Pretzels for Lent – recipe and printables here and here

Mary Reed Newland describes a beautiful Good Friday pretzel practice here.

"Even to your old age I am the same, and to your grey hairs I will carry you: I have made you, and I will bear: I will carry and will save." 

Isaiah 46:4

"Hair" was the prompt this week for my photography group. There is a lot of beautiful, young hair in this house but I thought I would go self-portrait this time and record what that looks like in my life at this age and stage.  For me, that is.  For now. 

Maybe it's all those hours logged at the beauty salon paging through the big idea books while Gram sat under the dryers.  Maybe it was watching my aunt transitioning from strawberry to platinum and back, sitting watching those blonde strands wrapped around the hot curlers one by one while I sat on the bathroom floor waiting and chatting. Maybe it's as simple as that box on my ID card still insisting hair color = brown.  Maybe it's looking in the mirror and recognizing the person looking back.  

For whatever reason, for now, it's just me, being carried along into this age. 

If you visit here for long you know I am doggedly 'glass half full' but that doesn't mean things don't get hairy.  I try hard to embrace the counsel Barbara shared here.  However now that some of these 'disagreeable' things are past I wanted to share them both so you weren't under the illusion that we lived in a land of gumdrops and butterflies and also so you have a reasonable expectation of what 'normal' challenges amount to in families.  It isn't always the challenges themselves but the surprise of it all, the fact they are sometimes so unexpected that throws us.  I think the fact we now come to expect them really does help.  Because they come.  They do.  

Living in jolly old England in a 200yo farmhouse is an idyllic, romantic undertaking.  I won't try to make that sound any less delightful than it was because people, that was just pure unadulterated bliss.  However, getting all your cr@p and your children and your little live creatures back across the planet is no cakewalk. 

"Nobody said it was easy.  No one ever said it would be so hard…." – Coldplay

It was hard y'all.  So so hard. 

It began with multiple inspections of the stuff.  The few antiques we acquired had to be certified free of wood worm.  I didn't even know what a wood worm was much less if we had one and way, way less about who it was who would make such a determination.  Unfortunately no one among the moving powers-that-be were much help.  So there were many many phone calls, talks with neighbors, and questions put out on online forums. (read: mom is out of pocket)  We finally found a very nice man who both certified our stuff and informed me it was worth about 6 or 7 times the bargain barrel prices we paid for them.  

The wood worms ended up being less problematic than the dirt.  Turns out none of that could journey to America – no dust, no spiders, no nothing, not on furniture or bikes or cars or lawn chairs.  Our beloved landlord found us a power washer and we scoured everything that ever touched British soil.  It looked fab.  To us.  It was not fab enough for the inspector as you can see by her face, who literally white gloved every nook and cranny, all the spokes of the bikes, the inside of the umbrellas, yada yada yada.  Suffice it to say we did not pass the first round. 

More power washing commenced followed by towel drying and carrying every bit to a mopped indoor storage.  The inspector returned as the movers arrived and fortunately permitted it all to pack.  

The vehicle didn't fare so well.  We paid a service that specializes in such things to prep the vehicle with a special undercarriage clean.  Then carefully took it to the loading docks where it…..did not pass inspection. The company guaranteed passing so they agreed to redo the job but the shipper was booked out a bit so the vehicle could not be rescheduled for another couple weeks, and hence is now still on the ocean someplace. 

The day the movers arrived we moved into a hotel.  Rather two suites in a hotel on base.  The littles went to a friend's early that morning until we could get into the rooms. Tess complained she wasn't feeling well when we dropped them off.  At some point during the morning Brendan threw up at the friends'.  Fortunately it was short lived.  

That week went by in a blur.  My husband and I took turns between supervising the house/movers and hotel/kids.  I don't honestly recall much of that because by the last day I got whatever they had and ran a fever.  Which brings me to a whole other story that was never told about bad health news which I got just before the move. There isn't much story to tell yet since it's still unfolding and obviously I am between doctors at the moment. So we will just put that one on hold. 

Ok, where were we?

As I shared in another post, we had a week before we flew out.  We spent that week getting the boys to their last basketball games, packing some things we would need on the other side and mailing to ourselves,  and meeting with friends to say our goodbyes.  Some of those were wrenching to say the least.  

Insert pause while I let that sink in.  

Saying goodbye to people you love never gets easier.  It never, ever gets easier.  Even military kids who move a lot do not actually get better at this, they just endure it more often.  They feel that horrible loss just as deeply each time.  There were many tears. There were some bitter words of resentment towards their fate by some.  There was a good and healthy processing of the stress and there was….. less good processing. Um…just yeah.

We didn't get to the chapel to say goodbye in person because of the cold/flu thing we had.  As it was, that was a blessing.  I knew I was unlikely to make it through that emotionally so it was merciful to be spared.  I don't think I could bear to say goodbye to dear, sweet Josephine, my 80 something year old friend who was a displaced London child during WWII.  We had said what we needed to say in the weeks that led up to leaving.  That would be the last for us.

In other news….There was good news on the dog front when we began booking tickets.  The little dogs were so light that they could fly as accompanied baggage vs cargo. The tickets were very reasonable and they would check in right along with us.  We took them for their shots a few weeks prior.  Then we took them back to the vet for their health clearance which had to be done within ten days of the flight.  Check! 

There was some confusion about their kennels from the airline info.  We worried that based on the measurements one kennel needed to be replaced.  We did that.  The night before we left we read the fine print on the tickets and noticed that though our kennel specifically said airline approved it would not in fact pass muster because it had an upper ventilation door.  This isn't a crisis in a large American city where you can go to a box store any hour of the day or night.  In semi-rural England, where the sidewalks roll up at 6pm it was a big deal, though not as big a deal as what the coming hours would reveal. 

While organizing tickets and passports and health clearances, a major mishap was discovered.  The pet passports had been packed.  Really big deal.  Thus began many phone calls to the airlines, the after hours vet answering service (no they could not open the office to make a copy. period. no) and even the US Customs Dept.  The dogs would not leave England with us.  While we were making these calls one boy who had gone to dinner with his team earlier walked out of his room and towards the bathroom and very dramatically vomited, not quite in the bathroom, leaving a spray of disgusting on the carpet and up the bathroom walls.  Insert pause in the making of dog arrangements while puke is frantically scrubbed, clothes laundered, and a steady stream of prayers are offered that no one else pukes, particularly not during travel.  

In the end the dogs would stay in England another week with friends who were angels to them and us.  They helped get them to their second health clearance and then to the kennel that transports pets to the airport for just shy of the cost of your firstborn. They are here with us now, praise God.  

So the night before we flew out – as all nights before leaving of places – was an all nighter. I think I laid down for about 3 hrs in there.  Then we got everyone up and over to the office where we were to meet the taxi.  Friends met us that early morning to see us off.  It meant the world to us.  The very first face I saw coming to England was the last one I saw leaving.  It was nice to have the company because the taxi was an hr late due to the freak cold that night.  

The taxi timing ended up being ok because the plane was also an hour delayed.  That didn't end up being a problem until we landed in Chicago and had all of 45 minutes to get 9 of us through customs and onto a train and checked back in another terminal.  We got orange expedited customs forms and airline employees handed us off from one to the other urging us to go faster, faster while they held the plane.  I want to stop here to give props to our kids who, though some of them were not thrilled to be leaving at all, were uber cooperative throughout and hustled as fast as their little legs could carry them.  Their good cheer and behavior caught the eye of more than one staff person who praised them vocally, took them to visit the cockpit of the plane and stopped to visit with them in-flight. 

We boarded the second plane and began the last leg of the journey eventually. It was now well into the wee hours of British morning so kids were dropping off finally, as was I.  That lasted until poor Abbie Rose threw up in her sleep all over herself.  When you are 6 you dont normally have a change of clothes handy.  Thank heavens, she WAS wearing a gray flannel English school jumper which repelled liquid pretty well.  She and I stuffed ourselves into the tiny airplane bathroom and did our darnedest to wipe it all off and put her sweater in an airline bag for later laundering. 

We landed in Salt Lake City at 9pm UT time, rented two cars and drove very carefully – on the right side of the road – the 30minutes to the base.  It became somewhat surreal at that point.  They showed us to the very same unit we checked into 18 yrs earlier.  It was dated and chilly but we jacked up the heat and Tess and I promptly fell asleep in our coats.  We all woke up very early in the morning – thank you jet lag – and realized it had never warmed up.  It was 55degrees to be precise.  There were calls to maintenance.  Kids were hungry and cold. So very tired and cold folks.   It was determined that it was a very old building and an unusually harsh wind storm outside.  They were sorry.  It was just…cold.  

More calls.  Another hotel was secured.  We checked into two rooms on two different floors and finally got everyone bathed and fed.  In a bit of a shell shock we made our first foray out into Utah, showing them where they lived so long ago.  

It's been two weeks now.  Since that time we have been reunited with friends who were coincidentally here with us then.  Aidan's godparents in fact!

(blast from the past – UT, first time around circa 1997)

 Here also is one of the first homeschooling friends we ever made back in Ohio in the early 90s.  (yes, 1990s ; D) In the past two weeks we have looked at hundreds of homes, gone under contract with one, purchased cellphones (and promptly began getting up to speed on cell phone monitoring and counseling of teens on cell phone usage).  We have a great deal yet to do.  No doubt weird, flukey things will happen while we try to do them.  Complications will arise, kids will act out, people will get sick, dogs will get out of the yard, paperwork will be misplaced, adult children will have crises, WE will have crises.  Stuff happens.  So we will grumble and then we will remind each other not to grumble.  We will go to bed early and take walks and say prayers.  The sun will rise again and again and again and new mercies will come with the new days.  

I probably won't be elaborating about all of the sorrow and struggle because of that silent thing mentioned up top.  I just wanted to do that here so you knew.  Life can be hard.  Life WILL be hard. It's a given. We can't base our happiness on the absence of disasters because they fall like rain. Even if we dodge them with our umbrellas they soak our feet.  Our family is not immune by any means. 

God is still right there. And joy is still possible. Beautiful things await us at every turn.

So I am going to press on now and continue to share some of those incredibly awe-inspring things we see and feel and do each day.  But you will know, right?  You will know it's still a very real, very normal, very challenging, perfectly imperfect, big family life. 

 I wouldn't change a thing.