in a weird spot, though - the big girls loved the beach, the little ones were not big fans. Fortunately, our beach house had a private pool as well, so one or two days I put the little kids down for naps and went to lounge by the pool [sit down for this] by myself. Josh stayed at the beach with the big girls, which was a huge fatherly sacrifice. Josh would generally fall in the Abby-category on the Beach Spectrum.

One day we switched jobs. I had the big ones (and Abby, until her big freak-out moment) at the beach; Josh stayed with Silas during a nap.
In addition to our private pool, the neighborhood had three community pools as well. These were bigger and deeper than our pool. These provided a nice break from the saltiness of the ocean. And we could steal Gigi's floaty raft!
Abby hit her stride in the pool. "Abby go big pool?" she'd ask us.

She didn't ever want to leave.
She must have jumped into the pool with Pappy a hundred times.
Good thing that Pappy loves her so much! [He didn't have the heart to say no!]
Before the trip was over, we all decided to rent a Pontoon Boat and drive it over to a nearby island. We'd heard that there were lots of great seashells there and shallow areas for young children to play in. It was a lovely place, indeed. We brought lunch and ate on the boat - which required a significant amount of logistical planning! Before we drove it back inland, Pappy and Josh decided that all the kids could drive the boat.

Samantha went first, and never really got over the euphoria that she was actually driving:
Emma was next and really got down to business - she was serious about driving that boat:
Even Abby got a turn! I think she giggled the entire time. She loves doing whatever her big sisters are doing.
Ha! Look, mom! No hands!
And we can't leave out Silas, right? That little man just steals my heart every time I look at him.
The boat was actually pretty big and very comfortable. It was a great little excursion, and we all thought it was worthwhile.

I didn't take so many pictures - pictures at the beach with little ones is tricky! - but I'm so glad I have these. Al and Debbie, we had such a wonderful time. Thank you so much for your creativity, generosity, and your time. I am so thankful to be in your family and couldn't dream of better in-laws. We've all got some wonderful memories stored from this trip!