Dying Plants, Jet Lag, and Those Dang Birds

I've had something to post everyday this week and never got around to it, so I apologize for the eclecticness of this post.

Dying Plants
We came home to find that the one plant we've managed to keep alive is in fact dying. I wouldn't say that this plant had a particularly high place of honor in the family considering I didn't really notice it was dying til yesterday, a mere four days after arriving back home. But that's menial compared the fact that going for 3 weeks without water, has in fact, left our poor, beloved houseplant shriveled.
I noticed the houseplant after a conversation with a semi-angry Arab landlord. I hung up the phone and sat looking at my poor semi-green friend and realized that we are truly in the same boat. My Arabic, like this plant, had been starving over the past 3 weeks and went from a small, but growing thing, to hardly nothing at all. Nothing but a shadow of its former glory.
So houseplant, hang in there buddy. water is on the way! While my Arabic, sadly enough, may never recover....

Jet Lag
Noah has successfully gone to bed at 9 o'clock the past several nights and has successfully woken back up and stayed awake til 3am every night except last night. Last night, Noah slept, and I woke up at 3am. I sat around the house and ate the left over pizza from the night before and then went back to bed at 4 and didn't go to sleep til 5. Jet lag, you ain't no friend of mine.

Those Dang Birds
Why do dove have to mate for life and then sit around and tell each other how much they love each other? In our Hashmi House (the house we lived in before) we had these two dove that obviously loved each other and loved to tell each other they loved each other very early in the morning. They would do it on our window sill! One of us spent half the morning chasing the birds from window to window in our house trying to get some peace and quiet.
Two days ago, I hear them! They weren't on our window but one of our neighbors. It was like having the alarm go off on Saturday morning. That wretched beeping monster has found a way to get you even on your day off and you lay there in mortal shock trying to refrain from ripping out your hair, or flushing the alarm, or going to Wal-Mart and cleaning them out of guns and ammo and DESTROYING SOMETHING!!! (maybe that is a little over dramatic, but you get the point?)
So you dang birds had better find another place, where love is appreciated, because it ain't my home!!

We are back!

This is not a complaining post. Just wanted to put that out there. I'm just stating the facts, ma'am.

We arrived home after 24 hours of trains, planes and automobiles. Not so much the trains, but the rest is true. Definitely some automobiles and for sure there was alot of plane in that mixture.

Wednesday night around, oh..5ish we are out of the airport. Our flight arrived early, we zoomed through passport control, and our bags were waiting. We head to customs and the custom guys get us. They kept saying they saw sheets of metal in one of our bags. Sheets of metal? Well after they search the bag all they found was close to 40 containers of baby food.
So the freshness seal on the Gerber is aluminum, and when you lay them side by side across your bag, on the x-ray it looks like a sheet of metal. So....for speedy customs inspections, don't layer your 40+ baby food containers side by side.

We get home, walk in the door, and.....smell wet cat. mmm.....yummy. Well we look around, no dead, wet cat. Oh and by the way, the whole time we were gone it had been between 30-35 and rainy. So coming in our house was like walking into a smelly refrigerator. It was COLD!!!! Anyways, we flip on the heaters and begin moving bags back to the bedroom. I walk across the entry way carpet and its wet, hence the cat smell. I also noticed that the dining room floor didn't look right, so I followed the "didn't look right" into the kitchen where the floor has a thin layer of mud across half of it. Beautiful. We come home to a stinky refrigerator with a dirt floor! So the most recent theory is this: We had some torrential downpour with some wind and it blew it up under our back and front doors bringing with it mud, dirt, cat hair, and a variety of other gross things. It eventually dried. It dried everywhere except for our under our thick Turkish rug that soaked it all up.

All this was Wednesday. Wednesday night we all slept fairly okay, except for some random jet-lagged, anti-sleep moments. From about 2 to 4am all three of us were sitting in the living room staring at each other.
At 7am B and I dragged (dragged or drug?) we drug the 6x9 foot, dripping wet rug outside and flung it over our fence to hopefully let it dry. Shortly thereafter jet lag set in and we passed out until Noah woke at noon.

So Noah woke up at noon and B got hit with some psycho, woman-eating stomach virus. So I got Noah and B went to the bathroom and periodically came out to feed Noah and then would return to pay homage to the porcelain goddess of vomit. Around 6 we decided that she needed to go to the doctor. The only thing open on a Thursday evening in the Middle East is the ER. So B heads to the ER and they rehydrate her and send her home. This is all about 9 o'clock. At eleven she can't even walk because of the pain, so she goes back to the ER around midnight.

So Noah and I hang out on the couch waiting news of her. Why Noah and I? Because Noah's body is somewhere on the Eastern seaboard and he is wide awake! Finally around 2:30 B gets home and has been pumped full of all sorts of drugs and is feeling better. And again the entire family sits in the living room wide awake until about 3:30am until jet lag releases its hold on us.

So today, it's 2pm, B is up walking around feeling fine, Noah is pulling her hair, our carpet is still hanging outside drying, and the floors have been mopped and cleaned up. Life is good.

Coming back from vacation has never been so tiring.

Family Photo

Here is a photo of the family. Feel free to save it to your computer or print it out and stick it on your fridge.

Noah's Christmas

Noah had a great Christmas! He got many things, and very few of them make noise (thank you very much)

Check out his laughing Elmo. He doesn't really care about it, but we loved it.


He also got a bear coat. He wasn't a big fan of it either though.

But he WAS a really big fan of the squash baby food!