In the USA

We are here!  Aden did a good job on the plane, but the flights were long and he wanted to move.  We flew in on Dec. 15 and spent a little bit of time with Katie (Tara's best friend) and Mike Verlee and their 2 year old son Asher in Chicago to start off our trip.  On Dec. 16th we met up with Grandma and Grandpa and have been doing a lot of relaxing ever since.  However, Aden did get a little ear infection, which made for an unhappy camper, but we got it cleared up pretty quickly after an urgent care visit.

Here are some pictures of the early Christmas and our time home so far.  There will be more Christmas post(s) to follow.

Jamie

The family in front of one of the Macy's windows in Chicago

The Chicago Bean

You look pretty short in the bean Tara

Aden playing at Lion's Park in Mauston

Look at that big boy!

Here comes Santa!

Aden's Turn!  He's so excited . . . or not.

A White Christmas and Next Year

Here's the scoop, after a lot of prayer and thought and indecision, we have signed another one year contract with our school.  The thought is that next year will be our last year in Saudi, but we won't be able to say for sure until this time next year.  We are excited about our decision and the outlook of being able to take steps to futher settle in to our roles here and our awesome house. 

As for Christmas plans, here they are.  We will be flying into Chicago on Dec. 15th.  Sometime on the 16th we will make our way back to Mauston.  On the 18th, we will be in Eau Claire for the day to go to church.  the rest of the week before Christmas will mainly be spent with Grandpa Brian and Grandma Wendy, this is the calm before the storm of Christmas.  Seth and Kelly we come into Mauston on the 25th it looks like.  There is also talk of a short trip up north while Seth and Kelly are here.  We'll be at McGuire Christmas on Dec. 31st (very exciting) and the Gillaspie Christmas is TBA as of yesterday.

We are a little busy, but since we are not back in the states all that often we would love to see anybody whose schedule might fit ours.  Everyone will be amazed with how much Aden has grown since summer.  Check out the videos I posted.

We are very excited to be finishing our last Master's class of the semester next week and to enjoy some good family and friend time.

Jamie

O.K. a good walking video finally

A unique laugh for a baby and it is contagious

All About Aden

He is walking!  With how busy we have been we have forgot to mention this news on the blog.  The video I posted is of some of his earlier steps.  He is a little studier on his feet now.

Also, it is the Thanksgiving/Christmas season over here.  We let the two overlap, especially since we are headed home in three weeks.  We have two Thanksgiving meals to go to this weekend and our tree is already up and the Christmas music pours out of our windows.

We are looking forward to coming back to Wisconsin soon, but are wondering how we will handle the cold after our last few winters where the highs were in the 70's and 80's.

Enjoy the videos.

Jamie

yeah!

He is figuring out new things all the time.

Excited for his first Christmas!

A video of Aden in the pool at the Al Bustan in Muscat.

Oh man! We're in Oman

We are off of school for one week for the Hajj Eid.  On Thursday we flew into Dubai, rented a car and took off for Muscat, Oman on Friday morning.  Our four hour drive turned into eight after some troubles at the border.  We waited in line for two hours to get our Omani visa only to be told we don't have an U.A.E. exit stamp!  Apparently we drove right through that check point.  So we got back in the car to drive the few miles back to the U.A.E border.  We ended up taking turns getting out of the car and walking the last part of the way to the border because the border traffic was so bad at the check point.  A little over an hour later we went to the front of the line we had already waited in and were issued our visas.  After that we only had to finish the last three hours of our drive.  We checked into our hotel and went to sleep.

Our first day in Oman was spent in Old Muscat checking out the Sultan's Palace and the old forts.  We had a fun time exploring and letting Aden get some exercise after such a long day in the car.  We ended up on the public beach letting Aden play in the sand with some kids from Kerala India.

Our second and last full day in Oman started out with a trip to the corniche where we were going to check out the souqs (markets), but they were all closed in the morning.  Having to change our plans we went to a big park where Aden was able to wear himself out playing.  The highlight of our trip was spending the afternoon at Al Bustan hotel.  This place was built in 1985 for a GCC (Gulf Coastal Countries?) summit.  It was amazing.  We at lunch at a sea side restaurant and then went swimming in the infinite pool and Gulf of Oman.  We checked out the prices to see if we could ever justify staying there, but for almost $500 a night we don't think so.

Our vacation is going to finish up in Dubai with shopping at the awesome malls, playing in parks, and hopefully having dinner with friends who live in Dubai, but it is also their vacation so we'll see if our schedules line up.

Only five weeks until we are home for Christmas!

This isn't the kind of hiking we usually do on vacation

Can you reach the pedals?

The Sultan's Palace

Ahhhh!

What a cutie!

A royal diaper change

Can you hear him laughing?

Omani boys

The landscape is quite different from the Eastern Province in Saudi

Al Bustan

Infinite pool

Checking out the Gulf of Oman

Bazaar!

The last few weeks have a blur of school, home, school, the beach, school, and friends.  Did I mention school?  I think sometimes that it would be more beneficial for us to just bring some clothes, blankets, and food to school and live there.  We finally had a two day weekend this past weekend and it was glorious!  I will never take them for granted again.  The first day we went to the Murjan Bazaar which is an event we really look forward to each year.  It is pretty much a big craft fair, but stores from around the area come and bring items to sell as well as individual people.  We love to look at carpets when we go to Bazaars.  We were successful this year with finding one we both agreed on that was in our price range.  We also have a very crafty friend, Lindsey, who was selling beautiful cups, clipboards, trays, and folders which she then personalized.  Look below for a picture of what we bought from her.  Aden was so excited for his tray table.  Right now he just likes to hit it, but I can see him using one day to color on or eat a snack.  While at the Bazaar we stopped into the hair dresser Jeanne Renee, who did a wonderful job cutting Aden's hair.  It was getting so long that it was starting to resemble a mullet.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous all weekend.  I'm talking low 90s with a slight breeze....perfection!  On Friday we had friends over who have a 1 year old daughter, Kamilla.  Her and Aden had fun causing trouble around the house and really enjoyed playing in the sand at the beach.  Kamilla is walking and Aden had to work hard to keep up with her.

This past week was our last 6-day work week for awhile.  Thursday we had parent/teacher conferences for almost 9 hours.  It's nice to remind myself that on Thursday we will be boarding a plane for Dubai as we take a much needed vacation.  I plan on doing a lot of relaxing, reading, and having some quality family time.  I'm sure we'll have lots of fun pictures to post after that.

Enjoy the pictures!

Tara

Our new carpet

Fun new personalized items

Aden hanging outside just before his haircut

Hanging out with our friend Savannah

Fun times with Unky B (notice the big boy haircut!)

Sorry, I know it's been a while

I don't think we've ever gone this long without posting.  I sincerely apologize to our faithful readers.  We've been super busy these past few weeks with school, masters class, surgery recovery, and of course Aden.  My hernia surgery went well.  I got to stay home from school to recover for a day and then we enjoyed a relaxing 3-day weekend as a family.  The hardest part of recovery was the fact that I wasn't supposed to pick much of anything up, including Aden.  This put a lot of responsibility on Jamie who really couldn't even leave me alone with Aden unless it was nap time.  I'm feeling much better now and got the doctor's approval to pick up Aden.  I can even start going some light workouts that don't use my ab muscles; I'm going to have to get creative with that one.

School is a bit stressful right now for everyone.  We had a big building project that was supposed to be finished over the summer, but it wasn't.   The beginning of school was delayed by two days which we've had to make-up for on the weekends.  Yes, we've had to come to school on a Thursday (our weekend) and have to do it again this upcoming week.  One day weekends are rough on everyone.

Aden has been moving everywhere!  He crawls all over the house and finds everything he shouldn't have.  One of his favorite places is the bathroom because the tub is the perfect height for him to stand and hold on to.  However, he has also found that he likes to play with the garbage, toilet bowl brush, and once he figured out that there's water in the toilet that became a play toy too.  We went back to the doctor on Wednesday to get Aden's 9 month shots.  He is now 21.6 lbs (70% percentile) and 2.5 ft (off the charts). 

That's about it.  Enjoy some pictures and video!

Tara

Oh how cruel we are.

"Hey, what's going on here?"

Fun with numbers

Quick update and some videos

Hi everyone,  real quickly I wanted to post a quick update.  School is in full swing and we are very busy, but things are running pretty smoothly.  Last night was our back-to-school night and we had a good turn out of parents.  I also had an interesting cultural experience.  I put my hand out to shake a mother's hand and she politely refused.  This is not overly uncommon and I usually wait for the women to approach me because I know some of them are modest to the point of refusing any physical contact with men because of their Muslim religion.  I was actually kind of excited that it happened because it is a story that not many living outside of the middle east can share.

On another note, tomorrow Tara goes in for her hernia surgery which should be no big deal.  We are going in early in the morning and she should be home around dinner time.  Thankfully we have wonderful friends who can take Aden to school and other friends to watch him afterwards for a while.

Now, for the main part of this post.  The videos of Aden!

Run Run Run!!!

I call this one "The Lizard"

Back in Saudi

So sorry to our faithful readers (especially to Grandma Gloria)that it has been so long between postings.  We've been busy leaving Wisconsin, getting settled in Saudi, and starting school.  Also, we don't have home internet yet in our new house so it leaves posting a blog to our time at school, which is where we are busiest.

Enough with the excuses.  My brother Seth and his new wife Kelly had an awesome wedding that was a lot of fun.  It was a great chance to spend time with a lot of our family.  I also really enjoyed water skiing with Seth the day after the wedding.  It is something we used to do regularly, but it has been a long time.

After the wedding we spent some time in Mauston and then headed south to attend a family reunion for Tara's family.  It was a big reunion, her uncle Doug did some impressive planning.  Tara's grandpa and great uncle got together for the first time in years with both of their families.  It was a blast.  Grandpa and Uncle Leon told stories, we went on a boat cruise around Lake Geneva, and spent a lot of quality time together.

From the reunion we went to the Carlson's house with Tara's parents to visit friends.  We were able to spend a good part of the day with Tara's best friend Katie, her husband Mike and their two year old son Asher.  The next day we boarded our plane to Saudi.  The trip was uneventful, which is what we want, and we arrived at our house as scheduled on Wednesday night.  It was nice to unpack and live in our own place again.  Aden had a great time exploring everything he had forgotten ever existed.  The Saturday after we arrived we started our week of teacher work days and are in our first week of school now.  It is good to be home and be back at school.  Tara and I were both looking forward to our students coming back to school.  After a week of teacher work days I remembered being a teacher is pretty boring without students.  Aden is having a blast in the nursery with the ladies who take care of him and the other kids.  He is crawling all over the place on his hands and knees and is pulling himself up on whatever he can grab.

We'll try to be more diligent bloggers in the future and get back to our once a week routine.

Enjoy the pictures.

The brothers, wives, sisters, and baby

The mommies showing off their boys.

This is the kind of trouble Aden was getting into at the end of the summer at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

A for Aden!

Yep, Papa put Aden in a box.  The first of many probably.

Last 3 weeks recap

These past few weeks have been a blast!  We continued to have a relaxing time in Canada and even took a family quad ride.  We finished our time in Canada with a cougar sighting!  Since being back, we've had the opportunity to hang out with friends in Minneapolis.  We also got together with a few of my girlfriends near Green Bay and went to Lambeau Field to watch the Packers practice.  Unfortunately we got rained out after only about 30 minutes of practice, but it was fun anyway.  We spent our last weekend in Eau Claire where Aden was dedicated at our home church, Valleybrook.  Spending time with so many of the people we love has been a blessing. 

This past Sunday was particularly special to us.  Even though we can only attend a few times a year, Valleybrook really feels like our home church still.  We were able to attend our last service of the summer and then Aden was dedicated to God by the assistant pastor and a good friend of ours, Grant.  A handful of friends blessed us with their presence and witnessed the event.  Aden was so good during the entire thing.  He tried eating the microphone the whole time Grant was praying which got some laughs. 

This weekend Jamie's brother will be getting married so we'll have more great pictures to come. 

Tara

 Family photo!

 What a cutie!

 Lambeau!

 The girls

 Aden, Daddy, and the PACKERS!

 Rodgers and Driver....who Tara affectionately calls "her boys"

 Playing with "cousin" Danner

 Dedication

Jamie and the guys

Oh Canada!

Yes, we are in the middle of our annual summer visit to Canada to spend some good quality time with Tara's parents Don and Kim.  Most of our time is spent relaxing and letting Nana and Papa play with Aden.  Of course there are always projects of various sizes we help out with a little and we usually try to make it through a season of CSI while up here too.  One of my favorite things to do is see the community they are living with up here.  Last night we went to dinner on the reserve and Tara and I met the new chief of the band (or reserve) and were able to visit with some people we have seen for three years now.

Aden is having a fun time with all the attention he gets up here.  He has also been able to get more familiar with Kim's dog Maggie and cat Mittens.  They were both a little interested in Aden at first, then they discovered he is better at pulling hair rather than petting.  However, Maggie will still lick Aden's hands and face looking for something tasty left on him.  Aden is also very familiar with mosquitoes unfortunately.  As much as we try to protect him from them and cover his cot with bug netting they still have gotten his cute little face.

That is about all we have been up to here.  We will be back in Wisconsin on July 31st.  Also, we will be having a baby dedication on August 14th for Aden at Valleybrook church in Eau Claire.  Anyone in the area who would like to come is welcome, just shoot me an email and I'll get details out to you.  Even though we aren't able to attend Valleybrook much because of being overseas we still view it as our home church and want Aden to be dedicated to God there before leaving for the school year again.  Fortunately for us a dedication for babies and children was scheduled at a time we could be there.

"Hey look at me.  I'm over here being all cute" - Aden

Mommy, Aden, and Mittens

Necessary mosquito precautions

Aden in his new towel Nana made for him.

Family ATV ride.

Papa and Aden hanging out on the floor.

Nana, Aden, and Maggie

thankful thoughts and pictures

 We have been fully enjoying our time in the States.  We finished our time up north by relaxing at the cabin.  We did some fishing, boating, and just hanging out.  It was really nice to have time to do nothing in particular.  Then we headed down to the Eau Claire area.  Our friends Steve and Meredith Dehn joined us there to go camping.  It was Aden's first camping trip and he did a great job.  We ended up putting the pack 'n play in the tent with us knowing we would all sleep better that way, but it did make things a bit tight.  Aden loved being outside and the mosquitoes didn't seem to bother him at all.  We stayed in Eau Claire for four more days, but stayed at a hotel.  We spent our time visiting good friends, eating at all the restaurants we had been missing, and doing some serious shopping.  Thank you to everyone who took the time to get together with us.  It really meant a lot to see you all.

One thing we got to do while in Eau Claire was visit our home church, Valleybrook.  We sat in the balcony and as I looked out over all the people singing and praising God I realized how much I had taken the church for granted before we moved to Saudi.  It really is a blessing we have here in the States to be able to come together and worship.  We can listen to songs and sermons online at our home in Saudi, but it is not the same.  So, if you find yourself at a place of worship this week, take a moment to think about it and be thankful for that freedom, not everyone has it. 

Tara

 Aden loved driving the boat.

 Petting Grandpa Ron's friend Redbutt

Aden on his first boat ride.  He didn't really like the life vest so it was a short ride.

Visiting Great Grandpa Howard

Camping!

Our tent, Aden took up a lot of room

Hanging out in the tent with daddy