There Is No Place Like Home

5th Grader is fine, no broken bones. Hit a growth plate in his elbow. Of course, it took six hours, X rays and my awesome awesome doctor and nurse who we've used for the last eight years as we shimmy in and out of Washington to find this all out. My secret 'hurrah' that he couldn't play football anymore this year has been shattered. So, tomorrow I still have to attend the school picnic, get 2nd grader to baseball and attend 5th grader's football game all at the same time with two little hangers' on in tow. Ack.

BUT,.. it is better than hubby's living conditions at the moment. It seems that God does know what is best and even He gets annoyed with my whining, so He sent me home in June. Could have been a little less dramatic, what with the 'I think I'm having a miscarriage in the middle of an Indonesian mall in a city I don't know all alone with my four kids, what the hell do I do now." (I'll write up the story this weekend, time heels all wounds and after it all, it is rather hilarious and unbelievable.) Okay, okay, perhaps not fate, maybe I'm looking at the silver lining of all my travails, my 'grace' as I would call it.

Anyway, after my little brood and I left Banda Aceh, they started having power outages ALL DAY LONG since they were upgrading the power grid. All summer. For six hours a day. We don't own a generator. Which means I would have had no lights (house is pretty dark, no windows in the main living area), no water (pump runs off of electricity) and open windows allowing all of God's creatures great and small to enter my pristine living space. Ha. I don't think so.

Then, when hubby returned to Banda after his home leave, he found that the well we used for our water had run dry due to lack of rain fall and no one NO ONE can figure out how to get the city water (is there such a thing there?) to work. The man is an engineer and he employs other engineers and various and sundry intelligent people. The man signs his name to detailed plans promising that bridges won't fall and houses won't tumble. Egads.

They dug another well, still no water. Not that this water is anything to write home about. It smells. It especially smells after it's been sitting in the one hot water heater we have in the house while we cavort in some gorgeous "for the next ten days I'll pretend I don't actually live where I do" R&R destination some where on the earth. Definitely makes you brush your teeth with bottled water.

So, now he has a truck come and fill up the 'mandis', or tiled basins in his bathroom and the kitchen for use in cleaning and showering. He's been taking a cup of life shower now for a few months. He's found that if you start with a slow trickle on top of your head, your body heat warms the water so when it reaches your actually body it isn't quite so damn shocking. Ack.

Then, I get a call to say hello from CRS's fearless leader in Banda, since he is home in the US for his home leave. He has TYPHOID and is having trouble kicking it. Ack. Don't forget that Rob contracted malaria right before he came home for leave.

And to top it all off, Ramadan is in full swing. Nothing wrong with Ramadan, but for the loudspeakers at every mosque that kick in at 2am and go on for the rest of the morning for all in the city to hear. I can attest that a pillow over the head and the rattling air conditioner can't cut out the noise of the Imam. At least there hadn't been the howling dogs like in Cairo.

Only two more weeks and our little adventure will close. Welcom home, hubby!

The Perfect American Family

Oh, you know how it is. We all want people to think our families are like this:



When in reality, we are all like this:



I've had two Mondays in a row this week. Here is how my second Monday this week went:

Up since 2am because of that 3rd trimester-no-room-in-the-bladder-so-I-have-to-pee-every-15-minutes syndrome, showering at 5am to get in two hours of work before the hoodlums are excommunicated from their sheets. Pack the lunches, feed four kids, change one poopy diaper, get three in respectable school uniforms and out the door to get to school a comfortable five minutes early, all in thirty minutes, even after dealing with crabby husband's phone call from deepest, darkest Sumatra.

Why is it that when I have a bad day, he has an even worse one? Aren't we supposed to balance each other out like yin and yang? Last time he left me : ) in Idaho to go to California my bad day consisted of the usual kids-will-make-me-loose-my-mind. He on the other hand had a worker knock out a gas pipe and had to evacuate a mile radius of the City of Riverside. This time he had two sets of lawyers to deal with in one day, one discussing his civil/criminal case he's been named in and the other the firing of a contractor who threatened to light one of his engineers on fire. Oh and then also entertain auditors. Show off.

Okay, back to me and my horrible, very bad day. Woops, they are paving the road outside the subdivision, so that means a pilot car and one lane of traffic. My 15 minute commute turns into 45 minutes and we are late for school. Get out of car at parking lot and realize Kindergartner has left both his backpack and lunch at home. Promise to navigate pilot car and warm asphalt a second time to deliver both before lunch. First, however, have to navigate Walmart to shop for hot lunch food items I have agreed to cook for tomorrow's Kindergarten lunch before taking B to the toddler gym class. Get home just in time to stick melting ice cream (I AM pregnant after all, had to get my fix!) to freezer after hanging out in car for 20 minutes waiting for *$&(%*& pilot car, grab a yogurt to feed to baby in car (don't recommend it), kid lunch and backpack. Peel back to school parking lot just to be told that I need to turn in my picture forms for the school pictures RIGHT NOW. Forgot about the school pictures. Fill out three forms in record time, do a little dance that they accept credit cards since I just realized I had run out of checks, spend way too much money and make it to toddler class late. Get B home for a nap, do another couple hours of work, feel the onset of a migraine. Navigate traffic one more time to get kids, do homework, force them in baths with actual soap involved. Then, decide no, I'll not only make lunch for 17 five year olds tomorrow, I will also, at the same time, make a mock Thanksgiving dinner to eat tonight. You've heard of binge eaters? I'm a binge cooker. Anyway, dinner was great, and kids finally went to bed just in time for headache to blossom into full on migraine just in time for another night of too uncomfortable to sleep.

Today, taking in 5th grader for suspected broken elbow from football practice last night. Will my fun never end?!?! But, migraine is gone!!

Rams Football Major JV

Jared No. 2 Richardson



He's out there somewhere, trust me,..





Getting the dressing down after the game,...



Looks scarey, eh?

Fall Baseball '07

Zach's uniform. he thinks he plays for the Capitols because that's what his shirt says.


Up at bat! He's excited because he was number 5 the last time he played.



Dugout. This is not the dugout where Cheddar the rabid mascot mouse was found. I have been instructed to bring 'mouse capturing equipment' to the next game. Whatever that is,...



Running to base!



Speedy gonzalez!

Preggo in the Park

After the boys had their hour sweatin' under their bike helmets on the SK8TR KDZ park, we headed over to the playground so Sabrina had something fun to do besides push her baby in the stroller and eat all the snacks. I'm 26 weeks preggo here. I seem to have a beer gut baby in there. So sad. We won't mention I've already gained 33 pounds. Woops.








The billy goat's gruff hill. She of course wanted to climb the rock wall.







Yay! I still could fit down the slide! Amazing!

SK8R KDZ

Fantabulous skate park in Lacey, Washington very close to where we used to live. (Yes, one of 50,000,000 houses we have occupied in our short lives.) Sure beats that drive way we paid to have cemented in Banda just to get about 12 feet of good board room, eh?






Kyle



Zach.



Jared defies gravity!

Keeping It In the Family

So my husband was out 'in the field' so to speak and stopped by one of the several villages he is in charge of rebuilding in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. One of several tasks of each of these NGOs who is over there constructing after the 2004 tsunami is to painstakingly go over beneficiary lists; see who really gets a brand spankin' new house and who is in it for the take.

Hubby had heard some strange things about this particular beneficiary and wanted to meet him personally to discuss the problem. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He knocked again, and, well, the picture tells the rest of the story.

Max, Max, Max of the Jungle,...

Okay, so my mom the mad scrapper thought up the title. Here is what every Rescue Dog Mission in America prays you WON'T do with the newly adopted dog. Fall in love with it and move it to some crazy foreign country.

We got Max from Coastal German Shepherd Rescue in Southern California two weeks before I was due with the B, the fourth child. How deranged is that? Actually, I had done the research on finding a new dog (we had to get rid of our last German Shepherd right before Christmas and this of course broke the hearts of all the boys in the family, hubby most of all) so I agreed to go LOOK at the dogs. The boys loaded up the truck, I grabbed my purse and when I walked out and saw the water bowl and a gallon jug of water being loaded next to the dog kennel in the back of the pick up, I knew it was over. We would not be coming home without a dog. Never mind I was 36 weeks pregnant and had to drive two hours in a pick up truck to go see these doggies. Argh.

Well, that is what these rescues do so well - they really care about the dog and match them up best they can with the right person or family. Our contact knew right away that 'Bruno' would be going home with us, too. Coastal was awesome to work with, not crazy like some rescues where you have to send in neighbor references, photos of the house and write an essay about how much you love dogs. I was actually terrified to get out of the truck and have the staff see I was so pregnant, thinking they would not let us adopt a dog so close to a major milestone in our lives. Thankfully, they weren't crazy and we went home with that stupid dog.

Little did we know that four months later we would accept a position doing tsunami relief work in Sumatra, Indonesia. So, we did the necessary vet visits, lots of shots, chip installed in the doggie, crazy phone calls to every major airline and airport trying to figure out how the heck to get a German Shepherd to Banda Aceh. I think flying a cat to the moon would have been easier. In the end, after the kennel flopped off the airport cart and they had to drill even MORE airholes in the kennel 'just to be sure', we found pet expediters in both Singapore and Jakarta who made our lives easier and Max made his doggie way to Banda.

I think Max is the biggest dog many Acehnese people have ever seen. Little did we know when we moved there what a stigma a dog is to most very religious Muslims. Dogs, monkeys and pigs are seen as unclean in Islam. The truely devote Muslims in Aceh aren't allowed to touch Max. I had to find my live- in nanny from Medan. Although she is Muslim, she is used to the way of us 'unclean' Christian foreigners and doesn't touch Max, she doesn't freak out by cleaning his hair off the floor, feeding him or having him hang around. I had to give my housekeeper hazard pay. We can't host parties for hubby's local staff because many will refuse to enter a home where a dog has been unless it has been thouroughly cleaned both physically and by the Imam (Muslim 'priest'). Kind of an exorcism, I guess.

So, jogging with the dog on the local streets always draws quite a crowd. That or the fact that my husband said "(#$)&* it" and all 6'6" of him would dress in a tank top and jogging shorts (I on the other hand, had to wear long pants and long sleeve top. I bought a treadmill.) to go jogging with said large animal.

The most this dog will do is shed on you or lick you to death, but he certainly is a great deterrent from any unwelcome visitors trying to make their way into our gated yard.

While the family has been back in the U.S., hubby has been taking Max on lots of jungle walks to find tigers and wild boar, as well as walks on the beach. So far just a bunch of monkeys have been found. Max the city slicker dog has gotten over his fear of water and is finally rather enjoying his traipses in the great Sumatran jungle.

Brood Hen

Here is the totally cute little Shaker baby set Grandma Nonnie gave to Sabrina, our resident Brood Hen. I totally believe some traits are just inherent in people. In Sabrina's case she'll either be a pediatrician, school teacher or the old woman who lived in a shoe when she grows up. After having three boys in the house we were a little scarce on anything cute and maternal. Yes, Jared did request a toy BBQ when he was five and subsequently would serve his Grandma beer and a hotdog from it. Then he requested a baby doll for Christmas, but the dog chewed off the toes and fingers and then after seeing it tied by a rope on the back of a bicycle one sunny afternoon in Southern California, we discreetly laid the baby doll to rest.

So, Sabrina has had to manage with Mickey Mouse dressed in drag (in one of her dresses) and wrapping pizza menus up in paper napkins while in Banda Aceh. Now, she is in baby heaven and owns three baby dolls, too many stuffed animals to count, and this, the bada bing of the baby doll set. Thanks Nonnie!!!

"Nigh - nigh"

Come Home Soon Daddy!

I'm growing up fast!

Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary! We had to celibrate without daddy. 14 years - and this is what we have to show for it! Daddy sent two dozen roses and mommy splurged and bought the cake at Costco. Then proceded to leave it in the bottom of the shopping cart, but thank goodness the nice Costco employee stopped her and put it in the front seat of the Suburban before we peeled out of the parking lot.

Let us tell ya, that was some good cake!!!

The Tower of Brothers

Kind of like the Tower of Terror at Disneyland, but the after effects last longer,...

Trip Down Memory Lane

Happy Anniversary! July 2004 on our way to So Cal from Boise, Idaho. This is July 4th at your parents' house. Yes, when Jared was young enough to wear tie-die.




This is the kid who is going to drive me to smoke or drink bourbon. One or the other. Very soon.



Are you ready for another one? Only 13 more weeks,...



See how much Max has grown? Our little rescue pup is now a seasoned world traveller!

I bought a ridiculously HUGE and expensive chocolate cake for hubby and my 14th anniversary that I will share with my boys tonight after the Kindergarten picnic and Jared's football practice. How romantic. : )

Farm Boys

Helping Grandma tear up the backyard so we can put in a deck. (That picture coming soon!) Well, not us, but the amazing Tim-the-Handyman.



Amazing what the dangling of allowance will do. And the chance to drive the tractor. We had every tool we could find out there - hoe, horse pooper scooper, snow shovel.



Even daddy had to help. (cut our time in half having him there actually.)



So Sabrina and did what we Richardson women do very well; supervise. We went for a walk and came back and those lazy boys STILL weren't finished.



Happy with the results. And so was Jo Jo the Clown.

Fear Factor Part II

Oi vey. When we were in Banda Aceh we started what I called 'Fear Factor Aceh Style' to get the poor little kiddies to take their anti-malarial medicine. (This before the baby got it ANYWAY so we stopped that ridiculous killing of our livers,..) I'd cut my pills up and grind them down with spoons and then carefully put them in a small amount of pop (electric melon flavored fanta perhaps.. or sour green apple. Soursop flavor wasn't too big in our house.) We'd have oreo chasers since even THAT couldn't disguise the awful bitter taste of those little pills.

So now here we are in the states and they actually MAKE Fear Factor popsicles. Some are black (see above tongues) and some have gumball eyeballs embedded in them. Fantastic!