Expat Ramblings and Maui

At this point, it feels that it may be Christmas before I get finished posting all of the pictures from last summer. It makes me feel better that I didn't finish posting the summer pictures until the end of September last year, but it probably won't be any earlier this year.

This has been one of those weeks that flies by because we are so busy. No more busy than any of you, though, I am sure. I find it hard to believe that one day our kids will be playing sports constantly; it won't be our sports schedules dictating our lives any more.

Expat life has this strange aspect to it that I had never considered before, since I had never moved anywhere outside of Washington state before. Life is busy for everyone, right? But as an expat, I constantly find myself comparing our lives now to what they were before in the U.S. or what they may be in the future.

One of the books that I read before we moved encouraged us to not compare where we were to where we were going. In that time of transition before we actually arrived in Korea--after we'd rented out our house and were living in my dad's to finish out the school year--it was hard not to think that some things would be easier once we arrived here. We would all have bedrooms. And closets. And beds. Even though we knew that a lot of things would be harder, we thought that some things would be easier.

I don't think that I make these comparisons often, but it's in the back of my head. Were our lives this busy when we lived in Stanwood? Will they be this busy if we move back? What if we move to South America? Life's supposed to be laid back and slow-paced there, right? Yeah, right. Where in the world should we move to be perfectly content?

I can tell that I vocalize these thoughts more often than I realize when we're in the car and Kennedy says, "This would be so much easier if we were just in America." Uh oh.

I suppose it's natural at this stage in our lives, but sometimes I think that I had a little less to think about before we became expats. I won't even get started on my train of thought every time I do laundry. It's not pretty.

It has been uncharacteristically cool in the past week or so here. We have had a couple of cool soccer practices--something that has not happened in the past two years. We even had a practice this week where it rained for the entire hour and a half. And it was only about 72 degrees out. It was the first soccer practice that reminded me of the many that I had growing up. I suppose it's ironic since western Washington has had uncharacteristically warm weather in the past week!

These pictures are from our first day on Maui. We had a relatively easy trip there, in spite of the fact that I was completely convinced that we would miss our connecting flight in San Francisco because we only had a 30 minute layover (thanks to United airlines changing flight times after we'd booked our tickets). We ran to the gate with another family and we were off again!

On our first day, Evan had to work in the morning and Jen had a doctor's appointment, so we wandered around their neighborhood, enjoying the view.

Then we went to meet Evan for lunch and headed to the beach afterwards. The kids were loving the sand and all of the attention!

It's hard to believe that at this point, the kids had nasty coughs and I was just about to start getting sick. I feel like we've been sick most of the past two months! Hopefully, this is not an indication of how the rest of our year is going to be!