Flag Day

On Friday we went to Flag Day. THE Flag Day that we have been waiting for for a year now! As I mentioned earlier, it was a big mind consumer for many days. It is an amazing feeling to finally know where we are going! Our life finally has a set plan, for the next few years anyway! Istanbul was one of our highs, and we were sooo excited when we heard the news! I was also especially grateful that it was called before many of our other highs. That way I didn't have to sit through the announcement for country after country that we had wanted in disappointment. Even though we would still have gotten Istanbul no matter which order it was announced, it made it a much nicer experience for me! (If I have not explained before...a large thing of flags is brought into the room, all the FSO's sit together while the family and friends watch from the sidelines. The flag is held up, post announced and the person assigned walks to the front to receive their flag. Everyone claps and the cameras flash! Quite like graduation I guess. They call the posts out in a random order however, so if you are towards the end the anticipation could be a killer!) Anyway, I had debated on taking both of the boys...but I decided that I did want it to be a family experience. I got really lucky as well. For the most part they were both pretty well behaved. The constant clapping was also an unanticipated bonus. They loved to join into the constant stream of applause. If only it was appropriate to clap every 15 seconds in church... But back to the subject. It was a great day for our family, and really SO exciting. We have been very, very blessed and are so THRILLED to be moving onto the next steps of our life. We will be getting on a new training schedule in the next few weeks that will become our new norm, and I'm excited to really get into researching our new post. Turkish lessons here we come!!

The boys running to give daddy a congratulations hug!! They were so excited to see him! I don't think they totally understood what was really going on...but everyone was happy and hugging, and they were thrilled to join in! What a great little moment for our family!

The excitement was so thick in the air, and my boys could feel it....more so about the fun flag to wave around! They have been fighting over it ever since....we have promised we will get them each a flag to wave around as soon as we can get our hands on another one, along with a good map for our wall!

And the Winner Is....

The Flag

For all of our blog faithful out there, the day really has come for us to reveal our first onward post assignment overseas!! To start you off we wanted to give you a little taste of our new adventure, and see if you can guess where we are going! I apologize as well that this day take me just over 24 hours to post since we have received the news, but life got in the way. So without further ado:

- It is home to some historical and amazing seafood restaurants, and some beautiful seaside resorts of the Princes' Islands and Sile

-Has one of the oldest book markets in the world where on might find some very rare books! It has been continuously active in the same location since the late Roman Empire.

-Home to multiple fun sports teams, hosting the 2005 UEFA Champions League Final and the 2009 UEFA Cup Final

-One of the largest historical museums of it's kind is located here, with more than 1 million artifacts from some of the earliest human settlements

-A religiously diverse community, with many beautiful churches and mosques including the Hagia Sophia-one of the largest in the world.

-A hop, skip and/or a jump from Greece, Western Europe, Jerusalem, and Cairo to name a few cool places!! (We hope to be doing some great traveling while here)

-Thousands of years of history here, including the official founding of the city in 667 B.C.

-The only city in the world located on two continents!!

-Has a temperate climate (which we as a family prefer) with four seasons, that is actually pretty similar to the D.C. area. Highs of average 82 degrees F in the summer and lows of average 41 degrees F in winter, with some good humidity because of proximity to large bodies of water.

-Has an impressive public transportation system with metro/light rail/ and trams.

-Been the capital city of four different empires

-Home to some amazing shopping including the Historic Grand Bazaar (active since 1461) and multiple new large award winning shopping malls.

-it has multiple American fast food chains (which let's be honest, is always a nice touch of home) and movie theaters!!

- Has been known through history by two other names: Byzantium and Constantinople.

- Spans the Bosporus Strait

-The creator of the wonderfully relaxing Turkish Bath tradition.

-Will be the best place on earth to feast on perhaps our favorite meal- the Turkish Kebap!!!!!!! (sooooooo yummy, can I say that again?! YUMMO!!)

So if you had not guessed yet, we are going to

ISTANBUL, TURKEY!!!!! and we couldn't be happier. This post is such an awesome location and holds some great family history significance as well for our family. We truly realize the blessing we have to be able to spend a portion of our lives in this great city. We can't wait to start this adventure and will be loving any all visitors that might want to come our way! There will be many more details to come as well as some more pictures of our soon-to-be home, so stay tuned to learn more about our adventure!

Some Thoughts

I have been thinking, researching, talking and gaging my feelings a lot over the last few weeks. This entire process has been very exciting. Much more than I even expected. We are all loving it. This afternoon though, is really truly the "big day"! Our Flag Day ceremony is coming up in only a couple of hours! I have many different emotions all trying to figure out where they fit. I am so excited, and have been looking forward to today for months. There is also a portion of anxious, nervous, relief, and scared mixed in. Noah and I have been trying to talk about the best strategy to get ready for the big event. My strategy has been to try and get excited about like 40 places. There is still definitely a chance that we might not go to one of our top 40, but we are told that the chances are reasonably likely. There are only really like 4 or 5 that would upset me, so I think our chances of me being thrilled are really good. I have made a list of 3 great things about all of our highs and mediums, so I can have that with me and get excited immediately about wherever we are posted! No matter what happens though, it is where we will live for the next two years, and it will be a great experience for our family. I am determined to make it so. In our house we believe that we can live anywhere for two years, our house is not our home. Our HOME is what we make of it, and we are definitely the kind to find out every great thing about the country we are going to. The world has so much to offer, and it is going to be such an adventure! I can't wait to finally know, so that I can now start to REALLY research!! It will be so awesome to finally know which new post we can call ours. This is the great stuff life is made of, days with this much potential don't come around that much in life! How exciting that in this career we get to have many of "these days". I love it, and I am so grateful for our families opportunity to be here. For now, we are off to play and get out some wiggles, maybe pick up a new outfit for mommy, just because I want one and we have an H& M, and head to the FSI to receive our flag....

Natural History Museum Goodness

Who couldn't love a moment like this?! The other day, my cute friend down the hall and I took our boys downtown to the National Museum of Natural History. We took the Metro, so the boys all had a great time (that in itself was half the fun). This is the museum that Porter had been wanting to go to almost since we had arrived, aka the "dinosaur museum". We did see some great fossils and stuffed African Animals-including the big Elephant featured in Night at the Museum 2. The major attraction of the day for the kids, however, ended up being the discovery room. There were so many fun things for the kids to do and explore, and we ended up spending most of our time there! We will definitely be making another trip!


The Hope Diamond!! Mom's favorite part of the excursion. It had it's own gallery, deservedly so-and it was GORGEOUS! It really is HUGE, and beautifully sparkly! The necklace by Cartier is the last thing it was set in before it was obtained by the museum. (it is chalk full of other diamonds as well, that must have been quite the necklace in it's glory days!)







Watching the dinosaur bones being worked on...

watching an educational film on the African slave trade. They did all actually watch it for a few minutes! only got a picture though as their attention started to fizzle. (They were the ones who wanted to do this by the way...not us moms:)

My little scientists at work, they loved the microscopes and all the things to touch and look at! Awesome! They loved it all.

The day has arrived!!

Yes, the big day has finally arrived!!! Now, for all of you who are just reading this post to see if we got our onward post assingment, I'm sorry to disappoint. You'll just have to keep reading the blog in the future for that great news! But, it was indeed a big day for us here as we finally bought a GPS!! This has been much needed recently... especially by me, Kendra. We have trying to buy one for a couple of weeks now, but the stores we went to were either sold out, or did not have the one we wanted. Talk about frustrating! Today, however, we got lucky. We found the one we wanted for a great deal on sale at Best Buy until tomorrow. Yay for us! I'm pretty happy about it. Sorry, that's all the news for now!

Over the recent long weekend, we were thrilled to have our first official visitors here in DC!!! Some of our very best friends, Tim and Ashley and little Xavier were able to come a see us!!! We had such a blast, and did our first REAL outing into DC since we got here. We did tons of things, including seeing the Capitol, Washington Monument, Lincoln Monument, WWI, WWII, Vietnam and Korean War Monuments, The National Air and Space Museum, Arlington National Cemetery, and the Washington DC LDS Temple. On top of that we also enjoyed tons of fun times and Beatles Rockband playing! The boys were loving having their buddy to play with, and they definitely got out tons of energy together! We had a wonderful time and miss them already! Also to remind everyone else, you're invited to come as well whenever you want!!

the boys and President Lincoln (Ronan slept through it this time I guess:)

Just getting ready to stroll the National Mall

Xavier and Porter racing down the National Mall (great for getting out their energy!)

Me and Amelia (the red airplane behind us was hers, for her first couple important flights obviously-not the one that vanished)

the Spirit of St. Louis

the 1903 Wright Flyer-aka the first airplane!! (and the back of Tim)

the boys first snowball fight

just riding the metro

cute picture of Porter at the Temple

also, not quite sure what was up with my camera for some of these pictures-quality is messed up for some reason...I only had my small camera, will have to figure out what happened or just take my good one with me from now on. hmmm..... sorry

Potholes of DC Unite!

So it has finally happened. Our beautiful new car, well now 1 1/2 year old car has been initiated into big city life. On Monday, while out and about in downtown DC we hit a GIANT POTHOLE!!! Now mind you, up until this point I was thinking to myself over the course of several trips into downtown that I was really impressed with the quality of roads that were being maintained. I had up to this point, not seen a single pothole. Well, I guess they decided to unite and make just one giant one for the city. You know, so that they were well represented! I have not seen a pothole this big in the United States. It was huge, and while driving with thick traffic on one side, and parked cars on the other we really had no choice but to hit it head on, and WE DID, HARD! It was such that I screamed out OUCH, not for me, but for the car. Poor baby. It sounded terrible! We drove for another 15 minutes or so, until we reached our destination, and we were incredibly lucky that our tire did not blow out in the meantime. When we were finally able to check the damage, we saw a nice large bubble in the tire. It was a doozy! So we (well, rather Noah and Tim) pulled out the spare to sport on the way home, until we promptly got ourselves two new beauties for the front of our car! What a day. I did enjoy that our spare tire is apparently a nice shade of yellow.

As promised, here are the much belated pictures of this year's gingerbread creation! We had a great time again, as usual with our friends Art and Steph and their family making fun gingerbread houses! We have kind of started a tradition of doing world landmarks, so this year (out of easiness as much as anything) we decided upon the pyramids. I did make three initially-two didn't quite work right, and the sphinx definitely leaves something to be desired but all in all it turned out great! In the past we have also done the Arc de Triomphe and the Eifel Tower. I was going to repost those pics too...but I'm not sure if I have them with us, so this will have to do! Thanks again guys, we will have to do next years by ourselves I guess! We'll be with you in spirit though:)

Our New Life

So I know I have put some tidbits up already, but I wanted to make sure we had one good post to officially ring in the new year, new decade, and our new life! We are officially settled into our apartment in VA, and loving it. We have already made some really fun friends, and have received our first bid list! We have essentially narrowed down our choices and have a personal top ten list. We won't find out for a couple more weeks where we are going, but if we get any of the places in our top 10, or even top 20 for that matter (which from what we've heard is reasonably likely) we will be THRILLED! There are tons of different places that cover the globe, so it is all much more exciting than I had even anticipated! Our air shipment arrived last week as well, and we have unpacked all of those boxes. Some of our stuff arrived in some really large boxes that we kept a couple of for the boys to play in. They have had a great time with them (also coupled with the "drop a piece of paper, and see if they can catch it game" that we learned from Greg T.) thanks again! It is amazing the fun some simple things can bring. We have been out a little bit to the city, and hopefully will be doing tons more here soon. So far though, we've been focused on the bid list and getting settled before we really hit all the monuments. There seems to be and ENDLESS supply of fun, free, activities here. We are in heaven! Missing you all, and waiting for any and all visitors!

Winter Family Pictures 2009

 

We had my SIL Aubrye take these fun pictures of us before we moved. Ronan was NOT in the mood for pics, Porter thought he had better poses than we could possibly come up with, and it was freezing because we waited until Noah could shave off his moustache for "Movember" (prostate cancer awareness) to take these....but we had a great time, and I thought they turned out great. We loved wearing our "Sparty" green colors and thought this was a good sum up of the photo shoot.

National Botanical Gardens Holiday Train Exhibit

My neighbor down the hall invited us along to the National Botanical Gardens the other day. Through last week they still had their holiday exhibit up with all of these gorgeous little houses, fairytale gardens, and all of the National Monuments! Everything was made out of natural things like leaves, beeswax, bark, acorns, etc. It was absolutely amazing, and a giant exhibit. The fun thing was that it was also a train exhibit with tons of awesome trains zooming in and around everything! The boys absolutely LOVED it! Now, for my part, I didn't even know we had National Botanical Gardens, so it was a great treat for me! Everything was so beautiful, and all the monuments were so detailed!! I especially loved that they put the new swing-set at the White House! It really was incredible. I am so grateful we were able to squeeze this in before it closed.



Still Working on being good for pictures. This is the best one we got of me and the boys.

Just for the journal...

Things I have learned and done recently:
one. Life is really exciting and awesome, and can at times be extremely sad. My life is quite fortunately exciting and awesome right now!! I want to remember this time when I have any hard times. two. I can drive a car somewhere all by myself in the Washington DC metro area!! woohoo for me:) We'll see how deep into the city I can get by the end, but at least I am trying, made it to Target and the Foreign Service Institute today driving myself. three. the pennsylvania turnpike tollroad does not take cards...better have cash, or you'll have to send it in later, silliness-this is 2010. four. having movers is amazing, I never thought it would be worth the money, but I sooooo think it is now. five. Washington DC is a beautiful city. six. got a darling polka dot rug for my kitchen .seven. filled out insurance forms and many other paperwork type stuff. strangely, it is a pain-but has made me feel extremely organized having to document so much of our life. eight. went to H&M just because I could, and had cheesesteaks with the fam...so close to philadelphia, better than we've had in a long time! nine. have started recycling again. ten. is appreciating the blessing of having friends wherever I have lived, thankful for them. I am definitely being watched over. eleven. got a cute picture of Noah on his first day of work, and the first "real" day of our new life. (although, I can't get it to upload for some weird reason) that's enough for now, I could go on and on, but I won't. I know, shocking!


Ronan doing "paperwork" like mommy. Apparently he thinks this is what we should do all day! It was pretty cute to watch him pretend though.

The Holidays

With everything that has been going on we did manage to squeeze in celebrating the heck out of Thanksgiving and Christmas. My sister had her baby right before Thanksgiving, so since my parents and sister were going to be in town we offered to host Turkey Day! We also were blessed with the company of our great pals Art and Steph+family:) It all turned out great, and we had a wonderful time. On a side note, Noah made enough mashed potatoes for 100 people...Then for the month of December we rocked it with some fabulous gingerbread creating (in a separate post) and two visits from Santa Clause! I also treated myself to some new ornaments/decorations for the tree that are good to take to our first onward post. Purple and brown-with some awesome glittery flowers that I found at Tai Pan Trading! I got several comments about why I even put up the tree this year, but one of my main objectives in deciding to move our family all around the world is that my kids never feel that they have missed out on anything as a result. I am determined to try and do the whole shebang wherever we are. This year I would say that my kids got more, not less-two Christmas mornings worked out pretty well for them:) So anyway, hope you enjoy a few pics of our holidays!

P.S. I realized while doing this post, that my pictures from my other camera are on a memory card that doesn't fit in this laptop and I can't find the cord...our desktop should arrive in a day or two-then I can add a couple of shots from Christmas #2 and the boys in their Christmas outfits. Sorry for the delay.




Turkey Day Festivities





Coming down the stairs for the first time


more excited than I thought he would be about new bedding! (Christmas #1)



Christmas Eve #1 with Grant, Aubrye, and Chasen-and their fabulous new Madagascar stuffed animals