moving day

After more than 3 months of living out of our suitcases, that moving van was a welcome sight! I thought that finally today we would have all of our stuff back! If I had really thought it through, I would have realized that just because the boxes get here doesn't mean I'll be able to find ANYTHING! There's no way we could possibly go through all those boxes in a day...or two...or twelve...why do we need all this stuff anyways?

So now we have a warehouse of boxes in our basement. They are all marked with Chinese characters and some awesome chinglish, most of which say 'ornaments'.

The haircut

I have been dying to do my hair since we got back! My last haircut was more than 8 months ago! It is really hard to find someone to cut my hair even here, because it's so thick and it chunks up easily and I'm picky. And in Taiwan, they mostly all have the same hair type, so it's really hard to find someone who is good with other hair textures. I was ready for a change, and I debated cutting it above my shoulders, but I decided to go halfway first. I chopped about 6 inches off, and I'm glad I didn't cut it any shorter because it is so thick, I'm sure I would have ended up looking like a human Q-tip! But I really like it, and more importantly so does Nate!

I hate camping

As soon as we got back in the states, we decided to go camping. We actually haven't all been camping as a family before. In fact, the last time I had gone camping was about 10 years ago, shortly after we were married. I guess it takes 9 years to forget...

When we drove up to the campground, it looked so pretty from the car. Then we opened the car doors to get out and got swarmed by mosquitoes. The only bug repellent we had was some Chinese concoction we bought in Taiwan, which apparently only repels Chinese mosquitoes because the American mosquitoes loved it!

No sooner had Nate got the tent up than a bee flew inside. The kids and I were inside the tent when the bee came in, so it was up to me to save their lives. I threw a blanket over the bee and went to toss him outside, which turned out to be a bad idea because a bee can still sting you through a blanket, you know. Right on my thumb. I'd never been stung by a bee before, and they are mean! My hand was on FIRE, and it throbbed all the way up my arm clear into my teeth! Luckily there were some snowy patches on the ground, and the kids had fun bringing me little snowballs to hold on the sting. That was just the fun of the first day!

No, that doesn't mean "thumbs up-we're having so much fun", it means "This is where the bee stung me, and camping stinks!"

The boys had a ball playing in the dirt, rolling in the dirt, throwing dirt in the fire, throwing dirt at each other, and Ashton even tasted some dirt. Did I mention the dirt? Dirt's everywhere when you're camping, and some people say "It's so great that you don't have to worry about being clean!" Well, call me crazy, but I sort of enjoy being clean!

We did have some really good dutch oven food, and I got to make banana boats which I hadn't had since girl's camp (the year I burned my tent down. Yes, really.) And I got a great picture of the fire. We'll try it again next year because I have boys, and boys like this kind of thing, and I can endure a little misery for one night every year so that they can have fun childhood memories. So it really doesn't matter if I enjoy it, the important thing is that they do!