We're back!

Well we made it back from our whirlwind adventure visiting family and friends in the States over the holidays. What a wonderful time we had! Everyone made us feel so welcomed and loved. It felt so great to see so many familiar faces. Thanks so much to all of our very gracious host and hostesses, whose homes we crashed and ravaged, starting with Becca and Tom for letting us stay in our "green house", and my folks whom we immediately infected with all of our new germs but who were the best sports about it letting us come back again and again and again, and Jeff and Kate for notifying Santa of our locale, and Grandmom for braving the cold, and Steve and Kim for the second round of Christmas celebrations. Thanks to all of you who took time out of your busy schedules to spend time with us. It really meant so much to us and made for a very memorable Christmas 2004.

Happy 2005! We returned to Belgium on the 4th bracing ourselves for the the dreary dark wet weather when in fact it has been sunny and mild. I've yet to experience the late rise of the sun because with three jet-lagged kids waking up at all hours of the night we (Rick not included) have been sleeping until well after the sun rises sometime between 8 and 8:30. Let me give you an example of what it means to have three jet-lagged children. On night two having trouble falling asleep myself I was still reading when I heard stirring in the girls' room around 11:45pm. After about two hours of trying to convince them they should be sleeping and not playing, crying, or standing expectantly outside of my bedroom door I started dozing off. At 2:17 am after aproximately 15 minutes of sleep so far the whole night I am startled awake by I'm not sure what. I jump out of bed, rush to the kids room to find them all empty. I go running down stairs to find them ... eating breakfast. EATING BREAKFAST! at 2:17am!! Now because I'm very well rested at this point I calmly send them back to bed. OK, no actually that is what I wished I had done but instead I stood there pointing toward the stairs with incoherent noises coming out of my mouth in between the "get" .. "back" .. "to" .."bed". Well they luckily knew I meant business or was at my breaking point or something because they couldn't get up the stairs fast enough, climbed into bed and we didn't hear boo from them until I woke them at 10:30 the next morning. Now I would have and should have dragged us all out of bed earlier but I was so exhausted because when I went back to bed I couldn't fall asleep thinking of the predicament that just happened. You see on school mornings for most of November and all of December we ate breakfast while it was still dark outside. On the weekends Drew had gotten into the habit of shuttling his little sisters downstairs and giving them breakfast without bothering us. He loved this new found independence. A beautiful thing for Rick and I letting us sleep in on the weekends. A beautiful thing that I might have just destroyed. Anyway, I spent way too long pondering how to make sure this weekend breakfast thing still occurs. Your mind does funny things when sleep deprived.

Ok next day, when I'm a bit more coherent I plan my night time strategy if the kids wake up again. At 11:30pm that night the alarms go off again. Alyssa and Megan are up and don't want to go back to sleep. Wondering why I earth I did not do this the night before I drug them. A little bit of cold medicine and 20 minutes later everyone is back a sleep. Let's see what happens tonight...