After Houston we headed to the Northwest to see Seth’s sister Claire and her husband Donnie in Oregon. We had a great long weekend with them there enjoying the sights of Oregon!  One of the highlights was a trip to the coast. Despite the fact that the water was icy cold Jackson just LOVED it. He had no hesitation. He just held his breath and enjoyed! We got spoiled eating all of the famous blackberry sweets! It was so fun to see Claire and Donnie’s new home and Claire’s growing tummy! She is due only 3 weeks after us! The only downside of the trip was that Jackson (independent of his begging parents) decided to stay on Texas time. So we woke up for the day with him in the 4 AM hour which made for some tired parents!

Here are a few pictures!

On Sept 11th we landed in Houston, thrilled to be back in the United States!! We had a packed week visiting with Seth’s family. We ate our fill of Blue Bell ice cream and made sure to get to Lupe Tortilla!

We took Jackson to his first Astros game! He was so excited and actually payed attention more than we anticipated.

national anthem

Jackson had lots of fun time playing with his cousins.

We spent a day in Galveston….We thought Jackson might get his shorts wet but we never anticipated him wanting to dive in to the ocean! He loved it!

ready to feed the seagulls on the ferry

We visited with Seth’s grandmother, Mimi, at the nursing home.  After visiting Jackson said “Mimi, old lady”

One morning, out of the blue, Mia spotted a snake in the backyard.  Turns out it was a coral snake.  Check out the video if you don’t believe us.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RBjptynLx4]

At the end of our time in Houston we made our 6 month stop at MD Anderson. Another all clear check up which was an answer to prayer! Jackson was a trooper when the IV took 3 attempts.

After the MRI Jackson was groggy for maybe 20 mins and then he was ready to get moving!

Well, it is good to be able to post on this end of things having had survived our packout. It took weeks of prep with our things being divided between storage, DC short term (our things for the next 8 months), DC long term storage, Bern and giveaway! I threatened after this packout that next packout I might take Jackson and Owen away and let Seth do it! Jackson was more than enthusiastic and helpful which made things interesting. The movers were in our home for 3 full days, not because we had that much stuff but because in true Colombian style our packers were late, didn’t show up and worked like snails! We were so relieved to see the trucks drive away.

Here are a few pictures!

Jackson on his last day at school. He carried in bouquets of flowers for his teachers

saying good bye to Sonia and Santiago

saying good bye to our guards and getting the chance to hold the walkie talkie and wear the official hat

helping with the luggage.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5JJKZ4XfA0]

his backpack was so heavy he fell over carrying it!

Our traveling family. USA here we come!

This past weekend we took a road trip to a town outside of Bogota.  It was nice to get out of the city one last time. The city is famous for their crafts and town square. To be honest there wasn’t much to see but we filled our time by going to the local Sat produce market, walking around through the cobblestone streets and just relaxing.It was probably our first trip with realistic expectations in terms of accommodations. We always like to say now that they might have a star system in Colombia for hotels but the starts just don’t shine as bright. We came home with a few bed bug bites and it was quite rustic for the price you pay but overall it was peaceful and a good time away in the fresh air.

Our funniest memory was Jackson trying to order his own food at the hotel. He would call for the waitress in Spanish and continue to tell her exactly what he wanted with a sweet “por favor” and followed up by a boisterous “gracias”. They loved it and he obviously ate up the attention. We discouraged it knowing that in the US this would be seen as super disrespectful. One of the mornings there the waitress answered his request for milk but brought warm milk. Word of warning, warm milk in a sippy cup equals and spraying geyser.  As soon as the lid was tightened it flipped on it’s side and spun around as it shot out warm milk. Luckily the hotel restaurant was almost empty at 6:45 AM so we enjoyed our own milk show without disrupting other guests!

On our way home we got behind a bike race which took forever to get around. Jackson decided not to nap and talked about the cows and animals along the road the whole way home! We are not sure if we can talk about cows from TX to DC when we do our move in Oct. Thank goodness by then we will have a car with a CD player.

Here are a few pictures from the weekend…

Our hotel had beautiful flowers

checking out the ducklings at the market

is this not the biggest zucchini you have ever seen?

this was strawberry country! we got a lb for about a dollar and they were the best we have had in a long time!

this basket was super noisy! we asked the lady to open the bag for us to peek…

it was full of little chicks!

5 mins into our walk on the cobblestone Jackson was finding places to plop down!

town square where people came out in the evenings to fly kites

poor little guy…after another good run around he plopped down again!

back at our hotel…Jackson was standing in his crib with the window open peering out

this was what we had in front of us on part of the ride home…we think it must mean that Jesus’s second coming will somehow involve a cruise ship. How exciting!