Since we will be stateside for a bit this was a treat to do one last homeleave before the next phase.  Seth spent most of his leave painting and working on the house but he snuck in a few fun days before that all began. You can click on the pictures to make them bigger. I haven’t learned how to do a collage and the thumbnails cut off some of the pictures but this was WAY too many pictures to put in full size and in a zillion posts. Sorry for the photo dump!

We started in Friendswood with Seth’s family! We made it to an Astros game which made Seth’s heart content. Oh yes, and he had some Whataburger too. What more could a guy ask for.

on our way to Ft Worth we popped in and saw our friends Bo and Leigh and their little girls! Their new home is so beautiful and was such a welcoming space!

Seth stayed in Ft Worth for a couple of days with us and then packed up and drove a penske up with his dad to get going on painting and getting the house liveable!  While he was away we went to the Ft Worth zoo, got spoiled with my moms good cooking, went to Glenrose, Texas to look for dinosaur tracks in the river at the State park, spent time with my brother and my sister-in-law Tina and weathered the heat of the Texas summer!   We also got to catch up with good friends from our old Dallas days!

part way through our time in Ft Worth we went away to my sister-in-law Tina’s family lake house in Possum Kingdon! On the wall of their kitchen they have a quote that summed up the weekend: “Home is where you treat friends like family and your family like friends”.

After our time in Ft Worth the boys and I headed back to Friendswood where we spent a few more days with Seth’s mom and had some great cousin time. It happened to be Jackson’s birthday so we celebrated there. I had planned to keep it REALLY simple and it was but Jackson started asking about invitations and friends and DADDY so by the end of the day our fun frozen yogurt outings with cousin morphed into a pizza/swimming party to lessen the blow of a birthday during a move.

These weeks were packed and exhausting but so fun too. I learned pretty fast that I don’t enjoy being a single mom and that it was very hard to be away while Seth was working on the house. I am so happy to be here now working together and making progress towards being settled!!

So it turns out that when everyone in the US found out we were coming back they decorated with American flags, shot off fireworks and fired up the grills for good old American hamburgers….not really, it was actually the 4th of July, but it may as well have been for us because it was so fun to come back just before the 4th and soak in lots of patriotic love!

We stayed for our first few days stateside with my brother and his family. My sister-in-law and brother kindly braved a day with our boys so that we could spend a day finalizing our kitchen remodel and picking paint and appliances for the house. (I don’t recommend doing this with jetlag but it’s just how it worked out)  The next day was the 4th and we spent the day playing with the kids, going to a 4th of July parade that my niece Ruthie was marching in, grilling and going to the pool. At the end of the night we let the kids try some sparklers. Stephanie did a great job of decorating the table and adding little festive touches!

The boys did well with jetlag all in all. We wrapped up a few more house details and flew out Thursday morning for Texas.