Hello from Arlington

Greetings, all-

I got away from this blog and then thought it was too late to restart, but have been asked to start it up again. So, I’ll just do a broad wrap-up of the last seven months and move forward. I’ll miss much, I’m sure.

We wrapped up in Nairobi with a final couple of adventures – a final safari and a beach trip – and enjoyed the boys’ closing ceremonies from their school there. When we left Kenya on August 3 of last year, the embassy sent a mid-sized bus come pick us up from the house there, given that we had six people and a large dog, a ton of suitcases, a dog cage, and four car seats. The trip back was fairly uneventful, apart from Luke spending 18 hours yelling at the floor of two different airplanes, and insisting that he heard his dog, Clifford, barking back in response.

Christopher became an American citizen when we landed in Atlanta on August 4. I told the immigration officer that after three years of trials and uncertainty, I expected confetti and streamers rather than a quick stamp in Chris’s passport and, “The naturalization certificate will be in the mail.”

We enjoyed several weeks of leave, mostly in Georgia. The kids quickly remember the deal on Happy Meal toys. The kids have had several moments where we remember that they need to be re-oriented to the U.S. One was Little Mark having no idea how to hang up a phone with a wire on it. Others included the kids getting mad the first time we stopped at a stoplight (a no-no in Nairobi, where being stopped made you more susceptible to car-jacking).

We got to Arlington, VA in early September. Little Mark, Chris and I all started our respective classes on September 7. Chris and Mark are both in kindergarten now, and both have better handwriting than me. Luke and Joy are home with Annette, who is doing amazing work, as always. They get to the Smithsonian museums most weeks, and Luke, owing to several trips to the Air and Space museum, says he’s going to be an astronaut when he grows up. I’m studying Mandarin Chinese in preparation for four years in Taipei, Taiwan.

We’re enjoying being 70 miles from my folks. For some reason unbeknownst to Annette and me, they insist the kids never do anything wrong, even when the kids have been cranky all day and we go out for dinner. Pretty amazing. Aunt Vi gets in quite often, as well, and then we’re spending a lot of time on I-85 between Virginia and Georgia, getting to visit the folks down south.

Little Mark is doing great in school. After a week or two of class, we got a certificate in his backpack that said he was doing great in Spanish, to which we replied, “He’s taking Spanish?” He’s reading quite well already, and he enjoys the attention when his siblings ask him to read stories to them. He and Chris both played soccer in the fall as members of the Wizards, and the team did well in spite of the coach (me).

Chris remains pretty free of confidence problems. He insisted to Annette a while ago that his hooded sweatshirt wasn’t on backwards. After she made him put the hood on, hoping to prove her point, he walked around with this face in the hood, maintaining that the sweatshirt wasn’t backwards. He’s enjoying kindergarten, and progressing well. He finished his first fun-run on the day before the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington.

Luke is ornery as ever, and growing in intelligence and vigor every day. He’s had to adjust from being in school in Nairobi to being home here. He thinks he’s really pulling something over when I take him for walks during my lunch and buy him a Slurpee, which has soda, which they can’t usually have. Just a couple of weekends ago, it took a bad crash for him to start focusing on how to avoid going straight down the ski slope.

Joy is doing all she can to keep up with her brothers, seemingly unaware that she’s half their size. I went into their room at naptime one afternoon to find Joy leaping from a stool onto a futon, with Luke, in all 30 pounds of his glory, waiting down below to catch her. She seems to be lagging in speech a bit, but not lagging at all in getting whatever she wants when she grunts at one of her three big brothers.

Annette pulled me along to finish the Marine Corps Marathon on October 31, along with her sister Kathryn and Kathryn’s fiancé. She takes Luke and Joy on adventures while the big boys and I are at our schools. She’s doing amazing work keeping the kids up on their schoolwork, including creating ‘homework’ for Luke, who misses being in school. She did fantastic birthday parties for all of the kids, including custom-made fire truck, princess castle, and space shuttle cakes. Each of the boys gave her a ‘dinner date’ for Christmas, and Mark and Chris have both taken her out so far.

We’ve had lots of fun living in American suburbia, for all of its quirks. During the fall, we gathered leaves into a huge pile, with the explicit purpose of allowing the kids to jump into it. The kids have managed to sled on about a half inch of snow (your standards aren’t too high when you come from the Equator). The kids often comment often that our minivan isn’t very tough (“It’s not a dirt car, like our Nairobi car1”); maybe it was the reindeer nose and antlers we had on it at Christmastime?

More from the ‘Kids always win’ file:
• Luke told me to be quiet at Christmastime when I began discussing presents for his black Labrador Retriever, Clifford, since Clifford was in the room and might hear me talking about the gifts.
• Chris and I went to look for a sled in Georgia when we got in on Christmas Day, since they had a couple of inches of snow on the ground for the first time in years. After unsuccessful tries at Target and Wal-Mart, we were headed home when Chris asked why no one had sleds. After I replied, “Because it never snows in Georgia,” Chris looked out the window at the snow-covered ground, looked at me in the front, and said confidently, “Yes, it does!”

I’ll do two batches of photos here, since I can do five at once.

Hope everyone is enjoying 2011,
Mark & co.