Ahoy Matey!

"Hula Anna' absolutely loved dressing up in this fun skirt! She would be so busy looking down at it, she forgot where she was going. This afternoon we had a play date with friends we haven't seen in nearly 18 mos. They were living/working in East Africa and we were neighbors there (way back when! =)), and now they've settled in this area. Small world. We had such a wonderful time playing together with all their dress-up clothes!

Gma and Gpa bought James and Joel some pirate 'items' as James calls them, and they gave them as a surprise gift this morning at breakfast. So we've been 'the good kind of pirates' all day long with the occasional 'ahoy!' and 'you'll walk the plank!' thrown in here and there. This fit perfectly with our friends' dress-up clothes (which included two full pirate outfits and a cowboy - close enough). Here the boys impatiently await the signal on the stairs to run and find the hidden treasure! We stumbled upon a new version of the same old game. We hid their plastic coins in the dining room furniture and they had to find it. It's essentially an easter egg hunt over and over again...


Us Mums noted as they left that the boys really hate saying goodbyes. In a mobile life like ours there are lots of goodbyes and some kids cope with that better than others. It's never easy. But today getting together with a foreign-born playmate from our 'other life' in Africa was their first reunion. The boys hit it off immediately and had a wonderful time. It's true that our kids won't have deep roots in one community, but maybe just the intermittent rich relationship?

ER

Saturday we planned to drive north to Seattle.
Our allergist told me that a grass pollen count of 30 parts per cubic meter is relatively high in other areas. She told me that in the lovely Willamette Valley in June ('grass seed capitol of the world'!), the counts are easily in the hundreds. I checked the official counts on the aaaai website for last week and grass was at 871 parts per cubic meter!!! No wonder I can't walk out to the car without having the sniffles for a few minutes afterwards! Both James and I are allergic to grass.

So he's been fairly sniffly and just this week coughing a lot. I was a bit discouraged to think he may be asthmatic like his Mom and brother. Anyway, the cough was getting worse and worse and by the time we needed to leave town it became clear to me that he was not up to the journey. We talked with the triage nurse who ordered us straight to Urgent Care. We quickly called our insurance, which shall remain nameless, for where to go in Corvallis. Apparently, they have no agreements in Corvallis and suggested an hour's drive north or south. The urgency of his wheezing and coughing continued to increase, and they permitted us to go straight to Corvallis' ER.

So up we drive to the ER with a screaming, wheezing, hysterical 5-yr-old. A few minutes on the nebulizer and a chest X-ray later we find out James has pneumonia in his right lung! His younger siblings sat wide-eyed and motionless watching the blur of nurses and doctors.

After two days of antibiotics James is still hacking and not eating much, but playing and running again. He ended up sleeping much of the trip north and arriving late at night to sleep again. I keep running through my mind why things happened as they did. Why I did not see his illness sooner? Praise God for ERs. We have had one or two medical crises in places that do not have them, so I am thankful. Maybe it was better for us to have no insurable place to go for urgent care. We ended up having an X-ray and reading it 5 minutes later!

And just as the nurse suggested, James can now tell his big story of his trip to the Emergency Room! =)

Oh to be Griet!

For quite a while now I've been wanting to reference a blog that was influential in my mommy life. People with 3 small children have unusually busy lives for a season. For us, we are throwing a nomadic and inter-cultural lifestyle full of packing and moving on top. I found that reading military wives blogs have some major things in common with my life. So a month or so ago I stumbled across this blog:
http://gypsy.chattablogs.com/

(just scroll down to 'Don't even sink about it' and look for the picture of Griet)

The hyperbole of Griet startled me with a laugh to my own unrealistic expectations. I'm not trying to keep up with the Joneses, I'm trying to keep up with Griet (though I still don't know how to correctly pronounce her name!) =) She's the supermodel who sews handwoven cloth into clothes for her perfectly calm little angels frolicking in the flowers she planted. Ha. No matter how hard we work, none of us is ever really Griet. It's a very good thing I don't set the standard for life! Once again I praise God for sending his Son who could meet the standard perfectly so WE DON"T HAVE TO!

Can you tell I'm procrastinating from unpacking? =)

Moving on

FYI, we are moving out this week, so our lives are in boxes and we're not going to post pictures. I promise to catch up when life slows down a minute!

We'll be in Corvallis a few days then off to visit the grandparents in Seattle June 15-23. Hope to see you there! (unless you're one of our friends living overseas - no visits for you just yet...)

I will add quickly that it's been fun having Anna talking these days. She'll come around a corner to surprise you and say "An-na!!" really loudly. We used to call her 'Hurricane Anna' because she left a path of destruction through her brothers' railroad tracks, but I think the 'Anna monster' might be her new personality. She does it with a cute smile of course.

'NO!' is also a big hit and easily applied to every situation. She's learned to say her friend's name: "Kate". Yesterday she was playing with a large bottle of shampoo, laid it down, gave it a little pat and said "Ni-Night". I'm not sure why the soap needed sleep, but she's carrying around her baby doll more and more giving 'hugs' and 'bottoe' or 'dink'. So fun.

More later!