Back to Texas

As soon as we all got our negative Covid tests, I started getting pretty excited about our trip!

The ondel ondel haven't gotten any shorter over the years...

Cheers to a good trip and Christmas in Texas!

This was my view many times during the flights...a little head kept popping up to say hello!

A pretty view of Doha! We had an 8-hour layover there on one of the busiest travel days of the year, so it wasn't the quickest trip ever, but we eventually moved to a really comfy area with chairs and a big ottoman so it wasn't the worst either.  We actually had the option to leave the airport and explore, but since we landed at midnight, we didn't think we were missing to much in the wee hours of the night.

Just 16.5 hours later, we arrived!! This is the my favorite sight.

The next best sight is all of our checked bags arriving unscathed. The Kirkhams picked everyone up and took all this luggage while I went to stand in line for an hour at the rental car counter.  That was our first introduction the the new normal in the US - no one wants to work any more! The poor lady at the Thrifty counter got logged out while she was helping me because her 14-hour shift had ended and she was still waiting for someone to come relieve her.

Another lovely sight - all of our online orders waiting for us to arrive! I spent the first day opening boxes and wrapping Christmas gifts.

We're all pretty good travelers by now but sometimes it's just too hard to stay awake when the jet lag hits.  We lost each of the kids when they got too quiet!

 We were so thankful to be home and hug our parents/grandparents and get ready to celebrate Christmas together!

Holiday Celebrations

We had a fun time in December with a few holiday celebrations with friends. The Booster Hut board from JIS got together for a dinner that was so much more than I expected! There was a dress code (black or white with a splash of red) so I was prepared for fancy, and I was not disappointed.

Nina was so kind to host in her family's "extra" house that they keep for parties.  Wow! Notice that the food is all on the table and I was absolutely salivating while we took 15 minutes' worth of pictures.  Indonesians LOVE their pictures.

After dinner, we retired to one of the living rooms for a fun gift exchange.

A few more pictures in one of the other living rooms before we ended our night!

This has been a really fun group of ladies but sadly we have a lot moving on or graduating this year. The goodbyes are starting again!

I joined the Parents Welcome Committee to help the new families settle in and also to scope out new friends, because the longer we stay, the more I have to say goodbye to people! We had a welcome morning in person for the first time in nearly two years and it was lovely to meet new faces and help answer questions.

We had a slightly smaller pokeeno night but it wasn't short on laughs! Pak Suwarto is always happy to be a part of this crowd.

We celebrated Farrah's birthday at the Shangri-La with a wonderful brunch.  I think this is the first time I realized how much taller Ben is getting - I'm wearing heels in this picture!

Our fun group in the private room.  We camped out for hours and enjoyed the amazing food.  The kids finally organized themselves to take two of the cars back to our house for some fun while we lingered over our desserts.

We have so much fun together! Love these ladies.

Not sure what we were laughing about but this picture makes me so happy!

A street kitty had her kittens in the pot on our front porch.  I left her a great box with a towel and cat food in it, but she was so traumatized by me opening up the door all day to see the kittens that she moved them all next door!

Love this boy as well.  He's worked hard on this look.

Our favorite little lovebird who is passionate about tortilla chips! (and sadly, this would be our last picture with him because he and his wife passed away while we were gone over Christmas)

Rambutan season means the golf ball retriever can also double as a fruit catcher.

One last golf game before we headed out for a month.  We're pretty fortunate to live in a place where we can play year round.

I was shocked to realize that we could see Mt. Salak from Pondok Cabe.  I've played there so many times and I'd never seen it before.

One last pretty sunset!

Finally, it was time to head to the US and say goodbye to everyone for at least a month.  Our staff take such good care of us and keep everything running while we're gone.  We're so fortunate to have each of them!

Friendsgiving 2021

I was really excited to host our first Thanksgiving in Jakarta!  On Thanksgiving day, we had a special dinner as a family, but it's difficult to do much because it's a regular school and work day for us.  We had planned a big dinner on Saturday and invited several American families (and one French 10th grader who was curious about Thanksgiving) to come celebrate with us.

Our group grew to 23 people, so it took some work and lots of borrowing to make sure we had tables, chairs, plates, and silverware for the entire group.

Thank goodness Kayla had tables and chairs to put together a great table for all the kids.

I was pretty excited to decorate the table!

Had a little fun with the selfie stick again when everyone started arriving!

Alice made an awesome fruit turkey! Everyone really chipped in to get all the food we needed.  Amanda's dressing and gravy were pretty important and all the other majors sides were covered.

The kids had fun shooting their table from upstairs with nerf guns!

We were really thankful for Bubba, our barbecue guy, who fried our turkeys and sent them over at dinnertime.  My EZ bake oven could never handle a big bird.

We got (almost) the whole gang before dinner!  I didn't realize I'd cut off Ben and Noa on the right side until later. Such a wonderful group of friends.  They are very high on our thankful list this year!

Ahh, dinnertime! This table suddenly got very quiet.

Dinner was amazing, or so I heard.  As soon as I sat down, I realized I wasn't hungry at all.  About 15 minutes later, I was hit with pretty terrible food poisoning and I spent the rest of the night upstairs locked away in our bedroom.  I was grateful that I'd had a few hours to enjoy everyone's company but sick enough not to care that I was missing the rest of the party.

Amanda's desserts looked amazing!

We also had pumpkin, pecan, and apple pie!

The kids went upstairs to take over the game room and the adults moved to the kids table to play some games.

We had a 4-way tie for the closest guess of M&M's in the jar!  Since they couldn't all share the grand prize of Chick-fila sauce, they had to figure out some way to split all the goodies.  

Really thankful for our friend family here in Jakarta. We couldn't do this without them and they make it a pretty awesome place to live. But we're also pretty dang excited to spend the next big holiday with our actual families!

Grown Ups Having Fun!

Sometimes it seems like the kids are having all the fun, but sometimes the grown ups get out there and make their own fun as well!  The high schoolers have been planning get togethers every weekend with girls and guys (pictures strictly prohibited) and we can't be outdone by a bunch of teenagers.

When we found out that the karaoke clubs had reopened, we didn't waste any time getting a fun group together and spending an evening at Happy Puppy!

It was a terrific group of people, including a real guitarist and singer/songwriter.  The rest of us were just having fun...I'm sure we sounded amazing!

When Happy Puppy closed at 10pm, we took the party to Brett and Sandi's house because he has a full-on music room and real equipment.  The fun continued!

Their kids were asleep upstairs (or so we assumed) but they let their parents know the next day that we're not as talented as we thought :)

November Pokeeno night! It was hard to know where to sit because I love all of these ladies and we had a fantastic evening together.

We decided to give high tea at the Raffles a try on a Friday afternoon and it was a terrific find.

We got selfie sticks as a free gift and I was pretty entertained for the rest of the day!

The food was so gorgeous and inventive.

The chefs came out to meet us and one of them had a terrific sense of humor.  These "prescription chill pills" had to be his idea.  They're actually tiny cheesecakes bites!

Love the selfie stick!! ha!

And for a typical Jakarta day, we got in the car on a very stormy Friday evening and realized it was 1.5 hours to get home.  Thankfully, we'd been to a bazaar and had wine in the car and were able to stop and buy cups from a kaki lima on the side of the road, so the ride in Jenny's party van was much more fun!